Willard Van Orman Quine

obert j. fogelin
1 Aspects of Quine’s Naturalized
Epistemology
Though there are clear anticipations in Quine’s earlier writings of
his commitment to a naturalized epistemology, its first full-dress
presentation appears in his essay “Epistemology Naturalized.” I will
use this carefully plotted essay as the central guide to Quine’s conception
of naturalized epistemology, making excursions into earlier
and later works where this proves useful.
Quine begins this essay declaring that “epistemology is concerned
with the foundations of science” (EN 69). Oddly, this opening claim
naturally suggests a project quite the opposite of the one he is about to
endorse. To speak of the foundations of science suggests an attempt
to find some way of validating science as a whole – that is, an attempt
to find some way of basing science on something more primitive and
more secure than science. This, however, gets Quine’s conception of
epistemology pretty much backwards. For Quine, epistemology does
not provide an independent standpoint for validating empirical science;
instead, empirical science provides the framework for understanding
empirical knowledge, including the empirical knowledge
provided by empirical science. This reversal represents the revolutionary
core of Quine’s conception of naturalized epistemology.
In order to explain why he adopts this revolutionary standpoint,
Quine presents an elaborate comparison between his naturalistic approach
to epistemology and what he takes to be the correct way of
viewing the outcome of twentieth-century research in the foundations
of mathematics:
Studies in the foundations of mathematics divide symmetrically into two
sorts, conceptual and doctrinal. The conceptual studies are concerned with
meaning, the doctrinal with truth. The conceptual studies are concerned
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