Understanding Naturalism

Naturalists' problems with meaning and truth have plagued us throughout. In Chapter 2 we found reason to question Quine's naturalized epistemology because of problems with his account of language. In Chapter 3, we noted that even if we accepted reliabilism as an account of justification, without a naturalistic account of belief and truth it falls short of making knowledge a natural property or state. In Chapter 4, we found realists such as Boyd claiming that the truth of scientific theories explained their empirical success. Such an argument requires an account of truth that shows how it can play this explanatory role. And once we turned to metaphysical matters in Chapters 5 and 6, we have to confront the awkward fact that meaning and truth don't seem to be physical or natural properties. So what in the world is a “meaning”, or the property of being true?

Essentially two approaches seem to be on offer for the naturalist. One begins with a substantive account of what it is to have a mental representation (e.g. a belief about the world). This theory of representation provides the basis on which a theory of truth can then be developed as some kind of relation between the naturalistically explained representation and the world. The other approach begins with what is often called a deflationary or minimalist account of truth and then attempts to provide a theory of meaning in which the idea of truth plays no substantial role.