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In recent years there has been a great deal of discussion about the prospects of developing a “naturalized epistemology,” though different authors tend to interpret this label in quite different ways. This chapter sketches three projects that might lay claim to the “naturalized epistemology” label, and argues that they are not all equally attractive. Indeed, the first of the three—the one attributed to Quine—is simply incoherent. There is no way we could get what we want from an epistemological theory by pursuing the project Quine proposes. The second project is a naturalized version of reliabilism. While this project is not fatally flawed in the way that Quine’s is, the sort of theory this project would yield is much less interesting than might at first be thought. The third project is located squarely in the pragmatist tradition. One of the claims made for this project is that if it can be pursued successfully the results will be both more interesting and more useful than the results that might emerge from the reliabilist project. A second is that there is some reason to suppose that it can be pursued successfully. It is argued that for over a decade one version of the project has been pursued with considerable success by Herbert Simon and his co-workers in their ongoing attempt to simulate scientific reasoning. The final section offers a few thoughts on the various paths Simon’s project, and pragmatist naturalized epistemology, might follow in the future.

Justificatory cognitive processes must be tractable. That one ought to produce and sustain beliefs in certain ways entails that one can. Fitting epistemic standards for human epistemic agents must be sensitive to which potential belief-forming processes humans are capable of employing, at least with training. Such (low-grade a priori) points call for a naturalized epistemology. This chapter clarifies this demand by elaborating upon the kind of idealized normative standards one can expect from a naturalized epistemology, and on the range of disciplines that can contribute to normative naturalized epistemology. It also advances a way of thinking about naturalized epistemology as encompassing a broad spectrum of inquiry ranging from low-grade reflection about central evaluative concepts to richly empirical inquiry revealing the character of actual human cognitive processes and the possibilities for variation. The organizing principle that holds the spectrum together is the concern for a kind of engineering for truth seeking. Just as various kinds of inquiry find a place within common engineering disciplines, so likewise a wide range of inquiries can find a place within naturalized epistemology. The spectrum of inquiry falling within naturalized epistemology is the E-spectrum (the ‘E’ standing both for epistemology and for engineering).

In an age of moral skepticism, moral philosophers are often casual about their own positions to represent moral life in societies segmented by gender, race, class, and other differences. Drawing on resources of feminist epistemology and naturalized epistemology, this chapter critiques a theoretical-juridical model of morality and defends an expressive-collaborative one sensitive to questions about epistemic authority, credibility, and claims to represent common moral thought and life. Intuitions are moral judgments we have learned in common with others, but which may be modified or relinquished in a process of moral reasoning that involves analogy and narrative. Reflective equilibrium is recast as a moral equilibrium among persons sustaining moral understandings and mutual intelligibility in a shared and stable way of life they can find valuable. A key critical method is thus testing for transparency the actual arrangements of power and authority that hold moral understandings in place.

Quine’s naturalism is not well appreciated for either its force or its detail. It is a scientific view of what science, knowledge and objectivity amount to that takes seriously the fact that such a view is benignly circular: there is no point of view commanding knowledge or science that transcends science. After explaining how Quine himself accepted the view after his famous responses to Carnap, the chapter discusses naturalized epistemology and its implications for the study of language, the specter of indeterminacy, the fundamental importance for naturalism of the inscrutability of reference, and the place within naturalism of ontology. The chapter concludes with the implications for compositionality, truth, semantical holism, instrumentalism, realism, objectivity, the status of psychological characterization and the propositional attitudes.

Epistemologists in the 21st century come from a long tradition in which perception, memory, and testimony were viewed as the sources of knowledge. Of these, perception and memory, however enhanced, abstracted, or elaborated, counted as the most reliable sources, with testimony ranking as a distant, and usually compromised, third. In this chapter's view, social epistemology reverses this ranking, granting a central place to testimony in the production of knowledge, and interrogating assumptions about the replicability and homogeneity of perception and memory. It thus generates a range of issues that had seemed to be hors de question for traditional epistemologists. Drawing on the conceptual framework developed in Ecological Thinking: The Politics of Epistemic Location, this chapter proposes that epistemic inquiry socially reconfigured is more fully naturalized than post-Quinean naturalized epistemology has been. Social epistemology focuses on epistemic practices communally engaged by identifiable knowers in the world (thus not principally in the laboratory); who are situated not just socially, but ethically, politically, demographically, geographically, and ecologically, where aspects of such “situatedness” often count among the conditions that make knowledge possible. The inquiry focuses on testimony and advocacy as practices where these factors are particularly salient, and on ignorance not as a mere lack or failure of knowledge, but as a modality of not-knowing, or knowing inadequately, unjustly, which is itself situationally fostered, inhibited, or eradicated.

This chapter advocates a return to Moorean independence. One dominant metaethical trend is moral epistemology naturalized. Another metaethical trend has been conceptual analysis, often called ‘analytic ethics’. It is argued that both trends are philosophically misguided. Ethics naturalized is un-philosophical in lacking the kind of supreme generality and abstractness that is distinctive of philosophical inquiry; it takes human beings to occupy moral centre stage. By contrast, we find in Moore a kind of cosmological ethics, focused on the value of all things in the universe as a basis for ethical inquiry. Moreover, ethics naturalized lacks competence in that its scientific pretensions are at odds with how philosophers go about their business. Analytic ethics, on the other hand, which is explicitly concerned with armchair, intuitive judgments about meanings, cannot overcome the lack of competence signaled by the philosophical lessons about conceptual analysis found in Kant, Quine, and Wittgenstein. In light of these failures, the chapter advocates returning to the cosmological orientation of Moore's ethics, which can be properly understood as avoiding the traditional metaethical debate between realism and anti-realism, as well as avoiding the battery of objections to the effect that Moore's ethics is not relevant to action. Such a return to a Moorean view of ethics would represent a version of ‘ethics dehumanized’: cosmological in its focus and thus properly philosophical.

This chapter summarizes the book's arguments against the extended view, as well as the primary conciliatory contentions advanced with regard to the embedded and embodied views. The chapter closes with comments on the positive importance of the embodied and embedded programs, particularly in respect of such philosophical issues as reductionism and naturalized epistemology.

In contrast with views that attribute the biological utility of beliefs to their truth, Nietzsche maintains that their relative utility renders them proportionately more likely to be idiosyncratic expressions of species‐relative concerns. Nietzsche's sceptical ‘argument from utility’—the inference from the practical utility of beliefs to the improbability of their being metaphysically true—is examined and rejected. It is argued that Nietzsche is an early proponent of naturalized epistemology. His objections to the ‘best explanation’ defence of metaphysical realism are discussed. It emerges that the ‘evolutionary’ strand of thought is incompatible with his other sceptical arguments. The chapter pursues Nietzsche's doctrine that the ‘ruling drives’ representing the dominant manifestation of the will to power in an individual determine the standards for validation, evidence, and truth. The discussion proceeds to an examination of Nietzsche's remarks that the external world is created in a manner depending on the specific form of the will to power instantiated by the empirical subject.

This chapter extrapolates from the earlier account of perceptual belief and proposes a general theory of basic beliefs: a basic belief is one that is the result of the noninferential operation of a primal system: an inferentially opaque cognitive system that has a normal developmental etiology. The chapter explains all this and argues that it gets the cases intuitively right. It is argued that we can transcend and improve on our naive epistemic intuitions by turning to the empirical sciences to correct our untutored assumptions about which cognitive systems there are, where they come from, and what their outputs are.

In “The Sciences and Epistemology,” Alvin Goldman argues that epistemology and the sciences should remain distinct yet cooperative. He presents several examples that illustrate the relevance of science to epistemology. Drawing from work in psychology, he proposes that science can shed light on epistemic achievements by contributing to our understanding of the nature and extent of human cognitive endowments. He suggests, in addition, that psychology can also contribute to our understanding of the sources of knowledge. Finally, Goldman argues that some specific projects in epistemology can receive important contributions from psychology, economics, and sociology.

This chapter claims that recent developments in psychology and brain science cast considerable doubt on moral intuitionism. In arguing for this claim, it first develops a set of six principles concerning when non-moral beliefs require justifying beliefs to back them up. In short, whenever a belief is important, partial, controversial, emotional, subject to illusion, or explicable by dubious sources, then that belief needs to be backed up by confirming beliefs, if the believer is to be epistemically justified in holding it. By appealing to recent empirical work, moral beliefs of all sorts fall under one or more of his principles, and thus are in need of support from other relevant beliefs. If so, then moral intuitionism is incorrect: no moral beliefs enjoy the status of being non-inferentially justified. This is his strong claim. More cautiously, the chapter claims that even if there may be some individuals who, in some contexts, have moral beliefs that do not require inferential support, still, for educated adults who are well aware of the various possible distorting factors affecting beliefs, no moral beliefs are non-inferentially justified. Even if moral judgments are not themselves claims that can be confirmed or disconfirmed entirely by empirical means (including the methods of science), it does not follow that developments in the sciences, including biology, psychology, sociology, anthropology, cognitive science, and brain science, are not relevant to whether a person's (or group's) moral beliefs are epistemically justified.

This chapter provides an overview of the chapters to follow, their central arguments, and how the various pieces of the view developed in the book fit together. Two of the subsequent chapters are identified as pivotal methodological chapters: Chapter Two—on the a priori and on philosophical reflection in particular—and Chapter Six—on the spectrum of inquiry to be pursued within a fittingly naturalized epistemology. The chapters that follow each of these methodological chapters implement and illustrate their lessons. The discussion of various versions of reliabilism in the third, fourth, and fifth chapters provides an extended instance of the “low-grade priori” reflection characterized in Chapter Two. The discussion and criticism (in Chapter Seven) of the psychological “proto-theories” that have mis-informed much epistemology reflects the far-reaching significance of certain empirical parts of the epistemological spectrum, while Chapter Eight articulates some consequences of an empirically better informed understanding of epistemically relevant processes. Thus, the revisionary treatments (in Chapter Eight) of foundationalism, coherentism, and contextualism constitute important lessons to be gained from a fittingly naturalized epistemology.

The closest ancestor of Second Philosophy is Quine's naturalism. This chapter details the Second Philosopher's departures from Quinean orthodoxy: the Quinean chooses naturalism in response to the failures of first philosophy, the Second Philosopher simply begins in her characteristic ways; she doesn't share his empiricism leanings, e.g., in her modified approach to epistemology naturalized; her reactions to radical skepticism differ from his; and perhaps most dramatically, she rejects his holism. These differences ramify into the philosophy of logic, mathematics, and natural science in subsequent chapters.

It has been remarked that the distinctive development in philosophy over the past thirty-five years has been a naturalist turn away from the a priori methods of traditional philosophy to a conception of philosophy as continuous with natural science. This is a reversion to the conception of philosophy advanced by Russell in the 1910s. The most august modern originator of such naturalism in contemporary philosophy was Quine. He advanced three forms of naturalism: naturalized epistemology, ontological naturalism, and philosophical naturalism. This chapter shows the errors and confusions that inform all three. The programme of naturalized epistemology is incoherent, and its claim to be an enlightened substitute for epistemology unwarranted. Quine's occasional forays into epistemology are examined and found wanting.