Philosophy Naturalized

Philosophy Naturalized

Quine’s famous paper “Epistemology Naturalized” advocates handing epistemology over to the psychologists. No more traditional a priori epistemology; let’s have empirical science instead. Cognitive science replaces conceptual analysis—that sort of thing. This will put an end to endless irresoluble philosophical disputes and set epistemology on the path to academic respectability (you know the pitch). But Quine never wrote a paper called “Logic Naturalized” advocating abandoning traditional a priori logic in favor of the psychology of logic. That would have made his own logic books obsolete: burn Methods of Logic and replace it with Experimental Logic! Let’s have “ex-log”! We can conduct empirical studies of what subjects think about logic, how they reason, when logic takes hold of the infant mind. If that sounds like a bad idea to you, then ask yourself how you might justify abandoning traditional epistemology in favor of the new empirical epistemology withoutleaving open the similar naturalization of logic. And the point generalizes: if epistemology is ripe for scientific naturalization, why not the rest of philosophy? How can epistemology be the only branch of philosophy that should be handled by the psychologists and those who read them (and only them)? What about ethics, metaphysics, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, aesthetics, political philosophy, philosophy of mathematics, etc.? If it’s good for epistemology, it must be good for the rest of philosophy. I won’t go into why this is a bad idea; my point is that consistency requires it. Naturalize one, naturalize all. This applies also to the philosophy of the sciences—of physics, biology, psychology, etc. We have to look at the psychological science of these subjects, i.e., the minds and behavior of scientists. The philosophy of physics will consist of psychological studies of physicists—e.g., the psychology of quantum theorists. Not the physical world but the mental world of the physicist. Likewise, for the philosophy of biology—this will become the study of the thought processes of biologists. That may be an interesting field of study, but is it the sole legitimate respectable form that the philosophy of biology should take? This wouldn’t be philosophy naturalized but philosophy destroyed. Naturalizing epistemology amounts to nothing short of eliminating philosophy altogether, once you think it through. You might want to do that, but let’s be clear about what you are doing. And if it is really what you want, why not take a degree in psychology to begin with?