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Abstract
Jerry Fodor asks whether natural science is psychologically possible. The answer coming from a naturalistic investigation of our cognitive capacities would seem to be that it is not. Top-down models of perceptual processing make it difficult to draw a principled theory-observation distinction, evolutionary accounts of the etiology of our cognitive capacities raise doubts concerning their reliability in scientific domains, and the various nativistic commitments of our psychology suggest that the scope of our cognitive capacities falls short of what our scientific ambitions demand. The result is that our naturalistic epistemology is threatened with a naturalistic form of skepticism, and naturalism threatens to reduce itself to absurdity.
I respond to these skeptical challenges by showing that their common thread is the view, as old as Aristotle, that the existence of endogenous psychological structure brings with it limitations on our epistemic capacities—that empiricist epistemology requires an empiricist psychology for its successful implementation. This explains the felt need for conceptually unstructured sensory givens, blank slates, and equipotential cognitive architectures. I show that this view is mistaken and that it is precisely because of our endogenous psychological structure that our epistemic capacities are unbounded. I propose an information-theoretic account of observation that renders the theory-observation distinction obsolete. I defend an information-theoretic account of concept possession and show that this together with our capacity for deferential concept acquisition entails that our conceptual capacities are unbounded. Finally, I propose a hybrid computational-associative theory of mind that eliminates the need for domain-specific inferential capacities of the sort entailed by modular cognitive architectures. Minds with this sort of architecture exhibit just the sort of equipotentiality that science demands.
The result is a naturalistic validation of natural science and a reassessment of the project of naturalistic epistemology. The possibility of a naturalistic skepticism shows that naturalistic epistemology does not beg the question against the skeptic, and the possibility of a purely naturalistic response to the skeptic shows that naturalistic theses can be used in the service of a validation of natural knowledge.
