Naturalizing Substantive Epistemology

Abstract

According to a modest version of naturalistic epistemology, empirical science is relevant just to a part of epistemology. It takes conceptual analysis to be an "a priori" undertaking and gives externalist analyses of epistemic concepts. The substantive issues concerning their application to actual cases become, therefore, resolvable by empirical enquiry. The basic presupposition of this approach is that the substantive questions concerning the scope of knowledge and justification are initially open and that it is the matter of empirical inquiry to close them. It is argued that this cannot be done in a noncircular way.