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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
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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

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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

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