Naturalism, Transcendental Conditions, and the Self-Discipline of Philosophical Reason

Naturalism has been the received metaphilosophical view within epistemology and the philosophy of science since the 1980s. In brief, it urges that science (and our knowledge acquisition in general) is an element of the natural world along with everything else. There is no privileged, aprioristic point of view of “first philosophy” over and above our empirical science itself, although such a standpoint is still assumed, in different ways, by old-fashioned empiricists, epistemological foundationalists, Popperian critical rationalists, and many contemporary scientific realists—in short, by most traditional analytic philosophers. Instead, science must be investigated scientifically; a scientific theory of science should be our aim. This kind of naturalistic program has been defended by, among others, Ronald Giere (1988) and Richard Boyd (1992). We may also classify Arthur Fine’s (1996) “nonrealistic” or “postrealistic” and postphilosophical “natural ontological attitude” (NOA) as a species of naturalism in this sense. According to Fine, all attempts to interpret and justify science philosophically, from a higher perspective lying outside science, are in vain. n n n J S P