Evolutionary Epistemology

Why it’s on the list: Campbell’s essay generalising 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, comes from the same blind-variation-and-selective-retention process that produces biological adaptation.

Where I heard about it

• Brendan McCord — on his Philosopher-Entrepreneur Reading List, shared on X in March 2026, in Science, Technology, and Epistemology directly after Popper and alongside Kuhn, Cziko and Hayek’s The Sensory Order — the section’s argument that knowledge is a selection process, the same shape as the market argument made earlier in the list. Full transcription: The Philosopher-Entrepreneur Reading List.

About this edition

An essay, not a book: written for the Schilpp volume The Philosophy of Karl Popper (1974). Campbell arranges knowledge processes into a nested hierarchy of roughly ten levels, each 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.

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.