This article reviews the transition between post-Fregean anti-naturalistic epistemology and contemporary naturalistic epistemologies. It traces the revival of naturalism to Quine’s critique of the "a priori", and Kuhn’s defense of historicism, and use the arguments of Quine and Kuhn to identify a position, "traditional naturalism", that combines naturalistic themes with the claim that epistemology is a normative enterprise. Pleas for more radical versions of naturalism are articulated, and briefly confronted.

In this paper I am going to try to indicate my notion concerning the nature and subject-matter of psychology. I am a behaviorist. I hold that psychology does not seek descriptions and intercommunications concerning immediate experience per se. Such descriptions and attempts at direct intercommunications may be left to the arts and to metaphysics. Psychology seeks, rather, the objectively stateable laws and processes governing behavior. Organisms, human and sub-human, come up against environmental stimulus situations and to these stimulus situations they, (...) after longer or shorter intervals of time, behave. The laws and processes determining this their behavior are stateable in objective terms. Even in the cases where the organism is oneself, these determining causal factors can and must—for the purposes of psychology—be stated objectively. It is true that in these latter instances, in which the animal in question is oneself, one may in one's rôle, not of a psychologist, but of an artist or a metaphysician, attempt to describe and convey to another man one's own facts of immediate experience. But such a description and report of immediate experiences, except in so far as this report is itself a form of behavior and therefore like all other behaviors the basis for an investigation of the objective laws and processes underlying it, essentially new to the picture. Experience qua experience, while of concern and interest to the man in the street, the philosopher and the poet, does not enter as such into the laws and equations of psychology,—in so far, at any rate, as psychology is to be considered as a science. (shrink)

Philosophers have ever declared that their problems lie at a different level from the problems of the empirical sciences. Perhaps one may agree with this assertion; the question is, however, where should one seek this level. The metaphysicians wish to seek their object behind the objects of empirical science; they wish to enquire after the essence, the ultimate cause of things. But the logical analysis of the pretended propositions of metaphysics has shown that they are not propositions at all, but (...) empty word arrays, which on account of notional and emotional connections arouse the false appearance of being propositions. This conception that the “propositions” of metaphysics, including those of ethics, have no theoretical content, is to be sure still disputed. We shall not, however, enter here on its demonstration, but, under its guidance, will limit ourselves to non-metaphysical and non-ethical philosophical problems. (shrink)

Previous claims that psychology is propaedeutic to the other sciences have been met with enthusiastic indifference. Contributing to this indifference has been the fact that psychology, a young and unproved discipline which habitually borrowed the methods of the older sciences, has too frequently revised its notion as to its own nature and subject-matter. More important, however, has been the faith of the physical sciences in the absolute character of their own basic concepts: in the reality of Absolute Space and Absolute (...) Time and in the universality of deterministic principles, for, as long as physics presumed to deal with entities which are what they are regardless of the nature of man, nothing other than these entities appeared to demand prior consideration. The problem of the nature of the observer in the physical experiment became important to physics only as a consequence of the recent ‘subjective’ revolution. It is this revolution which has revitalized the problem of the propaedeutic science and has accentuated the distinction which we must make between the behavioral phenomenon of individuals creating formal arrays of words or symbols which are without operational meaning and the discriminatory responses, or operations, by which the empirical meaning of such arrays is determined. (shrink)

The mind-body problem is—despite appearances—still the inevitable basic issue of unending discussions in recent philosophy. Various types of epistemologies and metaphysics, European and American, have offered their widely divergent “solutions” of the dreaded Cartesian tangle. Is there any hope of reaching a universally acceptable view?

In this paper I am going to try to indicate my notion concerning the nature and subject-matter of psychology. I am a behaviorist. I hold that psychology does not seek descriptions and intercommunications concerning immediate experience per se. Such descriptions and attempts at direct intercommunications may be left to the arts and to metaphysics. Psychology seeks, rather, the objectively stateable laws and processes governing behavior. Organisms, human and sub-human, come up against environmental stimulus situations and to these stimulus situations they, (...) after longer or shorter intervals of time, behave. The laws and processes determining this their behavior are stateable in objective terms. Even in the cases where the organism is oneself, these determining causal factors can and must—for the purposes of psychology—be stated objectively. It is true that in these latter instances, in which the animal in question is oneself, one may in one's rôle, not of a psychologist, but of an artist or a metaphysician, attempt to describe and convey to another man one's own facts of immediate experience. But such a description and report of immediate experiences, except in so far as this report is itself a form of behavior and therefore like all other behaviors the basis for an investigation of the objective laws and processes underlying it, essentially new to the picture. Experience qua experience, while of concern and interest to the man in the street, the philosopher and the poet, does not enter as such into the laws and equations of psychology,—in so far, at any rate, as psychology is to be considered as a science. (shrink)