ABSTRACT
The interaction of the naturalism that Quine inspired, and the reading of the history of science which Kuhn provided, together have had a profoundly unsettling impact on the philosophy of science. It shook literally centuries of philosophical confidence that it understood science. This sudden loss of confidence that we know what science is, whether it progresses and how it does so, and what the sources of its claims to objectivity can be, left an intellectual vacuum. It is a vacuum into which many sociologists, psychologists, political theorists, historians, and other social scientists were drawn. One result of the heated and highly visible controversy which emerged, was to make it apparent that the solution to problems in the philosophy of science requires a re-examination of the most fundamental questions in other compartments of philosophy, including epistemology, metaphysics, the philosophy of language, and even portions of moral and political philosophy.
