Naturalism, a dominant strand in current philosophical thinking in the analytic tradition, is the defining feature of the work of Willard van Oman Quine. However, despite its centrality, or maybe because of it, there is no clarity or consensus in our understanding of naturalism nor of the exact role it plays in Quine’s work. The current paper explores one strand of Quine’s naturalist project, the strand that primary deals with a naturalised account of language.
We can find several interconnected articulations of Quinean naturalism. Metaphilosophical or methodological Naturalism: Philosophy, according to Quine, should not be seen as an autonomous field of enquiry, rather as science conducted at a higher level of abstraction.
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