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Naturalism in this sense [naturalized epistemology] is just 'the recognition that it is within science itself and not some prior philosophy, that reality is to be identified and described.' Quine's naturalized epistemology shunned what he called 'first philosophy', any attempt to justify the deliverances of the sciences. There should be no attempt to ground the natural sciences; rather this is where we begin our philosophizing...the marooned philosopher has no other resources than the deliverances of the natural sciences at his disposal. Even if we allow that science needs no external justification for its being a source of knowledge, there is nothing in science itself that warrants the sweeping claim that there are no extra-scientific basic sources of knowledge as moral, aesthetic, religious, and metaphysical knowledge. But then Naturalism's restrictive epistemological stance is either justified extra-scientifically, which makes naturalism self-defeating, or else simply unjustified...As a set of methodological dispositions (or as a research program), Naturalism is not a philosophical thesis at all and is therefore neither true nor false. Since it makes no claims, it requires no justification. But then neither can it assert its superiority to some other inquirer's non-naturalistic set of methodological dispositions which treats as basic sources of evidence not only the deliverances of science but, for example, rational intuition or divine revelation.
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