How does Quine defend the idea that epistemology should be a branch of science?
[Worry: isnt science itself a branch of what we know, so that epistemology the theory of knowledge should be prior to science, and explain why scientific claims have the positive epistemic status that they have? ] Quine draws a distinction between conceptual and doctrinal projects in epistemology. The conceptual project asks what we mean by our claims; the doctrinal project asks what claims we ought to be making. On the conceptual side one might argue that the claims we make about the outer world are really just claims about patterns in our experience. Either we could identify outer objects directly with certain experiential patterns (the table = some ordered set of sense data that are brown, shiny, smooth, hard, etc), or we could translate whole sentences about objects into whole sentences about experience. (The table is rectangular = If I move my gaze in such-and-such a fashion, then I will see such-and-such a pattern of colour gradients etc). Going with the contextual definition app
