The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast PREMIUM-Ep. 294: Quine on Science vs. Epistemology (Part Three)
Jun 3, 2022
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Epistemology As A Psychological Project
- Quine reframes epistemology as a psychological question about how sparse sensory inputs produce rich beliefs.
- He proposes studying language acquisition and cognitive processes to explain theory formation empirically.
From Retinal Input To Rich Description
- The puzzle is how meagre two-dimensional retinal inputs yield torrential three-dimensional descriptions.
- Quine treats that transformation as the central empirical problem for a naturalized epistemology.
Psychology As Functional Cognitive Science
- 'Psychology' here likely means functional cognitive science, not Freudian psychoanalysis.
- Quine expects psychologists to map processing stages (e.g., perception to language) without full neural detail.