Naturalized Epistemology

Naturalized epistemology is the program, most closely associated with W.V.O. Quine, of treating the theory of knowledge as a branch of empirical science rather than as a foundational discipline standing outside it. The traditional project — finding a set of incorrigible basic beliefs from which all knowledge can be derived — is abandoned. In its place, epistemology becomes the study of how human beings, as physical systems in a physical world, actually come to form beliefs about that world.

Quine's paper Epistemology Naturalized (1969) argued that the foundationalist project had failed: logical positivism could not reduce theoretical statements to protocol sentences, and the analytic-synthetic distinction could not bear the weight placed on it. The alternative was to study belief-formation using the methods of psychology, cognitive science, linguistics, and neuroscience. The normative question — which beliefs are justified — is reconstrued as a question about which cognitive procedures are reliable, answerable by the same empirical methods that apply elsewhere.

Critics argue that naturalization collapses the distinction between knowledge and true belief, or that it cannot account for the normativity of epistemic assessment without circularity — using science to validate science. Defenders reply that the normative was always parasitic on the descriptive: we cannot specify what justification is until we know how belief-formation works. The program remains one of the most contested research directions in epistemology.