ABSTRACT
Many philosophers of science see themselves as pursuing a broadly naturalistic agenda. Quine developed what has become known as “naturalized epistemology”, which is to be accompanied by a naturalized account of the methods of science. We shall discuss Quine’s account of scienti c method in the next section. Quine says little that is novel about methodological principles. His main contribution is metamethodological in placing methodology and epistemology within the framework of naturalism. Just how successful he has been in this
metamethodological task remains unclear. Other naturalists take on board not just the results of empirical science but also the actual practices of scientists themselves. ey draw extensively on the history of science to determine what these practices are. An in uential approach along these lines is the normative naturalism of Laudan. It also addresses the question of how the normativity of method can be reconciled with the empirically determined actual practice of science (see §12.2). In the nal section we shall consider the closely related methodological pragmatism of Rescher.
