Concept

Naturalized Epistemology

Intro

For most of its history, epistemology asked a question philosophers could argue about from an armchair: what makes a belief justified? In 1969 W.V.O. Quine published a short essay proposing that the discipline give up and hand the job to science.

His case was that the traditional project had failed. Philosophers had spent centuries trying to show how our knowledge of the world could be rebuilt from sensory experience on foundations immune to doubt, and it had not worked. Quine's suggestion was to stop trying to justify science from outside and instead study, empirically, how creatures like us actually get from sensory stimulation to theories about the world. Epistemology becomes a chapter of psychology.

That is a serious proposal and it has serious defenders. Hilary Kornblith argues that knowledge is a natural kind, something to be investigated the way biologists investigate species. Stephen Stich goes further and questions whether there are objective norms of rationality at all.

But the move has a cost that matters enormously for apologetics, and it is the reason this page exists in a codex about defending Christianity.

Science describes. It tells you how brains actually form beliefs, which shortcuts they take, which errors they make. What it cannot do is tell you that you ought to reason one way rather than another. A description of what happens is not a rule about what should happen. The moment epistemology becomes purely descriptive, it stops being able to say that anyone is reasoning badly.

And that is exactly what the atheist objection to religious belief needs it to say.

Quick reply line: "Naturalized epistemology trades the 'ought' for a description. That's an honest trade. But once you've made it, you can't turn around and tell me I'm being irrational for believing in God, because 'irrational' was part of what you sold."

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In full

Naturalized epistemology is the program, launched by W.V.O. Quine's "Epistemology Naturalized" (in Ontological Relativity and Other Essays, 1969), of treating knowledge and justification as subjects for empirical scientific investigation rather than for a priori philosophical analysis. Quine's argument proceeds from the collapse of the foundationalist project: since the attempt to reconstruct scientific knowledge on indubitable sensory foundations failed, and since there is no vantage point outside our best theory from which to validate it, epistemology should abandon the validating ambition and become the empirical study of how sensory input yields theoretical output.

Two strengths of the program are commonly distinguished:

• The replacement thesis (strong): normative epistemology is to be replaced by empirical psychology. This is the reading of Quine's more radical passages and the one most often attacked.
• Cooperative or moderate naturalism (weak): epistemology remains a distinct inquiry but is continuous with and constrained by empirical science, so that armchair claims about how belief works must answer to what psychology actually finds. Most contemporary self-described naturalists hold something in this range.

Principal developments: Hilary Kornblith (Knowledge and Its Place in Nature, 2002) argues that knowledge is a natural kind, studied most fruitfully in cognitive ethology and psychology rather than by conceptual analysis. Stephen Stich (The Fragmentation of Reason, 1990) presses the sceptical implication, questioning whether traditional norms of rationality have any objective justification or merely encode local preferences. Gilbert Harman (Change in View, 1986) argues that principles of logic are not straightforwardly norms of belief revision, weakening the picture on which reasoning has clean rules to violate.

The program's apologetic significance is that it occupies the second horn of the Argument from Epistemic Normativity. It is the position naturalism arrives at when it takes its own ontology seriously, and it is markedly thinner than the normative vocabulary routinely used against religious belief.

Quine's argument, fairly stated

The case deserves to be put at full strength before it is criticised, because it is not a lazy position.

1. The foundationalist project failed on its own terms. From Descartes through Carnap's Aufbau, the ambition was to reconstruct knowledge of the external world from a base of sensory or logical certainties. Nobody achieved it. Quine takes the failure as decisive rather than as a task still outstanding.
2. There is no first philosophy. There is no standpoint prior to and independent of science from which science could be validated. We are, in Otto Neurath's image that Quine adopted, sailors rebuilding a ship at sea, never able to put it in dry dock.
3. So the question changes. Instead of asking how sensory evidence justifies theory, ask how, as a matter of empirical fact, meagre sensory input produces the torrential output of our theories about the world. That is a real question and science can address it.
4. This is continuous with the rest of inquiry. Using science to study the knower is no more circular than using science to study anything else, given that step 2 has removed the alternative.

The three standing objections

1. The normativity objection

The central and most widely pressed criticism, associated with Jaegwon Kim's "What Is 'Naturalized Epistemology'?" (1988). Justification is an evaluative notion. To say a belief is justified is to appraise it, not to report its causal history. A discipline that has traded evaluation for description has changed the subject rather than solved the problem, and it can no longer distinguish good reasoning from bad, only common reasoning from rare.

Quine's defenders reply that norms survive as hypothetical imperatives: given the goal of true belief, science can tell us which methods deliver it. That reply is available and is probably the best one, but notice what it concedes. The norms are now conditional on a goal, and they have no purchase on anyone who does not hold it. See the P2 and P4 treatment at Argument from Epistemic Normativity.

2. The circularity objection

Using empirical science to explain how we come to know things presupposes that our scientific beliefs are already in good order. If the point at issue is whether our belief-forming processes are trustworthy, an answer produced by those very processes cannot settle it without begging the question. Quine bites the bullet and accepts the circle as unavoidable, arguing that the demand for a non-circular validation was the mistaken part. The critic answers that accepting an unavoidable circle is a way of abandoning the question, not answering it. See Cartesian Skepticism.

3. The self-application objection

"Epistemology Naturalized" is itself an argument, offered because we ought to accept it given the failure of the foundationalist program. It uses the normative vocabulary it recommends retiring. This is not a knockdown, since the norm invoked may itself be hypothetical, but it does illustrate how difficult the vocabulary is to leave behind. See Self-refutation.

Why this matters apologetically

Three uses, in order of strength.

1. It identifies where the naturalist's epistemic critique runs out. The evidentialist objection to religious belief needs a norm binding across communities and independent of what the believer happens to want. Naturalized epistemology, taken strictly, supplies descriptions and hypothetical imperatives. The objector may keep the strong norm or keep the austere ontology; the argument is that he cannot keep both. See Evidentialism.

2. It is honest, and should be credited as such. This is what naturalism looks like when it stops borrowing. The codex's position is not that naturalized epistemologists are being evasive, but close to the opposite: they are following their commitments where they lead, and the resulting position is more modest than popular atheism assumes. Say so in debate. Granting an opponent's intellectual seriousness costs nothing and buys a hearing.

3. It sharpens the contrast with proper function. Alvin Plantinga's account requires faculties operating according to a design plan successfully aimed at truth. Naturalized epistemology can supply the causal story about the faculties but not the aim, because aims are teleological. That gap is the argumentative space Reformed epistemology occupies. See Reformed Epistemology and Argument from the Reliability of Reason.

One thing not to do. Do not treat naturalized epistemology as a self-evidently absurd position, or claim naturalists cannot reason. They reason well, which the Christian expects, since faculties given by God work whether or not the giver is acknowledged. The claim is about what the account can pay for, not about anyone's competence.

See also

• W.V.O. Quine, the program's originator
• Argument from Epistemic Normativity, the dilemma this position occupies one horn of
• Evidentialism, the normative alternative and the objection that depends on it
• Reformed Epistemology, the proper-function account that supplies the teleology naturalism lacks
• Argument from the Reliability of Reason, Plantinga's EAAN, the sister challenge about reliability rather than authority
• Fitness Beats Truth Argument, Hoffman's formal result on survival-versus-truth decoupling
• Cartesian Skepticism, the regress and circularity background
• Self-refutation, the pattern the strong replacement thesis is accused of
• Foundationalism, Coherentism, the traditional options Quine judged exhausted
• Empiricism, the tradition Quine works within and revises
• Quinean Rejection of Modal Logic Objection Defeater, the codex's treatment of Quine's other apologetically relevant commitment
• Epistemology, Christian Theories of Knowledge, domain hubs