Laudan’s Normative Naturalism: An Analytical Review

Larry Laudan (Philosophy of Science, 57(1), 44–59, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 21(2), 315–322) proposes and defends a naturalistic philosophy of science called normative naturalism. The paper will delineate the cardinal features of normative naturalism and some of the critiques against it. The objective of the paper is to present an analytical review of normative naturalism. The objections raised in this paper are limited to evaluating Laudan’s normative naturalism in the light of his theory of axiology. We will assess whether Laudan’s interpretation of the hierarchical model is historically accurate, the instrumental conception of scientific methodology, and the naturalness of the axiological criterion. The analysis of Laudan’s account of axiology reveals some inherent contradictions in his normative naturalism. We propose a strategy to rectify these inconsistencies in order to make Laudan’s normative naturalism compatible with his naturalistic project.

1. The hierarchical model of scientific rationality is espoused by Karl Popper, Carl Hempel, and Hans Reichenbach (Laudan, 1984 and 1990a).

2. The holist or relativist model of scientific rationality is espoused by Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend (Laudan, 1984 and 1990a). It is also known famously after Kuhn as Kuhnian’s relativistic model of scientific rationality.

3. Shonkholen Mate (2022) sees an insight into the methodology debates between Laudan and his critics. He defended an instrumentalist interpretation of methodological rules that constitute a given scientific system.

4. We do not discuss the first issue in length as it is a general one and a passing remark on it is sufficient. Also, due to limited space, the paper focuses only on the second and third issues.

5. Conceptual analysis has been considered a mainstay methodological tool in philosophizing (e.g. Chisholm, 1957; Gettier, 1963; Jackson, 1998).

6. Kornblith argues for a complete naturalisation of cognitive aims and methodology. He asserts that just as scientists empirically discovered the nature of other natural kinds, such as gold, aluminum, and rocks,epistemologists can empirically ascertain the nature of knowledge by consulting recent empirical findings in cognitive ethological research (2005; 2006). Laudan could also take a radical turn with conceptual analysis or argument and completely rejects it in favour of Kornblith’s a posteriori methodology.

7. Howard Sanskey (2020) argues that at one point in the development of his normative methodology, Laudan used pre-analytic intuition but came to reject it altogether in his later works. He can dispense with the appeal to conceptual analysis. The motivation for this is that Kornblith (2006) who argues against the employment of conceptual analysis in naturalistic theorizing also proposes that the appeal to intuition can be limited and we can dispense with it.

8. The approach is similar to that of Goldman (1993) who employs empirical methods of conceptual analysis instead of a priori conceptual analysis in constructing process reliabilism. That is, a posteriori investigation discovers the meanings of our concepts, or as his psychologized account of the meaning of terms would have it. In this manner, the semantic consideration is argued to be compatible with naturalism. We, however, go beyond him and adopt Kornblith’s a posteriori methodology.

I received no funding from any source. This research was done all by myself.

Authors and Affiliations

1. HSS Department, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Powai, Maharastra, 400076, India

   Shonkholen Mate

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Shonkholen Mate.

Conflict of interest

The author declares that there is no competing interests.

Publisher's Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.

Reprints and permissions