The most trenchant criticism of naturalistic approaches to epistemology is that they
are unable to successfully deal with norms and questions of justification. Epistemology
without norms, it is alleged, is epistemology in name only, an endeavor not worth doing.
(See e. g., Stroud 1984, Kim 1988, Rorty 1979) Furthermore, it is claimed, an epistemology
without norms or with norms fashioned from scientific practice leaves science prey to
skeptical doubts. What one makes of this depends on whether one takes epistemology to be
worth doing in the first place. (cf. e.g., Kim and Rorty) However, I shall argue, it is
possible to allow for justification within a broadly construed Quinean naturalistic
framework. The skeptic can be disarmed as Quine has argued. Along the way I shall offer a
corrective to Quine's celebrated dictum that the Humean condition is the human condition.
1. Descriptive versus Traditional Epistemologies — Three Views
Naturalized epistemologies challenge the tradition in arguing that the description of
cognitive processes is a more central epistemological concern than the search for
foundations and principles of justification. Traditionalists have responded by challenging
the legitimacy of the descriptivist's claim to be epistemologists at all. (e.g., Dretske
1971, Dretske 1985, Kim 1988, Stroud 1981, Stroud 1984, Hull 1982, Hull 1988)
One way of sorting out the relationship between descriptive and traditional
epistemology is to taxonomize their connections as follows:
(1) Descriptive epistemology is a competitor to traditional epistemology. On this view,
both are trying to address the same concerns and offering competing solutions to similar
problems. Insofar as the tradition has been concerned with normative and prescriptive
claims, the traditionalists have argued that descriptive epistemology fails to address
these traditional questions and is epistemology in name only. Purely descriptive
epistemologies, it is argued, cannot deal with problems of justification. But, as Kim puts
it, "For epistemology to go out of the business of justification is for it to go out
of business." (Kim 1988, 391)
(2) Descriptive epistemology might be seen as complementary to traditional
epistemology. On this view, the focus of traditional epistemology remains the
justificational questions of the tradition. Descriptive epistemology (either a narrowly
construed evolutionary epistemology or a more broadly construed naturalized epistemology)
supplements this account with a psychological account or a genetic account of the origin
of human knowledge. This is Donald Campbell's view as expressed in a number of papers
including Campbell (1974) and Campbell (1977).
(3) Descriptive epistemology might be seen as a successor discipline to traditional
epistemology. On this reading, descriptive epistemology does not address the questions of
traditional epistemology because it deems them irrelevant or unanswerable or
uninteresting. Many defenders of naturalized epistemologies fall into this camp including
the early Quine (Quine 1960)
Insofar as option (3) entails the rejection of all the traditional normative questions
associated with epistemology it is open to the charge leveled against option (1). What
remains when questions of justification are set aside, it has been charged, is
epistemology in name only. For radicals like Rorty, who argue that much of the tradition
in philosophy is wrongheaded, this suggests that there is no longer any point in doing
epistemology under any name. For moderates like the more recent Quine, such an approach
smacks of throwing the baby out with the bath water.
Over the years, Quine has retreated from his apparently more radical earlier view that
naturalized epistemology must be purely descriptive to a more tempered view which
endorses, in a transformed way, the justificational questions of traditional epistemology.
This has led some critics to charge that, in effect, Quine wants to have his cake and eat
it too. One criticism, to the effect that Quine's position does not answer the traditional
skeptic (and, hence, is not justificatory enough) has been addressed by Quine in a debate
with Stroud. A second criticism contends that Quine's view, in attempting to deal with
prescriptive issues from a descriptive point of view, confuses causal with evidential
considerations. Quine protests that it is his critics who are confused. A broadly
pragmatic reconstruction of Quine's position shows that he is more in the right than they.
2. Epistemology Naturalized
What are the implications of "putting epistemology in a psychological
setting?" (Quine, 1969, 84) One option, endorsed by Wittgenstein and Rorty, is to
abandon it. The second option, endorsed by Quine in "Epistemology Naturalized"
is to abandon the pretence of classical epistemology to be the foundation of knowledge and
employ all available means to produce a construction of what we know, using psychology and
whatever. The result, in Quine's view is a kind of "reciprocal containment" of
science and epistemology within each other. The result is a non-vicious circularity. We
employ the tools and results of science in general and psychology in particular to
construct an epistemological apparatus which can then, in turn, be used to criticize and
correct scientific practice. As epistemologists we become "busy sailors" on
Neurath's raft. The problem of epistemological priority (conscious states versus
physiological stimulations) gets resolved in favor of the latter. Finally, the Gestaltist
problem of figure and ground gets resolved in an analogous manner. Whatever is causally
closest to the sensory receptors is epistemologically prior. These latter conclusions led
critics of Quine to charge that by naturalizing epistemology Quine had replaced epistemic
connections with psychological and physiological relations and, in effect, confused causal
with evidential considerations. Evidential considerations are evaluated by means of
methodological rules. The claim that naturalized epistemologies confuse causal with
evidential considerations can be defused by showing that a naturalized epistemology can
accommodate such rules. I return to this point in section 4.
3. Disarming the skeptic
Epistemology remains a going concern, but transformed. It becomes a part of science;
the factual inquiry into the relationship between observation and theory. The key focus
for epistemology now becomes how do human beings process observations to produce theories
[including mental representations?]? The key question for Quine (1969, 74) becomes
"how we human beings . . . have managed to arrive at science from such limited
information [as the irritations of the surfaces of our sensory apparati]?"
As a part of natural science, epistemology is free to use the results of the natural
sciences to answer its question[s]. This raises the question of circularity. How can
epistemology use the results of science to justify science? Quine's response is twofold
based upon his "unregenerate realism": First, the skeptical arguments presuppose
science — illusions are parasitical upon viridical perceptions; second, science needs
no justification beyond that provided by the hypothetico-deductive method. (Gibson, 1987,
63)
Stroud charges that Quine's project, insofar as it ignores the project of Kant and
Carnap, evades a deep problem endemic to the human condition. (Stroud 1984, 216) Insofar
as Quine restricts the epistemological enterprise to that which can be explored by science
he has, in Stroud's view, changed the subject. The very posing of this alternative,
however, suggests that somehow questions exist independently of the contexts in which they
were asked. But the problem of traditional skepticism arises within the context of a
particular way of conceptualizing the human condition. It is a product of a
foundationalist, infallibilist conception of knowledge inherited from the Greeks. When we
abandon that conception, we are changing the subject — but, not in any evasive sense,
that is, not to avoid difficult questions, but rather because the question which had a
dire sense to it from within a certain framework no longer appears pressing because the
framework from which it arose appears to us to be problematic.
In response to Stroud's objections to attacking epistemological questions by
"projecting ourselves into the other's place," Quine argues that "this
projection must be seen no transcendentally but as a routine matter of analogies and
causal hypotheses within our scientific theories" (Quine 1981, 474; cf. Olding 1983,
2) In such a way, Quine thinks, we get from an epistemology of the other to traditional
epistemology. Quine's move may appear to just beg the question against the skeptic again.
But, one can defuse, in part, the sting of traditional skepticism by dividing skeptics
into two groups: those who will not accept anything and those who argue for skepticism on
the basis of arguments from illusion or the fallibility of science or the like. To the
former, we can say nothing and must leave them at the crossroads. Life is too short to
take such objections seriously. To the latter, Quine's point is more telling for it is, in
effect, a rejection of the skeptic's move to "transcendentalize" objections
which, after all, were derived from intersubjective comparisons and errors in the first
place. On this reading, both the skeptic and the epistemologist of the other start from
the same intersubjective considerations but the traditional skeptic is the one who gives
the argument a transcendental turn and then complains that appeals to intersubjective
experience are question-begging. The epistemologist of the other need only block the
initial turn to thwart this line of argument. The wrong move would be to accept the
problem as posed by the skeptic in its transcendental form and then try to argue back to
intersubjectivity. This latter strategy runs afoul of all the `veil of illusions'
objections which have plagued post-Cartesian epistemology. The solution is to avoid being
seduced behind the veil in the first place.
Nevertheless, in The Roots of Reference, Quine denies that he has changed the
subject. (Stroud, 1984, 224) Quine sees naturalized epistemology as an
"enlightened" approach to the traditional problems. It is enlightened insofar as
it recognizes that "global" skepticism (the problem of the justification of
science) is unwarranted; only "local" skepticism (the problem of justification
in science) has any bite. Local skepticism is of a piece with normal scientific
uncertainty. Skeptical doubts are really scientific doubts.
Stroud (1984, 228) argues that the skeptic, if he is producing a reductio, is unshaken
by Quine's contention that skeptical doubts are scientific doubts. He suggests as one
potential skeptical reductio the following: Either science is true and gives us knowledge
or it does not. If it is not true, nothing we believe about the physical world amounts to
knowledge. But if it does give us knowledge, we can see from what it tells us about the
meager impacts at our sensory surfaces during perception that we can never tell whether
the external world really is the way we perceive it to be. But of that is so, we can know
nothing about the physical world. So once again nothing we believe about the physical
world amounts to knowledge. On either possibility we know nothing about the physical
world.
This does not seem fair. The first horn appears to amount to the dubious claim that
"If science does not give us knowledge about the physical world then nothing
does." Unless the term "science" is a blanket term for any procedure which
yields knowledge about the world, it is not clear that the claim is true. The other horn
is not convincing either. If science does give us knowledge, then the theory that tells us
that our sensory inputs are meager is embedded in other theories which tell us about the
nature of our bodies and the objects which produce the signals that impinge upon our
sensory organs to produce the meager impacts which are the foundation of our construction
of models about ourselves and the world. So we do know much more about the world then the
claim suggests. Of course, we cannot be sure about any of the particular claims about any
aspect of ourselves and the world, but this just is the scientific predicament. In any
case, it just does not follow from these considerations that "nothing we believe
about the physical world amounts to knowledge." Unless, that is, the skeptic is
smuggling in a model of the nature of knowledge which is immune to revision in the light
of subsequent investigation. But, if this is the skeptic game, then we are warranted in
rejecting the conditions of the engagement. The shift to fallibilism in the 17th century
was implicitly such a rejection.
Stroud concludes that "the fact that 'skeptical doubts are scientific doubts' does
not put the epistemologist who raises such doubts in the stronger position of being free
to use scientific knowledge of the world in his effort to answer those doubts and explain
how knowledge is possible." (Stroud, 1984, 229) Well, yes and no. It all depends on
how one construes the phrase "explain how knowledge is possible." If the call is
to give an global explanation of how knowledge is possible, Stroud is right, but such a
question assumes a discarded model of knowing. No such global explanations are
forthcoming, but none are called for. To insist on such is to side with those who insist
that in addition to providing causal explanations of all causal processes of the universe,
one is called upon to provide a causal explanation of the universe as such. If instead the
call is to provide a local explanation of how it is possible for human beings, constructed
as they are, to know, then such accounts (fallible though they may be) are readily
forthcoming and they are the kind of explanations that Quine seems to call for. The
problem, in principle, is no different from providing an explanation of how migratory
birds orient themselves in the absence of visual cues, or, for that matter, how they
process visual cues at all.
The skeptical problem (in its classical radical form) is an artefact of a particular
model of human knowledge. Quine's naturalization of epistemology is at one with a
rejection of that model. The "deep problem" of skepticism is just endemic to one
model of the human condition. Quine's dictum that the Humean condition is the Human
condition must be understood in a transformed manner.
4. The place of justification in a naturalized framework
This early formulation of Quine's position has struck many as being excessively
descriptivist. There appears to be no place for the epistemology of validation for Quine
in this view. The theory of confirmation appears to be reduced to or replaced by the
psychology of theory testing, appraisal and evaluation. But, it is alleged descriptions of
how theories are tested, appraised and evaluated are no substitutes for a prescriptive
analysis of these procedures. A purely descriptivist reconstruction of epistemology
strikes many as an impoverished epistemology at best.
The question of the justificatory function of epistemology arises at two very distinct
levels of inquiry. On the one hand, there is the problem of the global justification of
the scientific enterprise as such. When Quine rejects the call for putting science on a
foundation he is denying the legitimacy of this function. On the other hand, there are the
problems of what we may call the "local" justification of the particular
probative methods employed by science — the statistical tests, the appeals to
simplicity, confirmation, evidential adequacy, and the like. The rejection of the
skeptic's attack on the foundations does not address these issues. The Humean condition,
construed as the global question of the justification of science, is not the human
condition.
Reflection on Neurath's raft and the Duhem-Quine thesis leads us to realize that the
empirical results of science (data or theories) combine with the methodological rules of
scientific method to form a seamless web. The principle of justification that form the
norms of science are encoded in the methodological rules. Although they are not reducible
to empirical regularities, they are nonetheless inseparable from them. The Duhem-Quine
thesis shows that the locus of predictive failure is not determined by the logic of the
test situation. But, accepting or rejecting hypotheses, theories or test results requires
appeals to methodological rules as well. As "busy sailors" on Neurath's raft, we
must fashion the methodological tools which we employ to rebuild our scientific corpus
from the same experiences which we use to construct the corpus itself. We are just as free
to reject or reshape the methodological rules as we are to challenge any of the components
of the Duhem-Quine conditional [(H + AA + IC) —> p] in the light of failures
to observe the expected p. This pragmatic interplay between methods and results transforms
epistemology. Norms still matter but they arise out of scientific practice as Quine
contends. That practice is fallible and the results and norms which it gives rise to are
fallible as well. In this (limited) sense, the Humean condition is still the human
condition (as naturalists construe it).
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