Abstract

This dissertation is about naturalism; in it, I take the position that naturalism is the practice of accepting only public empirical evidence, and that that practice is untenable. The dissertation is divided into three chapters. In the first chapter, I review the literature on naturalism and conclude that most accounts of it must be incorrect; in that chapter, I also argue for my account of naturalism. The second chapter examines versions of naturalized epistemology and philosophy of science which wish to preserve normativity, and concludes that they are unworkable; the practice of naturalism gives us no resources with which to privilege any belief-claims over any other in terms of their justification, cognitive virtue, origin from a process which reliably leads to the truth, or similar. In the third chapter, I discuss versions of naturalized epistemology which attempt to dispense with normativity and conclude that beliefs are cognitively virtuous only relative to contingent and local goals and principles of hypothesis choice; I conclude that such radical naturalized epistemologies find themselves enmeshed in a skepticism which renders them unable to declare any cognitive state even relatively virtuous, and thus that radical naturalized epistemologies cannot succeed, even by their own standards