ABSTRACT
A number of moves in contemporary philosophy of science have attempted to be sensitive to the naturalistic turn, with varying degrees of success. This chapter provides an overview of the contemporary work done in a few different fields. It provides brief recapitulation of the work of those feminist theorists who are the least relativist and the most comfortable with some sort of notion of empirical justification, and then presents a short summation of what is now being called "naturalization" in philosophy of science. Naturalized epistemology, particularly in its post-Quinean interpretations, draws on work from contemporary cognitive science and the social sciences in general in order to try to see what cognizers actually do and how their work might be relevant to epistemic theory, especially epistemic justification theory. Naturalized epistemology not only provides philosophers with a handle on how agents actually cognize; it provides them with new notions that might be consonant with the general project of justification, including scientific justification.
