Abstract
My central goal in this paper is to interpret what Quine says in his Kant lectures about the norms of epistemology and the doctrinal and conceptual tasks of epistemology—the tasks, respectively, of constructing good theories and of clarifying meanings—in light of what he says about these topics in several of his earlier and later works. I argue that despite one puzzling passage in the Kant lectures that misleadingly suggests otherwise, the norms of Quine’s epistemology are exclusively doctrinal, not conceptual.
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This is implied by the way Quine introduces the distinction in the Kant lectures. As we saw in a passage quoted earlier, he writes, “The traditional concerns of epistemology are of two sorts, that I call conceptual and doctrinal” (Quine, This volume, 31). I understand Quine’s use of the phrase “that I call,” not “which I shall call,” for instance, to signal to his audience that he intends to use “conceptual” and “doctrinal” in the way he explains them in previous work. The only earlier publication in which he defines the terms in “Epistemology Naturalized.” Moreover, apart from the Kant lectures, as far as I know, he does not use the terms again.
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I discuss this point and it consequences in more detail in Ebbs (2011).
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Johnsen (2005) sparked some of the thinking that led me to the reading I present here. Gregory (2008, chapter 5), arrives at a similar conclusion, without highlighting, as I do, that Quine’s epistemological norms are part of what he calls the doctrinal side of epistemology, whose task is constructing good theories. Peter Hylton distinguishes between epistemological norms that tell us “how to act so as to obtain successful theories” and epistemological norms for “the thinking-up of successful theories” (Hylton 2007, 84). On my reading, the norms of Quine’s epistemology that concern how to act to obtain successful theories are not distinct from the norms for thinking up successful theories.
References
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Acknowledgements
I presented an early draft of this paper in February 2018 at Quine’s 1980 Kant Lectures, a Group session of the Society for the Study of the History of Analytical Philosophy at the Central Division meetings of the APA in Chicago. I thank the chair of the session, Joshua Eisenthal, and the other participants for their comments immediately following my presentation, Adam Leite for helping me to sort through some of the epistemological assumptions that Quine rejects, and Robert Sinclair and Sander Verhaegh for their very helpful written comments and editorial advice on the penultimate draft.
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Ebbs, G. (2019). Quine on the Norms of Naturalized Epistemology. In: Sinclair, R. (eds) Science and Sensibilia by W. V. Quine. History of Analytic Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04909-6_7
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