Quine's Naturalized Epistemology And Its Normativity

Rationalism and empiricism are the two main factions on epistemological problems, the representative of Cartesian rationalism claims that relying on the human rationality to seek for certain knowledge and provide the foundation for other subjects. Quine rejects rationalism, proposes indeterminacy and philosophy as continuous with science. Empiricism agrees with reductionism and the dichotomy of the analytic and the synthetic, which are called "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" by Quine. On the base, Quine puts forward the thought of inseparable knowledge. Quine argues that rationalism and empiricism are foundationist epistemology, we should use the thought of inseparable knowledge and philosophy as continuous with science to make the epistemology naturalized.Making the epistemology naturalized depends on the method of observation sentence?semantic trace?and behaviorist psychology. On the one hand, these methods guarantee the objectivity of knowledge. On the other hand, they make knowledge and truth have the features of transcendence. These cause the problem of normativity in naturalism. Philosophers generally believe that Quine's view about naturalized epistemology lack of normativity. But Quine believes that naturalized epistemology remains normative.Criticisms on Quine mainly focus on the negligence of knowledge definition and the rationality of truth. But Quine believes that there is a significant gap between the tripartite definition of the traditional knowledge and truth. So the focal point of epistemology should be how we gain knowledge rather than knowledge definition.With respect to truth, Quine believes that truth can be wrong but not truth's relativism,empirical evidence can provide a guarantee for truth. According to Quine's view about knowledge and truth, we will find Quine still pursue a kind of correctable normativity. This view is consistent with inseparable knowledge.More importantly,the correctable normativity comes from the description of how we gain knowledge,which achieves the combination of normativity and descriptivity.