World of Philosophy

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

Page 583

justification, good reason and so on in the same light in the sense of their not all being equally culpable from a naturalistic point of view.
Now some epistemologists argue that naturalisers of epistemology ignore all sceptical challenges. But Quine argues that naturalized epistemologists does not by nature disallow sceptical challenges. The sceptical issue of science versus science arises; science provides the context and content of it.
Quine is of the opinion that traditional epistemologists have always looked to science for the context of their work. He claimed that both Berkeley and Hume drew on the findings of science in their work. It involves circularity when these epistemological underpinnings provide foundations for science. This perceived circularity becomes most vivid in the case of scepticism according to Quine. He further adds that all the traditional sceptical challenges to epistemology arose within science itselfnot internally to epistemology or philosophy generally. If that is the case, then the naturalized epistemologist can use the findings and methods of science in response to sceptical challenges.
There are two standard sceptical moves which are ruled out by Quine in advance that the sceptic work from within science". The first is any version of the argument from error which states from the claim that it is logically possible at any time and in any circumstance)! that ones present belief should be false. Quine refuses any of such argument by disallowing the notion of logical possibility which it uses, the physical possibility, that which science admits.
In a similar way the sceptic might try to argue that our knowledge of the external world may be distinct from the way the world in reality is. But with Quine's account of the relation between epistemology and science, this supposition is senseless. The only world of reality is that which the science describes.
Though the two possible sceptical arguments are ruled out the one that uses science to confute science is methodologically acceptable. Quine himself provides us with one. For he takes it to be a deliverance of science that we receive a meagre input from which there is somehow generated a torrential output. This contrast is what is needed for the sceptic to mount an argument against the possibility of any theoretical knowledge.
Here one can see the pragmatist in Quine when he says that the sceptic is overreacting. Instead of leaping immediately to enormous sceptical conclusions one should wait and see what the naturalistic study of the relation between input and output turns up.Barry Stroud is of
534