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Epistemology — the naturalistic turn
Epistemology is the inquiry into knowledge — what it is, how it is acquired, and what makes a belief warranted rather than merely held. Most of that inquiry takes the form of recurring stances toward the enterprise of knowing: securing knowledge on a foundation, withholding assent from the skeptic’s chair, dissolving the problem as misframed, reading knowing as conditioned by where the knower stands. Those stances are perennial — taken up centuries and traditions apart, none ever finally winning — and they are the same postures, worn for the knowledge question rather than the being question, that the metaphysics subject already maps. This page does not re-walk them.
What it holds is the one move that map has no slot for. Metaphysics’ twentieth-century reckonings — positivist deflation, the analytic revival, metametaphysics — are internal: the field arguing with itself about its own legitimacy. Epistemology’s twentieth-century turn is external. It renegotiates the field’s border with a maturing empirical science of the knower — and, on a second front, with the social sciences. Where the perennial question was how should knowledge be justified from the armchair, the turn asks whether the armchair is the right place to sit at all: whether the study of knowing should be handed, in whole or in part, to the disciplines that study knowers empirically. That handover, and the resistance to it, is this page’s subject.
The analysis of knowledge, and its collapse
The modern story begins inside the armchair, with a project as old as Plato: say what knowledge is. The classical answer — knowledge is justified true belief — held as a working definition for two millennia. In 1963 Edmund Gettier published a three-page paper showing it could not be right: one can have a belief that is true, and justified, and yet not knowledge, because the justification connects to the truth only by luck. The paper set off a cascade. Each proposed repair — add a fourth condition ruling out luck, require the right kind of causal link, demand that the belief track the truth across nearby possibilities — met a fresh counterexample, and the counterexamples were generated faster than the conditions could absorb them.
The cascade’s significance is not any single repair but its eventual diagnosis. Linda Zagzebski argued that the failures were not accidental: as long as justification falls short of guaranteeing truth — as long as the account is fallibilist — a Gettier case can always be constructed, by pairing a justification that happens to misfire with a truth that arrives by another route. What the literature records is the modest, well-attested verdict that follows: no analysis has been widely accepted. Whether that means the project is dead or merely unfinished remains in dispute — many treat it as ongoing — but even the modest verdict was enough to turn attention outward, toward the relations a belief stands in to the world and the processes that produced it, the very things an empirical study of the knower could measure.
The naturalizing move
W. V. O. Quine made the outward push a programme. His 1969 “Epistemology Naturalized” proposed that the traditional project — to justify knowledge from a vantage prior to science — be abandoned as a failure on its own terms, and that epistemology “simply fall into place as a chapter of psychology.” Stop asking how knowledge could be grounded a priori; study how the human animal, given the meagre input of sensory stimulation, actually arrives at its torrential output of theory. The question becomes empirical, and the discipline that answers it is the science of the knower.
Quine deferred to psychology; his successors widened the recipient as the science of mind itself widened. Alvin Goldman located justification in the cognitive processes that produce belief — work that reaches toward cognitive science rather than philosophy of the armchair. Hilary Kornblith treated knowledge as a natural kind, to be investigated the way cognitive ethology and evolutionary biology investigate any natural phenomenon. The common move is the handover: epistemology’s questions, or some of them, are surrendered to the empirical disciplines that study cognition, and the philosopher’s task shifts from settling them a priori to drawing on what those disciplines find. Not every naturalist goes all the way — the replacement reading would dissolve epistemology into psychology entirely, while a cooperative reading keeps the normative questions and lets empirical findings inform them — but the border has, either way, been moved.
The externalist turn
The same pressure that produced naturalism produced a turn in the theory of justification, and the two are nearly one development seen from two sides. The classical picture was internalist: what justifies a belief must be accessible to the believer on reflection — reasons one can cite, evidence one can survey. The post-Gettier repairs strained that picture, because the feature that turned true belief into knowledge kept turning out to be something outside the believer’s reflective reach. Reliabilism — Goldman’s again — made the break explicit: a belief is justified if it was produced by a reliable process, one that tends to yield truths, whether or not the believer can certify that reliability from the inside. Two people may form a belief on the same apparent grounds, one by a sound perceptual faculty and one by a faculty that misfires; on the externalist view they are not equally justified, even where neither can tell from the inside which case is theirs. What does the warranting is the process’s actual track record, not anything available to reflection.
This is the internalism–externalism debate, and reliabilism is its hinge — the point where the naturalizing move and the justification question meet. To locate warrant in the reliability of a process is to locate it in something an empirical science can study and the believer need not access. Virtue epistemology extends the line by shifting the unit of assessment from the belief to the knower’s cognitive character — the stable competences from which good belief flows — though its responsibilist wing, attending to traits the agent can answer for, pulls back toward the internalist side. The externalist turn is the armchair program’s failure converted into a positive doctrine: stop requiring the knower to certify the knowing, and let the certifying be done by facts about how the belief was formed.
The social turn
The second front renegotiates a different border. Where naturalism hands the study of knowing to the science of mind, social epistemology hands it, in part, to the study of communities — recognising that the lone reasoner of the classical picture is a fiction, that almost everything anyone knows is held on the word of others, learned through a division of cognitive labour, certified by institutions. Testimony, long treated as a second-class source, becomes central: most of what counts as knowledge is acquired by trust, not by first-hand verification. One wing of the field stays close to the naturalistic spine — Goldman’s veritistic social epistemology asks which social arrangements are reliable, which produce more truths — but its object is social structure, not cognition.
The other wing pushes further, and its empirical rival is the social and human sciences rather than the science of mind. Standpoint theory — descended from Marx and developed by Sandra Harding, Patricia Hill Collins, and Donna Haraway’s “situated knowledges” — holds that knowing is conditioned by the knower’s social location, that there is no view from nowhere, and that some standpoints afford epistemic advantages the dominant position is blind to. Miranda Fricker’s epistemic injustice names the wrongs done to people specifically in their capacity as knowers — disbelieved because of prejudice, or lacking the shared concepts to make sense of their own experience. (Standpoint as a perennial posture — the recognition that the knower is always situated — is upstream with the enterprise-stances; what belongs here is the twentieth-century research program that turned it into a method and a politics, and renegotiated epistemology’s border with the sciences of society.)
Where the turn stops
The turn provoked its own counter-move, and that counter-move is the field’s own marking of the edge. Timothy Williamson’s knowledge-first epistemology reads the whole episode — the unfinished analysis, the handover, the long search for the missing fourth condition — as evidence that the project was misconceived from the start. If decades of trying to build knowledge out of belief, truth, and a further ingredient have failed, perhaps knowledge is not built out of anything: take it as primitive, the most general factive mental state, and explain belief, evidence, and justification in terms of it rather than the reverse. Knowledge-first refuses the handover by refusing the analysis that motivated it.
That is the turn’s natural boundary. Upstream sit the perennial enterprise-stances — foundationalism’s bedrock, the skeptic’s doubt, the pragmatist’s dissolution of the problem, situated knowing as a permanent condition — which are postures one can take toward knowledge in any century, and which this page leaves to the metaphysics map where they live as stances. The turn begins where those leave off: at the moment the study of knowing acquires an empirical rival and has to decide how much of itself to hand over. Whether the handover was a maturing or a capitulation is the live question, and that the field has not settled it — that knowledge-first re-asserts the armchair just as naturalism was vacating it — is the clearest sign the border is still being drawn, not finally fixed.
See also: Metaphysics (the perennial enterprise-stances, upstream) · Philosophy of science · Pragmatism · Phenomenology