ABSTRACT
Few epistemological doctrines seem to fit the sciences more readily than do empiricism, taken as a philosophical doctrine about evidence, and naturalism, understood as a philosophical account of scientific method. Empiricism explains how scientific theories connect to the world; naturalism proposes optimal procedures for learning about the world. But a fundamental problem appears to attach to these doctrines. For the very type of knowledge these philosophical doctrines purport to support and clarify turns out to be implicated in supporting and clarifying empiricism and naturalism themselves. Examining this threat of circularity and its consequences leads, I suggest, to reconceptualizing the status and role of philosophical inquiry vis-à-vis scientific inquiry and empirical knowledge. “Epistemology,” Quine declares in “Epistemology Naturalized,” “is concerned with the foundations of science” (1969: 69). Yet, (in)famously, Quine also maintains in the same essay that the relation between epistemology and science is one of “reciprocal containment” (ibid.: 83). Because Quine’s writings have decisively influenced two lines of debate within epistemology generally and the relation between epistemology and science in particular – holism and naturalism, respectively – his account provides a convenient basis for surveying how these debates have evolved. My particular concern will be, in line with the Quinean perspective adopted herein, determining in what respects empiricism remains epistemologically fundamental as an account of scientific knowledge. In what follows, I offer a sketch of a movement in twentieth-century epistemology from what I term a “bottom-up” to a “top-down” approach regarding the relation of epistemology and the sciences. This will follow lines of argument found in
“Epistemology Naturalized” by tracing the development of the arguments that systematically strip away attempts to justify science independently of science. This engenders key problems in specifying what to count as empirical, and so as evidence for and against individual scientific claims. This turns out to be the crucial step in Quine’s naturalism, i.e., elimination of philosophy as a form of inquiry independent of science. Yet against those who maintain that Quine’s blurring of the lines between speculative metaphysics and science represents a politically (if not philosophically) retrograde move, I indicate how Quine’s holism and naturalism helped motivate and make possible a proliferation of alternative approaches to the study and understanding of science. Making explicit this connection allows a somewhat different perspective on the current disputes between philosophers of science and science studies researchers. Towards that end, consider reference to “the whole of natural science” from “Epistemology Naturalized” (written circa 1968) in light of the context of an earlier use of that phrase in “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” (circa 1950-51). In the latter case, Quine urges a vast enlargement of the unit assessed as having (or lacking) empirical significance. In the former, he declares for naturalism, i.e., treating epistemological questions as questions within science, and so using science to account for how humans manage to acquire such knowledge. By implication, the notion of empirical significance must itself be subject to naturalistic scrutiny along with all other aspects of scientific method and theorizing. By unpacking just why Quine makes use of so vague a phrase reveals just how radically Quine’s critique of empiricism forces a reconception of the relation between epistemology and the philosophy of science. In particular, I suggest, terms such as “empiricism” no longer hold promise of epistemological insight regarding the basis for scientific knowledge. Empiricism simply ceases to have standing as an epistemological doctrine apart from science. It becomes, rather, a consequence of naturalism (and pragmatism), a thesis about the nature of scientific evidence maintained on the basis of scientific investigation (see Nelson and Nelson 2000).
