Hostname: page-component-7479d7b7d-t6hkb Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-10T04:32:25.496Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Siegel on Naturalized Epistemology and Natural Science

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2022

Paul A. Roth
Paul A. Roth*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, University of Missouri—St. Louis
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

What is the relation of epistemology, understood as the study of the evaluation of knowledge claims, and empirical psychology, understood as the study of the causal generation of a person's beliefs? Quine maintains that the relation is one of “mutual containment”.

Epistemology in its new setting, conversely, is contained in natural science, as a chapter of psychology. … We are studying how the human subject of our study posits bodies and projects his physics from his data, and we appreciate that our position in the world is just like his. Our very epistemological enterprise, therefore, and the psychology wherein it is a component chapter, and the whole of natural science wherein psychology is a component book—all this is our own construction or projection from stimulations like those we were meting out to our epistemological subject. There is thus reciprocal containment, though containment in different senses: epistemology in natural science and natural science in epistemology (Quine 1969, p. 83).

Type
Discussion
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 50 , Issue 3 , September 1983 , pp. 482 - 493
Copyright
Copyright © Philosophy of Science Association 1983

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

†

I would like to thank Dick Ketchum, Ron Munson, Teddy Seidenfeld, Jim Walters, and the referee for Philosophy of Science for their comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

References

Davidson, D. and Hintikka, J. (eds.) (1969), Words and Objections. Dordrecht, the Netherlands: D. Reidel.Google Scholar
Quine, W. V. (1966), Ways of Paradox. New York: Random House.Google Scholar
Quine, W. V. (1969), Ontological Relativity and Other Essays. New York: Columbia University Press.10.7312/quin92204CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Quine, W. V. (1974), Roots of Reference. LaSalle, IL: Open Court.Google Scholar
Quine, W. V. (1981), Theories and Things. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press.Google Scholar
Reichenbach, H. (1938), Experience and Prediction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Roth, P. (1980), “Theories of Nature and the Nature of Theories”, Mind LXXXIX: 431–438.10.1093/mind/LXXXIX.355.431CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Roth, P. (1982), “Logic and Translation: A Reply to Berger”, Journal of Philosophy LXXIX: 154–164.Google Scholar
Siegel, H. (1980), “Justification, Discovery and the Naturalizing of Epistemology”, Philosophy of Science 47: 297–321.10.1086/288934CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Thompson, M. (1981), “Epistemic Priority, Analytic Truth, and Naturalized Epistemology”, American Philosophical Quarterly 18: 1–12.Google Scholar