Traditional Epistemology and Naturalism

Abstract

My overarching thesis — as I will henceforth refer to it — is that, to the extent we can make sense of naturalistic epistemic norms, there is no need for such norms in the process of rational belief-formation. To appreciate the significance of this claim, one of course needs to know something about NE (and how I understand this), and to do that, one also needs — since epistemology was originally conceived and pursued as a discipline that could only be described as anything but naturalistic — to look first at how epistemology is conceived on a more traditional model. In this chapter, I will present the outlines of what I call TE before showing how this, arguably, breaks down, paving the way for naturalism and NE.