Normativity and Truth in Naturalized Epistemology (original) (raw)

In his famous article "Epistemology Naturalized" (1969), Quine established a novel take on the position of epistemology in philosophical and scientific discourse. According to his views, epistemological questions are a subset of psychological questions, and psychology in itself is a branch of natural science. Thus, epistemology, as understood in the Quinean sense, threatens the very idea of its normative aspects, as natural science is empiristic and, as a result, relies on purely descriptive claims. Hence, the following question arises: Does the naturalized account of epistemology entail the rejection of epistemic norms? In this research, we explore the three possible answers to this question and argue there is a sense of normativity in Quine's naturalized epistemology, but only insofar as we are willing to accept his imperfect notion of the truth.

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