Quine’s Naturalized Epistemology, Epistemic Normativity and the Gettier Problem

W. V. Quine is one of the most prominent advocates of the naturalistic approach to epistemology and he argues that epistemology should be naturalized and transformed into a sub-discipline of psychology and hence a chapter in science. In his famous paper " Epistemology Naturalized, " Quine starts to compare epistemology with the logical and set-theoretical studies of the foundations of mathematics. Similar to the studies of the foundations of mathematics, as Quine suggests, epistemological studies, which are " concerned with the foundation of science " (Quine 1968, p. 69), can be divided into two sorts— one is conceptual and the other is doctrinal. Quine further argues that the conceptual ones are concerned with meaning of our material object concepts, which are clarified by reducing them into sense experience concepts; and, on the other hand, the doctrinal ones are concerned with truth of our material object beliefs, which are established by deducing them from the premises about observations. According to Quine, both sorts of studies in traditional epistemology are doomed, since traditional epistemology shows no real advantages over sciences, especially psychology. Thus, Quine advocates that we should abandon this traditional epistemology; but this does not imply the death of epistemology per se, since epistemology can still go on " in a new setting and a clarified status " (Quine 1