Essay On Quine's Naturalism

Quine’s Naturalism
Abstract: Quine thinks epistemology is contained in natural science, given that the subject of epistemological study is a physical. He claims that philosophy is continuous with natural science: “The new setting of epistemology is in psychology.” (Quine: 1969, 259).This implies that when deciding whether an observation is epistemologically prior or not, we should choose whatever is coming from sensory receptors, unlike Gestalten psychology suggested, we should not choose the one we are aware of. As it is seen, Quine defines his naturalism through natural sciences and he introduced a new physical perspective known as naturalized epistemology. However naturalism is very important element which affects his philosophy from the

Empirical knowledge is constituted as a “fabric of interlocking sentences which hooks on to the neutral input at the observation sentences.” (Sommers:1994 qtd French, 22). However Quine’s naturalism differs from the definition of naturalism. Quine creates a new philosophical perspective known as “ Quine’s naturalism” which cannot meaningful or be understood without him. He basically took the naturalism which defined in the historically epistemic doctrines and re-arrange of modified version of naturalism which belongs to him. He uses this modified naturalism to defend his philosophical perspective against to idealism and realism. The term ‘naturalized epistemology’ was introduced Quine in his famous article known as “Epistemology Naturalized” (1969). In this article he defends a naturalistic approach to epistemology, arguing that epistemology should be regarded as continuous with or even part of, natural science. Although Quine criticizes the version of empiricism adopted by the logical positivists and their immediate successors, he explicitly affirms a version of Hume’s