WVO Quine's Epistemic Paradigm

WVO Quine's Epistemic Paradigm

Since its publication in 1969, Quine's seminal essay entitled Epistemology Naturalized has had a polarizing effect on pursuits in this field. Many have rejected the naturalist approach to epistemology on the grounds that it is mere relativism (see below), while others have celebrated Quine's program for articulating an empirical approach to epistemology. In what follows, I will endeavour to provide a clean explanation of some of the central features of Quine's naturalism and point out what I believe are the strengths and weaknesses of these features and, I will offer a brief account of why I believe Quine's naturalism to be an exemplary approach to clarifying how epistemic pursuits ought to be carried out.

1. Quine's Naturalism

What then is naturalized epistemology according to Quine? Simply stated, it is the departure from traditional philosophy insofar as it invites empirical science to play a crucial role clarifying the explanatory relation between theory and evidence. The reason that this is a departure from the tradition is because philosophical doctrine has clung to the notion that epistemology is primarily a normative inquiry concerned with the pure justification of our claims to knowledge.

One of the major, and perhaps ironic, problems with the traditional view, however, is that there has been much disagreement over just which criteria are to count as justification in the first place. If we need justification to increase the liklihood that our beliefs are true, and thus wind up with knowledge, then how are we to know that our original criteria are themselves justified? The most familiar strategy1 against this risk of infinite regress is to accept only beliefs that are indubitably true, such as first-person reports of conscious phenomena or clear and distinct ideas. From this initial cache of first principles one could then, were this endeavour successful, rationally reconstruct an epistemically justified account of how we come to have knowledge. Quine characterizes this approach generously by drawing a parallel to the attempted reduction of mathematics when he says: "ideally the obscurer concepts would be defined in terms of the clearer ones so as to maximize clarity, and the less obvious laws would be proved from the more obvious ones so as to maximize certainty."2 With this kind of foundationalist epistemology, once one has defined which first principles are to be accepted as justified truths, one can then proceed with the project of explaining science (inter alia) in accordance with them.