Nature of Naturalism: Chris Hookway

Chris Hookway, in his paper 'Quinean Holism and Quinean Naturalism', offered an account of the sort of naturalism that we could expect to arise from the rejection of the analytic/synthetic dichotomy. A familiar way of thinking about this is that the resulting naturalism sees philosophy as a branch of natural science. This is encouraged by Quine's own suggestion that naturalised epistemology be seen as a part of psychology. But when Quine offers concrete examples of naturalised epistemology, he often useses logic and mathematics. This seems reasonable, since logic and mathematics are not, on the Quinean view, to be seen as fundamentally separate from the natural sciences. It suggests, however, that Quinean naturalism can model philosophy on those disciples rather than on the natural sciences themselves. Quine focus on psychology, Chris suggested, can be largely understood to be a consequence of his focus on the (empiricist) concern with the relation between experiences and observational beliefs, and his desire to defend a causal and non-justificatory construal of it.

One of the issues that came up in discussion concerned Quine's claim that naturalised epistemology, just like previous epistemology, was concerned with the relation between evidence and theory. If experiences cause but do not justify observational beliefs, then it seems odd to think of them as evidence. One would expect, rather, that the observational beliefs themselves be thought of as the evidence. But this would disqualify Quine's interest in the relation between experience and belief as a part of epistemology and, if so, we still don't have an explanation of why Quine wanted to see epistemological questions as psychological ones.