The Pathologies of Standard Analytic Epistemology *

Standard Analytic Epistemology (SAE) names a contingently clustered class of methods and theses that have dominated English-speaking epistemology for about the past half-century. The major contemporary theories of SAE include versions of foundationalism (Chisholm 1981, Pollock 1974), coher-entism (Bonjour 1985, Lehrer 1974), reliabilism (Dretske 1981, Goldman 1986) and contextualism (DeRose 1995, Lewis 1996). While proponents of SAE don't agree about how to define naturalized epistemology, most agree that a thoroughgoing naturalism in epistemology can't work. For the pur-poses of this paper, we will suppose that a naturalistic theory of epistemol-ogy takes as its core, as its starting-point, an empirical theory. The standard argument against naturalistic approaches to epistemology is that empirical theories are essentially descriptive, while epistemology is essentially pre-scriptive, and a descriptive theory cannot yield normative, evaluative pre-scriptions. In short, naturalistic theories cannot overcome the is-ought divide. Our main goal in this paper is to show that the standard argument against naturalized epistemology has it almost exactly backwards. On the one hand, it is the theories of Standard Analytic Epistemology that have at