World of Philosophy

Author(s): Christopher Key Chapple, Intaj Malek, Dilip Charan, Sunanda Shastri, Prashant Dave
Publisher: Shanti Prakashan

Page 582

then revives the distinction between necessary and contingent within the natural world, rather than as a distinction between the natural and the logical.
The shift from transcendentalism to naturalism has invited the dissolution of the distinction between science and epistemology or to be more specific, science and philosophy. Naturalised epistemology seeks to demolish the philosophical doctrine that epistemology provides foundations to science. In his articles "Epistemology Naturalised" Quine has argued for the fact that the classical type of epistemology seeking the apriori fouadations of knowledge and science is dead and that in its place must be installed a new epistemology called naturalised epistemology.
Quine's project gives a new turn to epistemology in contemporary times which brings epistemology on par with science as it is practiced by mankind. Quine argues that epistemology is a part of science especially of phychology and physiology which demonstrates how knowledge grows over a period from the rudiments of sensory irritation on the human body In other words, epistemology gets submerged in the empirical science of collecting the phychological and physiological data of sensory experience. In the process, the details of the accumulation of sensory evidence provide us with how knowledge as a theoretical activity takes place. Quine is here suggesting that naturalized epistemology does not involve a change of subject. The old problem was the gap between meagre input and torrential output. Now this gap can be more directly studied by the study of the relation between the physical input received by the human subjectretinal disturbance for instance constitutes the information received by the eye-and the beliefs which the subject is there by caused to form, those beliefs being studied physicalistically, that is by studying the neurophysiology of the brain activity which constitutes them.
Quine identifies the above approach as the most characteristic feature of naturalized epistemology. The relation between the meagre input and the torrential output is a relation that we are prompted to study for somewhat the same reasons that always prompted epistemology, namely in order to see how evidence relates to theory, and in what ways one's theory of nature transcends any available evidence" 9. Thus the epistemic enquiry now becomes part of the broad area of science that includes cognitive psychology, neurophysiology etc.
Putnam observes Quine's position as sheer epistemological eliminationism. As a result of this he concludes that we should according to epistemological eliminativist abandon the case for justification of knowledge and reconstrure the notion of evidence so that the evidence becomes the sensory stimulations that cause us to have the scientific beliefs we have. Perhaps Quine would not see the epistemic notions of
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