Central to Quine's naturalistic account of knowledge is the idea that all our knowledge is in some way based upon stimulations of our sensory nerves.
Among other things, this account constrains his epistemology, since it is a naturalistic account of knowledge that is required.
This would be an important discovery, which many naturalistic theories of knowledge would struggle to to accommodate.
Although these issues are, of course, mainly epistemological, there is a significant causal component: one of the key issues seems to be whether a naturalistic account of knowledge, which relies on some notion of naturally acquired concepts, can measure up to the normative requirements of a notion like knowledge (Goris 2013).
For platonism entails that reality extends far beyond the physical world and includes objects which aren't part of the causal and spatiotemporal order studied by the physical sciences.1 Mathematical platonism, if true, will also put great pressure on many naturalistic theories of knowledge.
Not only can literary theory (along with art criticism, sociology, and yes, non-naturalistic philosophy) produce knowledge of an important and even fundamental nature, but fiction itself, so breezily dismissed in Professor Rosenberg's assertions, has played a profound role in creating the very idea of reality that naturalism seeks to describe.
Building on the pioneering work of American pragmatists, notably William James Jamess 1907) and John Dewey Deweyy 1922; Dewey & Tufts 1932), Philip Kitcher (Kitcher 2011a) has recently revitalized the pragmatic, naturalistic approach to moral knowledge evident in earlier thinkers.
Quine's response is thus to sketch an austerely naturalistic account of how our knowledge, and the cognitive language in which that knowledge is embodied, arises, or might arise.
His meaning reflects a belief in people's capacity for common knowledge, while the naturalistic and subjectivist definitions prevalent in the modern academy attenuate the belief in the possibility of consensus on various things, like psychology.
Morris offered an American-inspired general theory of signs, which synthesized the formal accounts by Leibniz, Frege, Russell and Carnap, with naturalistic and pragmatist accounts of knowledge, language, communication and social behavior by William James, Charles Peirce and George Herbert Mead.
