Naturalistic Philosophy Of Science And Its Normativity

Contemporary philosophy of science has an obvious naturalistic tendency. Through the insistence on the continuity between epistemology and empirical science, naturalism has induced a series of changes in the research subjects and methods of contemporary philosophy of science, and tries to provide a much broader prospect of science. However, the dualistic opposition between descriptive position of empirical science and the normative appeal of traditional epistemology is always a key theoretical dilemma of naturalistic philosophy of science, and restricts the evolution and development of different kinds of naturalistic theory.This dissertation is devoted to a multi-dimensional survey of contemporary naturalistic philosophy of science aiming at the theoretical dilemma. It reveals the important role naturalism plays in understanding philosophy of science and science per se, and at the same time it analyzes different normative strategies implied in vaious naturalistic approaches.To begin with, this dissertation interprets the concepts of naturalism and normativity. Based on a review of the history of naturalism, it poses the concept of naturalism studied by this text. In the meantime, this dissertation nails down the problem of normativity in naturalism by comparing the normative appeal of traditional epistemology and the descriptive stance of naturalism.Next, this text adopts a multi-dimensional perspective on naturalism in contemporary philosophy of science respectively from natural, historical, sociological and practical angles. The selection of these four dimensions is on the one hand based on different scientific properties and on the other hand, on the introduction of different empirical sciences. Naturalism throws different dimensions of science into relief by linking different empirical sciences and epistemology together. However, no single dimension can contribute to our holistic understanding of science, which renders a coherent research perspective necessary.Thirdly, this dissertation studies the key theoretical dilemma of naturalistic philosophy of science, that is, the problem of normativity. The specific approaches to this problem include: eliminativist strategy, instrumentalist strategy, the appeal of normativity to natural causal necessity, the appeal of normativity to social-historical necessity, and the appeal of normativity to practical situation, etc. This text makes a detailed analysis of the significance of these approaches and their possible limitations.Lastly, this text contends that by understanding science as practice, coherent naturalism based on practice not only sticks to multidisciplinary research of science, thus expanding research methods of philosophy of science, but also makes the multi-dimensional characteristic of science stand out, enriching our understanding of science per se. At the same time, this coherent naturalism grounds normativity on practical situation by way of deconstructing representationism and dualistic thinking which is closely related to it, thus providing a new direction for resolving the problem of normativity, which is of some positive significance both in theory and in practice.