Evolutionary Epistemology

Campbell’s essay, written for the Schilpp volume The Philosophy of Karl Popper, generalizes Popper’s account of science into a claim about knowledge as such. Every gain in knowledge — from an amoeba following a chemical gradient to a physicist proposing a theory — is the output of the same blind-variation-and-selective-retention process that produces biological adaptation, because there is no other way for a system to learn about a world it does not already model. Campbell then arranges knowledge processes into a nested hierarchy of roughly ten levels, each one a “vicarious selector” that lets an organism test a variation cheaply rather than by dying of it, with language and then science as the outermost layers: culture is how a species gets to be wrong on paper instead of in the flesh.

Why it’s on the list: It sits in the curriculum’s science, technology and epistemology section directly after Popper and alongside Kuhn, Cziko and Hayek’s The Sensory Order — the section’s argument that knowledge is a selection process, which is the same shape as the market argument made earlier in the list.

Where I saw it: Brendan McCord’s Philosopher-Entrepreneur Reading List, in the section on Science, Technology, and Epistemology. The full 211-entry transcription is on The Philosopher-Entrepreneur Reading List.

Connections

• Epistemology — the field the essay reframes.
• Evolution — the mechanism it generalizes from.
• Karl Popper — whose account of science the essay extends; it was written for a volume on him.
• Knowledge — the subject.
• The Philosopher-Entrepreneur Reading List — the curriculum this came from.