Naturalistic Epistemology for Eliminative Materialists

Abstract

This paper defends and extends Quine's version of a naturalistic epistemology, and defends it against criticism, especially that offered by Kim, according to which Quine's naturalism deprives epistemology of its normative role, and indeed of its relevance to psychological states, such as beliefs, whose warrant epistemology aims to assess. I defend Quinean epistemology's objections to the epistemic pluralism associated with other self-styled naturalistic epistemologies, and show how recent theories the philosophy of psychology which fail to account for the intentionality of psychological states fact provide a cognitive foundation for an eliminativist epistemology which both honors Quine's strictures and helps us accommodate important findings and results experimental psychology and cognitive science. In this paper I defend Quine's naturalistic epistemology [Quine, 1969], extend it and respond to its critics. In doing so I have borrowed freely from the work of philosophers who had no thought to defend or extend a Quinean naturalistic epistemology (hereafter QNE), and I have criticized the views of some exponents of (non-Quinean) naturalistic epistemology. The main theses of QNE are well known: traditional epistemology, a largely or wholly a priori and foundationalist discipline, is to be replaced by an empirical inquiry which will be a chapter mainly of psychology. This compartment of psychology is to examine the relation between an epistemic agent's meager sensory input and its torrential output of descriptions of a three-dimensional world in order to see how evidence relates to theory. Naturalizing epistemology is an inevitable consequence of Quine's rejection of the analytic/synthetic distinction, his repudiation of a difference between a priori and a posteriori and his attack on modality. These three commitments, together and separately, lead through a variety of arguments to the conclusion that philosophy and science are continuous with one another: the former is just very general and abstract scientific theorizing. Accordingly, a compartment of philosophy that deals with psychological states, as epistemology traditionally does, should be viewed as very general and abstract psychological theorizing. Epistemology must be continuous with psychology because philosophy is continuous with science. If science cannot be a priori,