Evolutionary Epistemology

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The evolutionary epistemology ( English evolutionary epistemology ) is a program proceeding from different disciplines in order to formulate an epistemology and above all an epistemological critique of the human cognitive ability on the basis of the evolution theory or the natural history of humans.

The main representatives are Donald T. Campbell , Gerhard Vollmer , Rupert Riedl , Konrad Lorenz and Karl Popper .

A history of ideas relationship is also the approach of the radical constructivism assigned neurobiologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela .

history

The first approaches to an evolutionary epistemology came from Herbert Spencer and Georg Simmel . Most approaches to evolutionary epistemology rely on a passage from Natural Kinds by Willard Van Orman Quine from 1969. In this essay he wonders why the categories of our language should correspond to those of the world. He takes the thesis that we are born with the ability to form categorizations that help us to survive, because: “ Creatures inveterately wrong in their inductions have a pathetic but praiseworthy tendency to die before reproducing their kind. ”(“ Living beings that are repeatedly wrong with their inductive conclusions tend - regrettably, but also thankfully - to die before they can reproduce their species. ”) With this, however, Quine does not support the theory that evolution actually took place just that the species I belong to would not have survived with inappropriate categories. Quine is a coherentist and naturalist , which is why the solution of philosophical problems through scientific knowledge is permissible for him. In the coherentist position, the justification of our categories through evolution only finds its place in Quine.

George Gaylord Simpson argues similarly : To put it roughly but graphically: The monkey, which had no realistic perception of the branch it jumped at, was soon a dead monkey and therefore does not belong to our ancestors.

A first larger systematic version was only presented by Konrad Lorenz ( The reverse side of the mirror. An attempt at a natural history of human recognition, 1973 ), which was subsequently expanded by Gerhard Vollmer . Another representative is the Austrian marine biologist Rupert Riedl . He writes: “With Konrad Lorenz's insight that the innate forms of our outlook fit into this world for the same reasons that the fish's fin fits into the water before it even hatches out of the egg, the 'evolutionary epistemology developed '. It teaches that life, evolution itself, is a knowledge-gaining process, irrespective of whether the knowledge was acquired genetically in advance or added through the associative learning process of the individual. "

Correspondence between environment and cognitive faculties

“The main epistemological question is about the reason and degree of correspondence between cognitive and real categories” (Vollmer 1998, p. 3 and p. 54). If a naive realism assumes that the world is exactly as man (can) recognize it, i.e. that the categories of knowledge and real categories match perfectly, then the transcendental idealism of Immanuel Kant delivers the opposite thesis: Behind the worldly appearances as they are perceived and to be recognized, there is a "thing in itself" that is in principle inaccessible to consciousness in its peculiarity. However, this idealism is put into perspective (at least in the case of Kant himself) by the fact that people primarily perceive themselves as an object of experience and only understand themselves as a free subject per se in order to understand action. For the continuation of idealism ( German idealism , British idealism ) it is crucial that Kant bases the possibility of this knowledge on "a priori" structures, i. H. to those that precede the experience and the possibility of its verification (namely the forms of perception and the categories ).

The modern natural sciences historically presuppose more or less explicitly a scientific realism . According to this, knowledge through scientific methods can recognize the environment more clearly and without errors in progressive approximation and self-correction. At the end of the 19th century there was the danger of a “ psychologization ” of knowledge, which could causally derive the emergence of the content of consciousness and convictions, but could not offer any reason or criterion for the truthfulness of the knowledge.

Evolutionary epistemology attempts a balancing act here: The "a priori " of the cognitive structures given before and independently of all experience is therefore correct with regard to the individual being to which these structures are innate and in this sense given a priori. But these structures can be explained biologically and psychologically from the tribal history of humans and the evolution of life in general: Realistic structures that grasp the real more clearly should arise from selection pressure. Thus the a priori itself is phylogenetic , i.e. empirically conditioned, and not a guarantee of the truth and validity of knowledge, but of the functionality of the cognitive apparatus under selection pressure.

Gerhard Vollmer:

“Our cognitive apparatus is a result of evolution. The subjective cognitive structures fit the world because they have developed in the course of evolution in adaptation to this real world. And they (partially) agree with the real structures, because only such an agreement made survival possible. "

- Vollmer 1998, p. 102.

The degree of correspondence between knowledge and the real environment is therefore unknown to us (Vollmer, p. 137), and can at best be assessed by comparing the given cognitive abilities in the same environment. Vollmer's consequence is a hypothetical realism with the following assumptions: 1) that there is a real world independent of perception and consciousness, 2) that it has certain structures and 3) that these structures are partially recognizable or agree with those of the world we recognize (Vollmer 1998, p. 35). This applies in particular to the structures of space and time .

criticism

This realistic interpretation is not undisputed. The neurobiologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela - despite their contradiction (cf. their Evaluation of Solipsism, 2010, p. 146) often referred to as radical constructivists - write e.g. B .: “If we assume the existence of an objective world which is independent of us as the observers and which is accessible to our knowledge through our nervous system, then we cannot understand how our nervous system functions in its structural dynamics and thereby a representation of this independent World should create. ”(Maturana / Varela, p. 259).

Conversely, in their book The Tree of Knowledge they use the theory of evolution to justify an anti-realistic evolutionary theory of knowledge. A central slogan is: “Knowledge has nothing to do with objects” (Maturana / Varela, p. 262), instead the knowing consciousness (and its organic substrate) is primarily related to itself. As a result, the 'phenomenon of explaining' and the 'explained phenomenon' do not belong to different domains (Maturana / Varela, p. 257). In doing so, they undermine the question asked by Vollmer about the correspondence between cognitive and real categories: Everything that is known in the world belongs only to the realm of cognitive structures.

There is a danger of a circular argument here : Maturana and Varela describe the evolution of life based on the material foundations of the universe, but come to the conclusion that these initial conditions and the entire evolutionary process are above all states and products of the cognitive consciousness, which is natural history its provisional end. It is questionable whether there is “no more fixed point of reference” (Maturana / Varela, p. 258), but only circularity, which they themselves illustrate with the image of the “drawing hands” by M. C. Escher , for example in the sense of autopoiesis .

Vollmer responded extensively to both Kantian objections and general criticism.

literature

  • Bernhard Irrgang : Textbook of Evolutionary Epistemology. Reinhardt, 2nd edition Munich 2001.
  • Konrad Lorenz : back of the mirror. Attempt at a natural history of human knowledge. Munich 1973.
  • Karl Popper : Objective Knowledge. An evolutionary design. Hamburg 1973.
  • Willard Van Orman Quine : Natural kinds. In: Ders .: Ontological Relativity and Other Essays. Columbia University Press, New York 1969, pp. 115-138.
  • Rupert Riedl : Biology of Knowledge. The phylogenetic foundations of reason. (1980) Berlin / Hamburg.
  • Gerhard Vollmer : Evolutionary Epistemology. Stuttgart 1975, 1998, 8th edition 2002.
  • Humberto Maturana , Francisco Varela : The Tree of Knowledge. Frankfurt 2010.
  • Immanuel Kant : Critique of Pure Reason. B = 2nd edition 1787, quoted from the Meiner, Hamburg 1998 edition.
  • Hoimar von Ditfurth : The spirit did not fall from the sky: The evolution of our consciousness. Hamburg 1976.
  • Hoimar von Ditfurth: We are not only from this world. Science, religion and the future of man. Hamburg 1981. H. v. Ditfurth makes evolutionary epistemology understandable to the philosophical layperson.
  • Detlef Weinich: Decline and decline. Civilizational change from the perspective of evolutionary epistemology. In: Würzburger medical history reports 17, 1998, pp. 473–504.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Konrad Lorenz (1903–1989) was the one who was the first to recognize / develop evolutionary epistemology in its full meaning and thus may be regarded as the founder of it (according to Hoimar von Ditfurth (1921–1989), from: Innenansichten einer conspecifics. ( 1989)).
  2. ^ George Gaylord Simpson : Biology and the Nature of Science. Science 11 January 1963, vol. 139, no. 3550, pp. 81-88, cited from Vollmer 1998, p. 103, text see Die Evolution der Kognbarkeit. ( Memento of the original from October 6, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www2.vobs.at
  3. ^ R. Riedl: Culture: Late ignition of evolution? Answers to questions about evolution and epistemology. Piper, Munich 1987. p. 197.
  4. ↑ Gerhard Vollmer: Kant and the evolutionary epistemology. In: What can we know? Volume 1: The Nature of Knowledge. Pp. 166-216, Hirzel, 1985.
  5. ↑ Gerhard Vollmer: Evolution and Knowledge - On the Critique of Evolutionary Epistemology. In: What can we know? Volume 1: The Nature of Knowledge. Pp. 268–322, Hirzel, 1985. There Vollmer deals with a total of 25 objections to evolutionary epistemology.

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