ABSTRACT
W. V. Quine describes his naturalism as “the recognition that it is within science itself, and not in some prior philosophy, that reality is to be identified and described”. Philosophers who accept the standard reading typically dismiss Quine's naturalism as “reductive” and espouse more “liberal” naturalisms according to which our ordinary discourses about propositional attitudes, meaning and translation are naturalistic and respectable despite not being reducible to natural science. The most obvious and basic problem with the standard reading of Quine's naturalism is that Quine says repeatedly, in many different ways, that he uses “science” broadly to include both the “hard sciences” and “the softer sciences, from psychology and economics through sociology to history”.
