ABSTRACT
Lynn Hankinson Nelson was the first to declare for a feminist natural-ized philosophy of science, one that meets three recognized criteria for naturalization. A naturalized philosophy of science should:
1 Be commensurable with the actual history and contemporary practice of science; we can take this to mean that a naturalized philosophy of science is subject to the same criteria the relevant sciences are subject to, for example empirical adequacy – understood as conforming to a rich body of evidence and/or as having scope or a range of applications. And meeting criteria such as empirical adequacy is one reason naturalized philosophies of science require far less rational reconstruction of history or contemporary practice than traditional accounts – although philosophers of science always have to select which facts to present when setting out cases. (Compare, for example, Conant 1970 and Potter 2001.)
2 Be grounded in sciences relevant to theories of theorizing, e.g. empirical psychology, social psychology, cognitive science, evolutionary biology, and/or sociology.
