Naturalism, History, and the Philosophy of the Science

Abstract

Naturalism as a philosophical viewpoint has come to be identified with a commitment to the superiority of the scientific perspective as a way and a means of knowing the world. In contemporary analytical philosophy, W.V.O. Quine has been the thinker most closely associated with the demand to establish all genuine knowledge as empirical and scientific in nature, treating both common sense and philosophy as continuous with scientific thought. But Quine did not address the problem of what to do with humanistic disciplines like history, and with the social sciences. Attempts to reduce the logic of history and social science to natural-scientific terms have generally been unsuccessful, because the natural sciences, especially if we take physics as a model, cannot incorporate the intentions, meanings, actions, and events which are the objects of the humanities and social sciences. There is, however, an older and broader sense of naturalism which has been generating renewed interest, associated with thinkers like George Santayana and Ernst Cassirer. Santayana and Cassirer both argue for the existence of an irreducible plurality of perspectives from which we may gain knowledge of reality. In their accounts, each of these symbolic perspectives has its own distinctive explanatory structure, allowing history and the social sciences to sit alongside rather than being subsumed under natural science. The advantage of adopting this view is that it can correct Quine's overly narrow view of naturalism, which is enlarged to make room for extra-empirical components of knowledge without returning to the kinds of transcendental, supernatural, and metaphysical ideas that Quine was rightly suspicious of.