Epistemology Naturalized

Foundationalism for Math

Conceptual Studies is the study of concepts with an eye to introducing precise definitions.

Doctrinal Studies is the attempt to prove laws.

The ideal course of events being that the clearest concepts are used to define all others, and the most obvious laws are used to prove all the others. The model here again is Euclidean Geometry. One starts with definitions of a point, a line, etc., and using only a few highly obvious axioms, one creates a theory of space and the shapes of objects therein.

Foundationalism for Empirical Knowledge

Here the goals are as follows:

Conceptual Studies: Using the concepts of immediate experience (observation), logic, and set theory, define all other theoretic vocabulary in the strong sense of reduction. Making all the obscurity of the talk of the physical world as clear as talk of immediate experience.

Doctrinal Studies: Derive all of the laws of science from immediate experience.

The Structure of Science

The Possibility of Attaining These Goals

Conceptual Studies: Not even the combination of the verificationist theory of meaning, contextual definition, and the weakening of the goal to implicational definitions can overcome the fact that "...the typical statement about bodies has no fund of experiential implications it can call its own." (p.22)

Doctrinal Studies: Here "the Humean predicament is the Human predicament." (p.17) "The most modest of generalizations about observable traits will cover more cases than its utterer can have had occasion actually to observe." (p.19)

If the grand foundationalist project of defining all of our object terms in observational language and proving all our object laws on the basis of immediate experience is a failure, we cannot offer a validation of science external to science.

Why Not Just Do Psychology?

However, there remains the major focus of epistemology, the relation between evidence and theory. If there is no hope of this externalist validation of science, no hope even of a strong conceptual reduction which would render our theoretical language innocent (i.e., strictly reducible to observation language), then there is no purpose to the foundationalist project. Why not, then, simply study psychology to see how we actually generate laws from experience and how observation leads to talk of objects. Why invent a fiction with no more epistemic merit than the psychology, when one can have the descriptive theory.

Such a project will allow us to understand the relation of theory to evidence in what ways theory transcends evidence. This epistemology with its newly clarified status does not contain natural science (i.e., lay its foundations in a manner external to it), rather there is a mutual containment of epistemology in science and science in epistemology. Science helps us to understand how we might generate a veridical science, so that science contains epistemology, but epistemology also contains science in that the veridicality of science is thereby explained by epistemology.

Epistemology Naturalized

Foundationalism for Math

Conceptual Studies

Doctrinal Studies

Foundationalism for Empirical Knowledge

Conceptual Studies

Doctrinal Studies

The Structure of Science

The Possibility of Attaining These Goals

Conceptual Studies

Doctrinal Studies

Why Not Just Do Psychology?