ABSTRACT
Liberal naturalisms are understood as alternatives to orthodox or scientific naturalism. My more radical naturalism develops a third alternative based on a challenge to their mostly shared conception of scientific understanding. A radical naturalism first analyzes scientific understanding as itself a scientifically intelligible natural phenomenon. Human conceptual capacities are biologically co-evolved outcomes of discursive niche construction, and that scientific account exemplifies the niche constructive conceptual practices that it makes scientifically intelligible. This re-conception of scientific understanding also challenges familiar strategies for understanding normativity more generally. Orthodox naturalists seek to eliminate normative authority or “place” it within a scientific image of nature as anormative. Liberal naturalists treat normativity as autonomously based in social or discursive practices mostly freed from accountability to that natural-scientific understanding. My radical naturalism instead shows how to understand the diverse normative concerns at work in human life as exemplifying an evolved, two-dimensional biological normativity.
