Naturalism, pragmatism and historical epistemology

Abstract

Historical Epistemology is a discipline that draws on quite distinct sources, straddling the analytic-continental divide within the history and philosophy of science. In this paper, I examine the analytic side of the equation, namely the tradition of empiricist naturalism, and the emergence, within the work of Goodman, Kuhn and Hacking, of naturalized transcendental structures resembling Wittgensteinian language-games, and the correlated multiplication of “worlds”.