Naturalistic Assumptions

Abstract

Naturalized epistemology is epistemology based on accepting the deliverances of our best current theories about the world, and premissing them in the account we give of how we get those theories. One of its principal attractions is that it allows us to make progress with other tasks in philosophy and elsewhere, unhampered by sceptical doubts. The paralysing effect of self-conscious questions about the getting and testing of beliefs — prompted in the tradition of epistemology by an acute sense of the finitary predicament not just of each putative knower taken individually, but of the collective even as it pools the results of its members’ best endeavours — is solved in naturalised epistemology by the simple expedient of avoiding those questions altogether.