Abstract

Normative apriorist philosophers of science build purely normative a priori reconstructions of science, whereas descriptive naturalists eliminate the normative elements of the philosophy of science in favor of purely descriptive endeavors. I hope to exhibit the virtues of an alternative approach that appreciates both the normative and the natural in the philosophy of science. ;Theory ladenness. Some philosophers claim that a plausible view about how our visual systems work either undermines or facilitates our ability to rationally adjudicate between competing theories on the basis of a theory-neutral observation language. I argue that these psychological premises do not support the epistemological conclusions drawn. ;Scientific theories. I argue for a psychological plausibility constraint: An account of scientific theories should tell us how a theory is mentally represented. I tentatively advance an account that satisfies the constraint. Finally, I criticize the traditional view of theories and the semantic view of theories . ;Conceptual clarity. Philosophers often offer classical accounts of terms ; then others adduce alleged counterexamples. The success conditions on these accounts must include either preserving or revising the original term's extension. Given recent psychological theorizing, the probability that we can find an extension-preserving classical account of a term is very low. Furthermore, it provides no benefits over the empirical effort to find the non-classical conditions we actually use in applying our terms. If the aim of counterexample philosophy is to non-arbitrarily revise the extension of the original term, I argue that we should choose a particular account of a term on the basis of how it performs in our best available theory on the subject. ;Conclusion. I argue that normative apriorists unwittingly make defeasible empirical assumptions that, if false, would undermine their normative claims. Against descriptive naturalism I argue that the cost of ignoring normative issues is exorbitant. Finally, I defend a version of normative naturalism, a style of philosophy of science that is informed--but not engulfed--by empirical assumptions