Naturalism, Transcendental Conditions, and the Self-Discipline of Philosophical Reason

Abstract

Naturalism has been the received metaphilosophical view within epis temology and the of science since the 1980s. In brief, it urges that science (and our knowledge acquisition in general) is an ele ment of the world along with everything else. There is no priv ileged, aprioristic point of view of first philosophy over and above our empirical science itself, although such a standpoint is still assumed, in different ways, by old-fashioned empiricists, epistemological foun dationalists, Popperian critical rationalists, and many contemporary sci entific realists?in short, by most traditional analytic philosophers.2 Instead, science must be investigated scientifically; a scientific theory of science should be our aim. This kind of naturalistic program has been defended by, among others, Ronald Giere (1988) and Richard Boyd (1992). We may also classify Arthur Fine's (1996) nonrealistic or postrealistic and postphilosophical natural ontological attitude (NOA) as a species of naturalism in this sense. According to Fine, all attempts to interpret and justify science philosophically, from a higher perspective lying outside science, are in vain.3