| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立臺灣大學 === 哲學系 === 86 === The aim of this thesis is to examine Quine's naturalized
epistemology,investi-gating whether its adoption would repudiate
the normative element in epistemo-logy. In his well-known essay
"Epistemology Naturalized" of 1969, Quine arguesthat
epistemology should be reconstructed as a branch of natural
science, an empirical study of the relation between sensory
stimulations and scientific theory formulations. There are
three major objections that have been raised against Quine's
argument and his approach to epistemology: (i)Quine's charact-
erization of traditional epistemology is misconceived. (ii)
Quine's recommedat-ion of naturalizing epistemology neglects the
notion of epistemic justificati-on, and hence the evaluative
strain in epistemology. (iii)Quine's naturalized epistemology,
understood as a scientific study, does not and cannot response
to the skeptical challenge to the very possibility of our
knowledge of the ex-ternal world,and hence fails to be a
normative study of knowledge. In this th-esis, I reconstruct
Quine's argument for naturalizing epistemology within his
systemic philosophy, and focus on Quine's holism and its
application: Qui-ne relies on it in arguing against traditional
epistemology (especially Carna-pian reductionist program), in
supporting his thesis of underdetermination of physical theory
and indeterminacy of translation, and in responding to
radicalskepticism. It offers the key to an understanding of the
normativity and scopeof Quine's naturalized epistemology. After
analyzing three criticisms on Quin-e's naturalized epistemology,
especially proposed by Harvey Siegel, Jaegwon Kim, Alvin
Goldman, and Barry Stroud, I try to show that those critics miss
the point because they do not appreciate the close connection
between Quine's naturalistic approach and holistic approach to
epistemology.
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