Epistemology Naturalized

Introduction

Quine’s essay appeared in 1969 in the collection Ontological Relativity and Other Essays. He argues that the empiricist dream of grounding science in sense experience – by deducing truths about the world or translating them into sensory terms, as Carnap tried in the Aufbau – has failed. What remains is to study empirically how a human subject, given a meagre input of stimulation, produces a torrential output in the form of a theory of the world. The relation between evidence and theory thus becomes a topic for psychology and the other sciences. Critics such as Jaegwon Kim objected that this loses the normative question of justification.

Connections

Criticizes

• The Logical Structure of the World1928 · Rudolf Carnap

More works by W. V. O. Quine

• 1951Two Dogmas of Empiricism
• 1960Word and Object