Types of Naturalism



For the purposes of this course we have briefly outlined three types of Naturalism. They are as follows:

1) All reality is physical reality. This is a physicalist point of view.

2) All genuine knowledge is empirical (natural?) scientific knowledge. This is an epistemological claim.

3) All genuine explanation is causal explanation. The Positivists reworded this slightly and arrived at: All genuine explanation is Deductive-Nomological explanation. Another flavor along these same lines is Reductionism.