Science and the Modest Image of Epistemology

Abstract

In Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man (1963) Wilfrid Sellars raises a problem for the very possibility of normative epistemology.  How can the “scientific image”, which celebrates the causal relation among often imperceptible physical states, make room for justificatory relations among introspectible propositional attitudes?  We sketch a naturalistic model of reason and of epistemic decisions that parallels a compatibilist solution to the problem of freedom of action.  Not only doesn’t science lead to rejection of our account of normative reasoning, science depends on, sophisticates, and explains how normative reasoning is possible.