EE

EVOLUTIONARY EPISTEMOLOGY

Introduction
Books
Journal
Institutes

If we are to take the variety of ways in which the evolutionary perspective has infused and been used in biology as a model, the directions in which EE has gone so far have exploited but a tiny fraction of the resources available to such a perspective.

— William C. Wimsatt

Introduction

Evolutionary Epistemology is the attempt to explain animal and human cognition, including science, in a Darwinian fashion. (Not incidentally, Charles Darwin was the first evolutionary epistemologist.) Two quite different research programs, the one more scientific, the other more philosophical, are associated with EE nowadays. The first program, biological EE, investigates the evolutionary basis of the perceptual and cognitive apparatus of living systems. It aims to explain how our eyes, brains, inference structures, and the like have evolved by natural selection for "referential competence" (Donald Campbell). It is endorsed by philosophers such as Quine or Shimony, but also by many cognitive ethologists, neuroscientists, evolutionary psychologists, sociobiologists and others. The second program is an attempt to apply to science and scientific change, often by analogy, concepts, models and theories that were originally developed in evolutionary biology.

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry (Michael Bradie and William Harms)

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Books

Introductory readings

• Plotkin, Evolution in Mind, 1997

Examines how such a powerful theory as Darwinism could have been disregarded by much academic psychology and shows why the relationship between the two must be readdressed. The theory and data of evolutionary biology and animal behavior can illuminate many of our most basic mental processes and activities: language learning, perception, social understanding, and most controversially, culture and the sharing of knowledge and beliefs. Ranging from the nature-nurture question, which has bedeviled philosophers and scientists for thousands of years, to recent debates about the mind's structure, Evolution in Mind demonstrates how an evolutionary perspective helps us understand what we are, and how we got that way.

• Changeux/Connes, Conversations on Mind, Matter, and Mathematics, 1995

In a wide-ranging series of conversations, the renowned neurobiologist Jean-Pierre Changeux and the eminent mathematician Alain Connes discuss the development of the human brain as a function of natural selection, debate the character of human intelligence, dispute the reasons for the "unreasonable effectiveness" of mathematics in explaining the physical world, and differ over the source of mathematical creativity. In an epilogue they go on to inquire into the relation of mathematics and science to ethics, asking whether a code of human morality can be devised that is consistent with what is known of the human brain.

• Wuketits, Evolutionary Epistemology and its Implications for Humankind, 1990

"The first book-length work written specifically to introduce students and scholars to the field of evolutionary epistemology and its philosophical ramifications." (David Edward Shaner)

Anthologies

• Derksen, The Promise of Evolutionary Epistemology, 1998

• Rescher, Evolution, Cognition, and Realism, 1990

• Hahlweg/Hooker, Issues in Evolutionary Epistemology, 1989

• Callebaut/Pinxten, Evolutionary Epistemology, 1987

• Radnitzky/Bartley, Epistemology, Rationality, and the Sociology of Knowledge, 1987

• Riedl/Wuketits, Die Evolutionäre Erkenntistheorie, 1987

• Wuketits, Concepts and Approaches in Evolutionary Epistemology, 1984

• Plotkin, Learning, Development and Culture, 1982

Selected monographs

• Hooker, Reason, Regulation and Realism, 1995

• Rescher, Useful Inheritance, 1990

• Hull, Science as a Process, 1988

• Riedl, Biology of Knowledge, 1984

• Lorenz, Behind the Mirror, 1977

• Popper, Objective Knowledge, 1972
Second last chapter

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Journal

• Evolution and Cognition (1995— )

TOCs (1995— )

(Biannual; Vienna University Press.) An interdisciplinary forum devoted to all aspects of research on cognition in animals and humans. The major emphasis is on evolutionary approaches to cognition.

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Institute

• Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research (Austria)

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