Comment on Levine
pp. 291-294
in: Abner Shimony, Debra Nails (eds), Naturalistic epistemology, Berlin, Springer, 1987Abstract
Most of my comments will concern the first section of Levine's paper, in which he agrees with Quine's assimilation of epistemology to psychology but differs from him by proposing that the appropriate psychological theory for this purpose is cognitive rather than behavioral. Levine says in effect (p. 262 and Note 1) that if the stimulus-response analysis of behaviorist psychology is inadequate to account for verbal behavior, then a fortiori it is inadequate to account for the intricacies of proposing hypotheses, gathering data, searching, assessing, and inferring that constitute the epistemic activities of ordinary life and of scientific research. I agree with him on the relative merits of behaviorist and cognitive psychology and believe that an adequate naturalistic epistemology must make extensive use of the latter. I do not agree, however, that a naturalistic point of view requires the assimilation of epistemology to any kind of psychology.
