A Defense of Naturalism

Two Notions of Naturalism∗

What is philosophical naturalism? Most fundamentally, presumably, it is the view that natural science constrains philosophy, in the following sense. The concerns of the two disciplines are not simply disjoint, and science takes the lead where the two overlap. At the very least, then, to be a philosophical naturalist is to believe that philosophy is not simply a different enterprise from science...

Presumptuous Naturalism: A Cautionary Tale

2 " The decisive movement in the conjuring trick has been made, and it was the very one we thought quite innocent "-Philosophical Investigations, § 308

Cultural Naturalism

Culture can be viewed as the means by which a society can live in its surroundings by acquiring and consuming free energy. This naturalistic notion assumes that everything can be valued in terms of energy, hence also social changes can be described as natural processes that are influenced by the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. This universal law, when formulated as an equation of motion, reveals tha...

Naturalism and the a Priori

In Coming to Our Senses (1996), I argue for and apply a naturalistic semantic methodology to defend an anti-holistic truth-referential view of meaning. The naturalism in question is an epistemological doctrine that I take from Quine: there is only one way of knowing, the empirical way that is the basis of science (whatever that way may be). So I reject “a priori knowledge.” I do not give a deta...

Positivism, Naturalism, and Anti- Naturalism in the Social Sciences