Evolutionary Epistemology

15 Jul 2008 17:47

Like evolutionary psychology, this is really split into two parts. One is the notion that ordinary, organic evolution is important to epistemology, in that it's shaped our senses and our cognitive processes. The other is the contention that knowledge, or at any rate opinion, somehow evolves.

The first branch connects back to all sorts of standard philosophical problems about the reliability of our senses and our reasoning --- "the care and feeding of the Demon", as Gellner used to say. Optimists, like Quine, say that animals which are consistently wrong about the world have a "pathetic but praiseworthy" tendency to die out, so there's no cause for alarm. Pessimists get very worked up about the possibility of adaptive errors; Nietzsche has some classic statements along these lines, though as usual the argumentation behind them is tissue-thin. (This leads into pragmatism.)

The second branch of evolutionary epistemology ties in, not so much to the theory of knowledge as a whole, as to scientific method and philosophy of science. The obvious question it has to answer is why in some fields (e.g. bridge-building, gunnery, mathematics) the quality of our beliefs rise steadily, while in others it does not. Obviously this is going to get tangled up with ideas about ideology in general, and these days probably memes as well.

Donald T. Campbell, "Blind Variation and Selective Survival as a General Strategy in Knowledge-Processes", pp. 2005--231 in Marshall C. Yovits and Scott Cameron (eds.), Self-Organizing Systems (1962)
Daniel Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea
Leszek Kolakowski has some interesting things to say about earlier ventures into evolutionary epistemology in Positivist Philosophy from Hume to the Vienna Circle (a.k.a. The Alienation of Reason), esp. the chapters on Mach and Avenarius.
Pete Mandik and Andy Clark, "Selective Representing and World-Making,", Minds and Machines 12 (2002): 383--395 [Starving one species of evolutionary demon, namely the one which says that organisms evolve to represent only those aspects of the world relevant to their ecological niches, therefore no organism truly represents the world. This is a variant, though they do not note it, of an obviously stupid argument which nonetheless seems to lie at the core of almost all forms of idealism, and which David Stove called "the Gem": in Mandik and Clark's formulation, "the only world that we represent is a world that is represented by us", therefore "it depends on being represented by us". Mandik and Clark say that can't possibly be what their opponents mean, but I think they're being more courteous than accurate in doing so. (Further comments here.) Full text of a draft available via CiteSeer. ]
W. V. O. Quine, "Epistemology Naturalized" and "Natural Kinds" in Ontological Relativity and Other Essays
Michael Ruse, Evolutionary Naturalism
Stephen Toulmin, Human Understanding, vol. I: The Collective Use and Evolution of Concepts

Werner Callebaut and Rik Pinxten (eds.), Evolutionary Epistemology: A Multiparadigm Program with a Complete Evolutionary Epistemology Bibliography [Surely one of the ugliest titles ever]
Donald T. Campbell, "Evolutionary Epistemology", pp. 412--463 in P. A. Schilpp (ed.), The Philosophy of Karl R. Popper [Thanks to David Jensen for the reference]
Murray Clarke, Reconstructing Reason and Representation [Blurb]
Suzanne Cunningham, Philosophy and the Darwinian Legacy
David Hull
- Science as a Process: An Evolutionary Account of the Social and Conceptual Development of Science
- Science and Selection: Essays on Biological Evolution and the Philosophy of Science
Ernst Mach, Knowledge and Error
Peter Munz, Philosophical Darwinism: On the Origins of Knowledge by Means of Natural Selection
Henry Plotkin, Necessary Knowledge [blurb]
Karl Popper, Objective Knowledge
Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen, Figments of Reality: The Evolution of the Curious Mind
Michel ter Hark, Popper, Otto Selz and the Rise of Evolutionary Epistemology