Epistemology

   1) Beyond Psychophysiology and Sociology and History of Science There Is Nothing for Epistemology to Do

   If we have psychophysiology to cover causal mechanisms, and the sociology and history of science to note the occasions on which observation sentences are invoked or dodged in constructing and dismantling theories, then epistemology has nothing to do. (Rorty, 1979, p. 225)

   2) Epistemology Is a Chapter in Psychology or Natural Science

   But I think that at this point it may be more useful to say rather that epistemology still goes on, though in a new setting and a clarified status. Epistemology, or something like it, simply falls into place as a chapter of psychology and hence of natural science. It studies a natural phenomenon, viz, a physical human subject. This human subject is accorded a certain experimentally controlled input-certain patterns of irradiation in assorted frequencies, for instance-and in the fullness of time the subject delivers as output a description of the three-dimensional external world and its history. The relation between the meager input and the torrential output is a relation that we are prompted to study for somewhat the same reasons that always prompted epistemology; namely, in order to see how evidence relates to theory, and in what ways one's theory of nature transcends any available evidence. (Quine, quoted in Royce & Rozeboom, 1972, p. 18)

   3) The Assumption That Cognitive Psychology Has Epistemological Import Can Be Challenged

   Only the assumption, that one day the various taxonomies put together by, for example, Chomsky, Piaget, Leґvi-Strauss, Marx, and Freud will all flow together and spell out one great Universal Language of Nature . . . would suggest that cognitive psychology had epistemological import. But that suggestion would still be as misguided as the suggestion that, since we may predict everything by knowing enough about matter in motion, a completed neurophysiology will help us demonstrate Galileo's superiority to his contemporaries. The gap between explaining ourselves and justifying ourselves is just as great whether a programming language or a hardware language is used in the explanations. (Rorty, 1979, p. 249)