Three Degrees of Naturalism in the Philosophy of Science

Abstract

One perennial issue in the philosophy of science concerns the extent to which we are justified in believing our scientific theories to be (at least approximately) true. This debate has borne witness to several substantial methodological developments throughout its history, from the predominantly semantic preoccupations of the logical empiricists and their critics in the earlier half of the twentieth century, to the largely epistemological focus that now characterizes the contemporary literature. Nevertheless, it has remained a persistent theme of the scientific realism debate that any philosophical argument over the approximate truth of our scientific theories should proceed along suitable naturalistic lines — understood here as the self-imposed injunction that one’s philosophy of science should be in some sense continuous with those very scientific practices that it seeks to investigate. The underlying idea of course is that the philosophy of science is not to be understood as somehow sitting in judgment of our scientific investigations, or as offering the ultimate source of legitimization for our scientific theories, but should rather acknowledge their cognitive autonomy. Yet, as well motivated as this insistence upon a naturalistic methodology might be, it is not entirely without its share of difficulties. One immediate concern is that in order to determine what exactly a naturalistic methodology requires of us, we first need to know something about the nature and content of the scientific theories from which it is derived — which is of course precisely what the scientific realism debate is attempting to establish.