•  1819
    Quine on the Nature of Naturalism
    Southern Journal of Philosophy 55 (1): 96-115. 2017.
    Quine's metaphilosophical naturalism is often dismissed as overly “scientistic.” Many contemporary naturalists reject Quine's idea that epistemology should become a “chapter of psychology” and urge for a more “liberal,” “pluralistic,” and/or “open-minded” naturalism instead. Still, whenever Quine explicitly reflects on the nature of his naturalism, he always insists that his position is modest and that he does not “think of philosophy as part of natural science”. Analyzing this tension, Susan Ha…Read more
  •  491
    Boarding Neurath's Boat: The Early Development of Quine's Naturalism
    Journal of the History of Philosophy 55 (2): 317-342. 2017.
    W. V. Quine is arguably the intellectual father of contemporary naturalism, the idea that there is no distinctively philosophical perspective on reality. Yet, even though Quine has always been a science-minded philosopher, he did not adopt a fully naturalistic perspective until the early 1950s. In this paper, I reconstruct the genesis of Quine’s ideas on the relation between science and philosophy. Scrutinizing his unpublished papers and notebooks, I examine Quine’s development in the first deca…Read more
  •  53
    Towards a moderate scientism
    with Pieter van der Kolk
    Algemeen Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Wijsbegeerte 107 (3): 285-299. 2015.
    Scientism, the view that only scientifically supported beliefs are epistemically justified, faces two influential problems: (1) scientism itself does not seem to be scientifically supported and hence self-referentially incoherent; and (2) scientism seems to dismiss many plausible ordinary beliefs as unjustified. In this paper, we show that both problems presuppose a needlessly narrow conception of science and that when scientism is based on a broader, more realistic conception of science neither…Read more
  •  906
    Katz’s revisability paradox dissolved
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy 91 (4): 771-784. 2013.
    Quine's holistic empiricist account of scientific inquiry can be characterized by three constitutive principles: *noncontradiction*, *universal revisability* and *pragmatic ordering*. We show that these constitutive principles cannot be regarded as statements within a holistic empiricist's scientific theory of the world. This claim is a corollary of our refutation of Katz's [1998, 2002] argument that holistic empiricism suffers from what he calls the Revisability Paradox. According to Katz, Quin…Read more
  •  750
    Quine's Argument from Despair
    British Journal for the History of Philosophy 22 (1): 150-173. 2014.
    Quine's argument for a naturalized epistemology is routinely perceived as an argument from despair: traditional epistemology must be abandoned because all attempts to deduce our scientific theories from sense experience have failed. In this paper, I will show that this picture is historically inaccurate and that Quine's argument against first philosophy is considerably stronger and subtler than the standard conception suggests. For Quine, the first philosopher's quest for foundations is inherent…Read more
  •  34
    Suspension and disagreement
    with Pieter van der Kolk
    Algemeen Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Wijsbegeerte 108 (1): 37-52. 2016.
    Some sceptics claim that in cases of peer disagreement, we ought to suspend judgment about the topic of discussion. In this paper, we argue that the sceptic’s conclusions are only correct in some scenarios. We show that the sceptic’s conclusion is built on two premises (the principle of evidential symmetry and the principle of evidentialism) and argue that both premises are incorrect. First, we show that although it is often rational to suspend judgment when an epistemic peer disagrees with you,…Read more
  •  613
    Quine's ‘needlessly strong’ holism
    Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 61 11-20. 2017.
    Quine is routinely perceived as having changed his mind about the scope of the Duhem-Quine thesis, shifting from what has been called an 'extreme holism' to a more moderate view. Where the Quine of 'Two Dogmas of Empiricism' argues that “the unit of empirical significance is the whole of science” (1951, 42), the later Quine seems to back away from this “needlessly strong statement of holism” (1991, 393). In this paper, I show that the received view is incorrect. I distinguish three ways in which…Read more