Principles of Evidence and Theories of method are not to be constructed a priori. The laws of our rational faculty, like those of every other natural agency, are only learned by seeing the agent at work. The earlier achievements of science were made without the conscious observance of any scientific method; and we should never have known by what process truth is to be ascertained, if we had not ascertained many truths.

I hold that knowledge, mind, and meaning are part of the same world that they have to do with, and that they are to be studied in the same empirical spirit that animates natural science. There is no place for a prior philosophy.

[K]nowledge and belief, reference, meaning, and truth, and reasoning, explaining and learning, are each the focus of eroded confidence in “the grand old paradigm,” a framework derived mainly from Logical Empiricism, whose roots, in turn, reach back to Hume, Locke, and Descartes. … it is not that there has been a decisive refutation of “the grand old paradigm.” Paradigms rarely fall with decisive refutations; rather, they become enfeebled and slowly lose adherents. … But many of us sense that working within “the grand old paradigm” is not very rewarding. By contrast, there is considerable promise in a naturalistic approach, … Epistemology conceived in this spirit is what W. V. Quine has called naturalized epistemology.