Aspects of Quine’s Naturalized Epistemology

Though there are clear anticipations in Quine’s earlier writings of his commitment to a naturalized epistemology, its first full-dress presentation appears in his essay “Epistemology Naturalized.” I will use this carefully plotted essay as the central guide to Quine’s conception of naturalized epistemology, making excursions into earlier and later works where this proves useful Quine begins this essay declaring that “epistemology is concerned with the foundations of science” (EN 69). Oddly, this opening claim naturally suggests a project quite the opposite of the one he is about to endorse. To speak of the foundations of science suggests an attempt to find some way of validating science as a whole - that is, an attempt to find some way of basing science on something more primitive and more secure than science. This, however, gets Quine’s conception of epistemology pretty much backwards. For Quine, epistemology does not provide an independent standpoint for validating empirical science; instead, empirical science provides the framework for understanding empirical knowledge, including the empirical knowledge provided by empirical science. This reversal represents the revolutionary core of Quine’s conception of naturalized epistemology.