Articulating the World

The most pressing challenge for naturalism today is to understand how to make sense of a scientific understanding of nature as part of nature, scientifically understood. Meeting this challenge requires substantial, complementary revisions to familiar philosophical accounts of both of its components: how to situate our conceptual capacities within a scientific understanding of the world, and what a scientific conception of the world amounts to. Joseph Rouse advances a naturalistic self-understanding by proposing a novel way to think about scientific understanding as a natural phenomenon, drawing extensively upon the philosophy of scientific practice and related interdisciplinary science studies, philosophical work on the normativity of conceptual understanding, and important new developments in evolutionary biology."