Is Naturalism Normative? The Function of Epistemic Norms Within Naturalized Epistemology∗

The topic of the paper is the problem of normativity within naturalized epistemology. The question I pose is whether naturalism can be conducted as a normative enterprise or whether it is merely descriptive as traditional epistemologists maintain. If they are to be faithful to their philosophi-cal presuppositions naturalists cannot deliver traditionally understood sub-stantive account of normativity. This is the reason why naturalism is often conceived as a merely descriptive enterprise. Nevertheless, naturalists do not reject normativity they just understand it differently. The numerous misunderstandings between traditional and naturalistic epistemologists is rooted in the difference in the attitudes to the naturalistic fallacy taken by these two sides. Naturalists treat this “fallacy ” as unavoidable, which pro-foundly influences their account of normativity. In my paper, I show that the main problem with naturalizing epistemic norms could be expressed by asking, What is the substantial difference between epistemic norms de-rived from descriptive statements and those statements? What does this derivation really mean? My thesis is that naturalistic epistemic norms are actually descriptions of empirical phenomena which are expressed in a nor-mative form for the sake of everyday life and scientific practice. To jus-tify this argument I firstly recall the traditional meaning of “normativity” in the work of Descartes and the post-Cartesian internalists. Secondly, I present how and why the meaning of “epistemic norm ” and “justified be-lief ” change within naturalism with reference to Quine’s and Goldman’