'Reciprocal containment and naturalised epistemology'

Quine is famous for his talk of the ‘reciprocal containment’ of epistemology and science. He also sees this idea as opening for a continuation of the problem of scepticism, albeit now from within science: Science stands in a position to refute or vindicate itself as a natural object of human knowledge. Hilary Kornblith is a contemporary naturalist who has done more than most to try to realise this project concretely, sketching a metaphysical view of nature that answers to actual science and drawing on recent work on the nature of human inference and reasoning to argue that there is as things stand no reason to believe the natural world should be beyond our ken. In this paper I argue that however intrinsically interesting these kinds of empirical discovery, they lack epistemological significance. That is, they do not and can not amount to a scientific vindication of science in the intended sense – at least without a further metaphysical assumption about knowledge, which I argue is incoherent in the context of a naturalism that accepts reciprocal containment.