EVOLUTIONARY EPISTEMOLOGY

SYNTHESE LIBRARY

STUDIES IN EPISTEMOLOGY,

LOGIC, METHODOLOG Y, AND PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE

Managing Editor:

JAAKKO HINTIKKA, Florida State University, Tallahassee

Editors:

DON ALD DA V IDSO N, University of Californiil. Berkeley GABRltL NUCHELMANS, University of Leyden

WESLEY C. SALMON, University of Pittsburgh

VOLUME 190

EVOLUTIONARY EPISTEMOLOGY

A Multiparadigm Program

with a complete Evolutionary Epistemology Bibliography

Edited by

WERNER CALLEBAUT Limburgs Universitair Centrum, Belgium & Rijksuniversiteit Limburg. The Netherlands

and

RIK PINXTEN Rijksuniversiteil Gem. Belgium

D. REIDEL PUBLISHING COMPANY

A MEMBER OFTHE KLUWER • ACADEMIC PUBLISHERS GROUP

DORDRECHT / BOSTON / l.ANCASTER / rOKYO

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Dat.

Evolutionary epistemology.

(Synlbese library; v. 190) Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1. Knowledge, Theory of -Congresses. I. CaUebaut, Werner.

II. Pinxten, Rik. III. Title: Evolutionary epistemology bibliography. N. Series. BDl61.E85 1987 121 87-20629 ISBN-I3: 978-94-01G-8260-0 e-ISBN-I3: 978-94-009-3967-7 DOl: 10.10071978-94-009-3967-7

Published by D. Reidel Publishing Company, P.O. Box 17,3300 AA Dordrecht, Holland.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

PREFACE

PARTI:BACKGROUND

WERNER CALLEBAUT and RIK PINXTEN Evolutionary Epistemology Today: Converging Views from Philosophy, the Natural and the Social Sciences

vii

IL YA PRIGOGINE / The Meaning of Entropy 57 HENR Y C. PLOTKIN / Evolutionary Epistemology and the

Synthesis of Biological and Social Science 75 RENE THOM / Epistemology of Evolutionary Theories 97 CECILIA M. HEYES / Cognisance of Consciousness in the Study of

Animal Knowledge 105

PART II: EVOLUTIONARY APPROACHES TO SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

DONALD T. CAMPBELL / Selection Theory and the Sociology of Scientific Validity 139

LOUIS BOON / Variation and Selection: Scientific Progress Without Rationality 159

KARIN KNORR CETINA / Evolutionary Epistemology and Sociology of Science 179

GERHARD VOLLMER / What Evolutionary Epistemology Is Not 203 ANDREW J. CLARK / The Philosophical Significance of an

Evolutionary Epistemology 223 LINNDA R. CAPORAEL / Homo Sapiens, Homo Faber, Homo

Socians: 1 echnology and the Social Animal 233

PART III: THE PIAGETIAN APPROACH

CHRISTIANE GILLIERON / Is Piaget's "Genetic Epistemology" Evolutionary? 247

vi TABLE OF CONTENTS

ARTHUR I. MILLER / The Genesis of Atomic Physics and the Biography of Ideas 267

CLAUDE LAMONTAGNE / Sensorimotor Emergence: Proposing a Computational "Syntax" 283

LEO APOSTEL / Evolutionary Epistemology. Genetic Epistemology. History and Neurology 311

PART IV: EXTENSIONS AND APPLICATIONS

JEF SCHELL and DANI DE WAELE / The Exchange of Genetic Information Between Organisms of Distinct Origin Can Play an Important Role in Evolution 327

JEAN PAUL VAN BENDEGEM / Fermat's Last Theorem Seen as an Exercise in Evolutionary Epistemology 337

FERNAND VANDAMME / Language and Evolutionary or Dynamic Epistemology 365

PHILIPPE V AN PARIJS / The Evolutionary Explanation of Beliefs 381

PART V: BIBLIOGRAPHIES

DONALD T. CAMPBELL, CECILIA M. HEYES, and WERNER G.

CALLEBAUT / Evolutionary Epistemology Bibliography 405

GENERAL BIBLIOGRAPHY 433

INDEX 451

PREFACE

This volume has its already distant or1g1n in an inter­national conference on Evolutionary Epistemology the editors organized at the University of Ghent in November 1984. This conference aimed to follow up the endeavor started at the ERISS (Epistemologically Relevant Internalist Sociology of Science) conference organized by Don Campbell and Alex Rosen­berg at Cazenovia Lake, New York, in June 1981, whilst in­jecting the gist of certain current continental intellectual developments into a debate whose focus, we thought, was in danger of being narrowed too much, considering the still underdeveloped state of affairs in the field.

Broadly speaking, evolutionary epistemology today con­sists of two interrelated, yet qualitatively distinct inves­tigative efforts. Both are drawing on Darwinian concepts, which may explain why many people have failed to discriminate them. One is the study of the evolution of the cognitive apparatus of living organisms, which is first and foremost the province of biologists and psychologists (H.C. Plotkin, Ed., Learning, Development, and Culture: Essays in Evolu­tionary Epistemology, New York, Wiley, 1984), although quite a few philosophers - professional or vocational - have also felt the need to express themselves on this vast subject (F.M. Wuketits, Ed., Conce ts and Approaches in Evolutionary Epistemology, Dordrecht Boston, Reidel, 1984). The other approach deals with the evolution of science, and has been dominated hitherto by (allegedly) 'naturalized' philosophers; no book-length survey of this literature is available at present.

Having explored the already overwhelming literature labeled 'evolutionary epistemology' (see the comprehensive, up-to-date bibliography by Campbell, Heyes and Callebaut at the end of this volume), we felt that on the whole, little had been accomplished in terms of either dependable theory or relevant application. As Ron Giere was to put it at the Ghent conference, what evolutionary epistemology seems to be lacking today i.s a really good Kuhnian exemplar, a paradig­matic problem solution. Our vaulting ambition with the con­ference was to lay the necessary groundwork for the trans­formation of evolutionary epistemology from a rather hetero­geneous collection of more or less wild and more or less interesting speculations into a theoretically sound and empi-

vii

viii PREFACE

rically fertile, multi- or even interdisciplinary yet scien­!!!!£ research program. A number of first-rate scientists had accepted to join our project; here was our chance to prove its timeliness and feasibility.

Needless to say, things actually turned out rather dif­ferently than we had expected. We wanted the conference to be critical of existing approaches to evolutionary epistemology as well as constructive. To succeed in the second under­taking, a number of current intellectual developments, hitherto unexplored by evolutionary epistemology, were scru­tinized: (i) the suggestions for an evolutionary theory of knowledge, including science, arising from current transformations in the natural sciences, in particular far-from-equilibrium thermodynamics; (ii) current micro-sociological approaches to the study of science and technology; and finally (iii) genetic epistemology in the Piagetian tradition. In this way, we hoped to shed new light on questions such as "How come human mathematics seem to fit the world"? (Piaget! Apostel), or "How does science accomplish referential compe­tence for its ideas as distinguished from mere pragmatic success?" (Campbell), or "What is the survivalistic advantage of evolving devices to test the honesty, the veridicality, and the pragmatic usefulness of information exchanged between creatures?" (Neil Tennant). As this volume is apt to show, substantial progress was actually made at a number of fronts, either at the conference itself or during the subsequent period of rumination and the writing up of publishable papers. (Contributors were invited to criticize each other's papers, which many have accepted. This procedure involved a good deal of shipping back and forth comments to the distant places our authors live in or moved to. It also postponed this publication. However, we also experienced the great joy of coming closer to one another.) On the other hand, the conference also made it abundantly clear that the intellec­tual distances still to be covered before the advocates (in some sense or other) of evolutionary epistemology will be able to sing in unison, are considerable.

The organization of the material presented here reflects the topics which the conference dealt with rather accurately. (To ensure overall coherence, two papers presented at the conference were not retained for publication in this book. For the same reason, two papers by authors who did not talk at the conference are included.) Part I ('Background'), one

PREFACE ix

could say, is basically about the metaphysical underpinnings and preconceptions of evolutionary epistemology both as science and philosophy. The five papers gathered here deal in one way or another with mechanism as the metaphysics of classical, 'Newtonian' science, which also impregnates Dar­winian and (even more obviously so) neo-Darwinian thinking. Werner Callebaut and Rik Pinxten's discussion of converging views from philosophy, the natural and the social sciences puts evolutionary epistemology in its proper setting. Apart from discussing the significance of the alleged demise of mechanism (see in particular Plotkin's paper) and inter­preting a number of hot issues in evolutionary epistemology from the prespectives of the philosophy of biology and anthropology, the introductory paper also emphasizes the importance of devising cognitive equivalents of the biolog­ical distinction between phylogeny and ontogeny, thus paving the way for the incorporation of a Piagetian perspective into evolutionary epistemology (which is the subject of part III). Prigogine and Thom's views on the metaphysical and epistemo­logical significance of recent developments in the study of complex physical systems (in particular, thermodynamic sys­tems), though contradictory in certain respects, both allow to bridge the gap between 'hard' physics and the biological and cultural study of the evolution of mankind. According to Ilya Prigogine, human existence can now "appear to us as one of the most striking realizations of the basic laws of nature" (p. 73). For Renl~ Thom, phenomena as divergent as the birth of the universe with the Big Bang, the evolution of life on earth and the diachronic evolution of language can be fruitfully put on a par epistemologically. Reformulating the old positivist demarcation criterium in terms of his own concept of "pregnance", he concludes that "Science differs from magic insofar as pregnance propagation can be submitted to constraints expressed by quantitative 'laws' which can be verified". (p. 103). Determinism will have to be weakened (Thom) , if not given up altogether (Prigogine) in certain respects. Henry Plotkin, wishing to account for "the con­tinuing Balkanization of biology and the social sciences", probes into the 'metaphysics of process' which the physicist David Bohm claims to have located beyond mechanism. Cecilia Heyes' paper, which concludes the first part, is a more down­to earth attempt to find out whether the student of animal learning can do without intentional language and methodology, as mechanism would seem to imply.

Part II ("Evolutionary approaches to science and tech

PREFACE

nology") consists of six papers. Donald Campbell's contribu­tion is a plea for 'selection theory' as a (psychological and sociological, i.e. naturalistic) theory of justification for beliefs, scientific and other. He argues that convergence is "near at hand between the corrigible justificationism of mainstream Anglo-American analytic philosophy and that pre­dominant variety of evolutionary epistemology which passes the justificatory buck to biological evolution" (p. 139). In addition, he criticizes the "erroneous emphasis on continu­ity" in the intellectual genealogies used by historiographers of science taking an evolutionary view, as well as the exces­sive ('Panglossian') adaptationism evolutionary-epistemolog­ical approaches often share with biological orthodoxy. Andrew Clark's paper usefully complements Campbell's by pointing out that evolutionary epistemology will never rebut the traditio­nal skeptic (a point endorsed by Campbell) and suggesting new questions (as opposed to those of the traditional faounda­tionalist enterprise) the evolutionary epistemologist might rightfully ask and try to answer; e.g. the question whether an evolutionary account of mind can be reconciled with a corre­spondence view of truth (yes according to Campbell, no according to Clark), the question of cognitive universals, or the question of the epistemic accessibility of the 'Ding an sich'. Gerhard Vollmer elaborates the differences between the two evolutionary epistemology programs mentioned before - the biological ("evolutionary epistemology") and the philosophi­cal ("evolutionary philosophy of science") program - in great detail, thus preparing the way for an answer to the crucial question: "What, if anything, does evolutionary epistemology contribute to philosophy of science?". Whereas Vollmer remains tributary, on the whole, to a rather traditional epistemological viewpoint (grossly simplified: positivism cum Popper cum Kuhn), Knorr Cetina and Boon assess evolutionary epistemology as a theory of science from the perspective of the radical relativism characteristic of the sociology of science of the last decade, which stresses the local cha­racter of most, if not any, knowledge increments. Louis Boon tries to demonstrate that "A conception of science as a blind, hierarchically structured selection process no longer needs rationality as the driving force of science" (p. 176). Karin Knorr Cetina argues, pace Campbell, that "discovery in science may be better understood as an editorial process rather than as a process of conceptual innovation, and hence must be seen as a phenomenon rather unlike biological muta­tion" (p. 183). Linnda Caporael's paper, which rounds off

PREFACE xi

part II, ventures to explain why it is that it seems easier to design technology than to make decisions about how to use it, by arguing that "we are neither Homo sapiens, nor even Homo faber, but rather Homo socians, and that technology has been hostage to a sociality that represents the wisdom of past selective environments" (p. 234).

Part III is a an attempt - the first in the literature we are aware of - to systematically incorporate the genetic­epistemological approach as developed by the Geneva school of Jean Piaget into evolutionary epistemology. Christiane Gillieron's paper is an attempt to answer the question "Is Piaget's 'genetic epistemology' evolutionary?" by means of a painstaking analysis of texts documenting Piaget's own intel­lectual development from his 1918 novel Recherche to his mature views on the "circle of the sciences": psychology mathematics - physics - biology. To the external selection of ideas, Gillieron opposes Piaget's view that knowing is not perceiving - that it is "anticipating, formalizing, sepa­rating by self-reflection" (p. 265). Arthur Miller's paper applies an amended Piagetian view (he also uses ideas from Gestalt psychology) to an episode in the history of science: the genesis of atomic physics. Claude Lamontagne wants to provide the first elements of an answer to the question what the process of reflective abstraction ("abstraction r~fle­chissante") really amounts to in terms of a sketch of a computational "syntax". Understanding reflective abstraction is of paramount importance if one wants to make sense of the very concept of development. In the paper which concludes this part, Leo Aposte1, Piaget's longtime collaborator, com­menting on the previous three papers, tries to convey an overall picture of the present relation between genetic and evolutionary epistemologies. He points to a number of conver­gences and incompatibilities, and concludes by offering three specific recommendations to workers in both fields.

The fourth part of this volume comprises some extensions and applications of evolutionary epistemology. Writing against the background of genetic engineering, biologists Jef Schell and Dani de Waele challenge the neo-Darwinian ortho­doxy by arguing that the transfer of independently evolved genetic information from different types of organisms is an important phenomenon in natural evolution itself. If war­ranted, this result is likely to influence the way in which the differences between biological and sociocultural evolu­tion are to be conceptualized (see Campbell's paper). Next· Van Bendegem, in an attempt to write an epistemologically

PREFACE

plausible history of the various ways in which mathematicians have tackled Fermat's last theorem over time, expresses the need to transform and enrich the historiographic framework sketched in Lakatos' Conjectures and Refutations by freely adopting concepts from evolutionary epistemology. In the third paper, Fernand Vandamme, after having outlined some general ideas about dynamic, evolutionary and developmental explanation, develops some of his own views on linguistic development and evolution. In the final paper Philippe Van Parijs, writing from a sociological perspective, applies his own view on evolutionary explanations to the explanation of beliefs. He thus hopes "to go some way beyond the (pretty unhelpful and desperately ambiguous) standard distinction between Darwinian and Lamarckian mechanisms" (p. 398).

Acknowledgements

The conference was financed by grants from the Belgian National Science Foundation, the Belgian Ministry of Edu­cation and the Faculty of Letters and Philosophy of the University of Ghent. We are grateful for their support.

Finally, we want to thank all those who helped to bring this book about, in particular Josette Thijs and Marleen Vara, for the excellent job they did on the word processor.

The Editors.

REFERENCES:

See the Evolutionary Epistemology Bibliography and the Gene­ral Bibliography at the end of this volume. For reasons of identification, some items have been marked with an ~-sign; they are all to be found in the second bibliography.