Naturalized Epistemology

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Naturalized Epistemology
The portion of text to be assessed in this essay comes from the topic “Why Reason Can’t Be Naturalized” by Hilary Putnam. This portion is titled Evolutionary Epistemology. In this portion, Putnam makes a few claims concerning truth and rationality. First, Putnam negates the notion of truth being a correspondence to the facts. He claims that humanity does not have absolute notions or ideas of the existence of truth. He says that anything that exists is relative to another version of perceiving things. Therefore, the existence of, for example, the color blue cannot be faulted. However, one cannot offer a clear-cut answer or justification to its existence except within the confines of how the world perceives colors. No sufficient reason can be given.
Another claim that is made in this portion of the text is that truth is rational acceptability. However, he makes it clear that this understanding of truth is rationally acceptable so that humanity can have a “working notion of it.” What the above statement means is that such an explanation cannot be taken as absolute. He includes the thoughts of Roderick Firth, who indicated that humanity has no capacity to identify truths except to suggest that what is considered rationally acceptable is true. Firth’s point is indeed crucial to the discussion of truth and what is rationally acceptable because it sets the stage for the notion that nothing is absolute; though humanity could be holding on to some ‘truths’ or beliefs about the existence or the world, these could only be the fabric that ...