On Quine's Naturalistic Epistemology

Naturalistic epistemology is an answer given by Quine to the traditional epistemology problems, and it is also an important apart of his philosophy system. Quine holds the view that in dealing with the human cognitive problems, we can not expect that we have the cognitive ability transcending the human normal and current cognitive abilities, epistemology should be classified into the scope of natural science. As a result, Quine objects the previous attempts tried by the former philosophers. For Quine , it is ridiculous that rationalism, represented by Descartes, claims that the guarantee of the objective knowledge obtained by human is the innate ideas. Besides, rationalism also takes god as the guarantee of innate ideas. Although Kant's transcendental philosophy dose not connect the objective knowledge to innate ideas, he still builds the knowledge of human on the transcendental form of cognition. The objectivity comes from the transcendental ability of cognition, and human can never have any ideas about the thing-in-itself. But the development of modern science broke the Kant's static picture. As to empiricism, Quine agrees on the basic position of epistemology problems, which means that human sensory experience is the initial source of human knowledge. However, Quine thinks that the previous empiricism failed on defending the concepts and theories about empiricism. On the one hand, Hume's skepticism points out that human's limited sensory experience cannot lead to the inevitable rules. On the other hand, the earlier analysis philosophers, represented by Rudolf Carnap, are guided by the modern logic and hope to construct a set of accurate artificial language, so that human can describe the world. But this attempt is difficult to come true.Quine hopes to solve the problems about the relationship between limited sensory experience and scientific theory, so he constructs the naturalistic epistemology, which stands on the traditional position of empiricism. Specifically speaking, Quine uses the way called language tracing to transform the relationship between limited sensory experience and scientific theory into the relationship between observation sentences and theoretical sentences. From Quine's opinion, on the one hand, to avoid the subjective factors created during the observation, the factor about mind should be removed, and the aim of introducing the observation sentences is to guarantee the consistency and communicability. On the other hand, scientific theory is consisted of different theories and formulated a net of languages, so if one want to understand the theory well, one should do due research first. Therefore, the problems on epistemology become into how can we get observation sentences through the observation, and transform the sentences into scientific theory. Quine also employs the methods of behavior psychology which means the procedure of cognition is the procedure of language learning too. Through the way children learning languages, Quine explains the procedure of transition from observation to theoretical sentences. Meanwhile, Quine proposes the integration idea, which means the scientific knowledge is a whole to experience. So that, it can avoid any statement from experience review and it also can escape from the experience crash by internal adjustment.It is Quine's naturalistic epistemology that solves the traditional epistemology problems in language level. His understand of language stimulates the diversion from linguistic to pragmatics, and the consistent truth also stimulates the rise of pragmatics in America. Though there are some drawbacks in Quine's theory, such as the paradox on canceling the normative thinking, ignoring the functions of mind and the contradictions of pragmatics, Quine's attempt has stimulated the modern philosophers to keep consistent thinking on the traditional philosophy problems. As the researches are moving forward to a deeper level on language, mind and world, the modern philosophy is moving too, all of which can regarded as the contributions of Quine.