Evolutionary Epistemology, Rationality and the Sociology of Knowledge. Edited by Gerard Radnitzky and W.W. Bartley III. LaSalle: Open Court, 1987. A$39.90 (pb).

Metascience 7 1989

Evolutionary epistemology applies Darwinian principles of natural selection to scientific theories and to knowledge generally. It is concerned with problem-solving and error elimination under various forms of selective pressure, in contrast with schools of thought which are concerned with the justification of beliefs or the explication of concepts. One of the modern protagonists of evolutionary epistemology is Karl Popper who has advanced the idea that scientific knowledge grows by conjecture and refutation (error-elimination), a theory that he has generalised to all forms of learning and to the evolution of life on earth. Every organism is constantly engaged in problem-solving by means of new reactions, new organs, new forms of life, and - in the case of humans - new theories. These responses can be envisaged as attempts to solve problems and they are subject to pressures from the environment, from competing forms of life and from alternative scientific theories and experimental tests.

The major emphasis throughout Evolutionary Epistemology is on the biological line of thought with some attention to William W Bartley's work on rationality. The articles were not originally planned for this volume, most are based on papers delivered at a series of seminars during the early 1980s and some are much older pieces that are reprinted because they make a specially significant contribution to the theme of the book. The volume stands in need of an introduction to make visible the skeleton of ideas that provides a degree of coherence to the collection. The absence of this guide will create some problems for people who are not familiar with evolutionary epistemology in general and with Popper's work in particular.

In Part I the philosophers William W Bartley and Rosaria Egidi, the scientists Gunter Wachterhauser and Gerhard Volimer, and the psychologist Donald Campbell, together with Popper, contribute eight chapters, which make up almost half the book. Bartley criticises a version of subjectivism or idealism ("the world is my dream") which he labels 'presentationalism'. His critique is relevant to all those epistemologies, which equate knowledge with true belief, though few are prepared to follow the consequences with the rigor of presentationalists such as Ernst Mach (1838-1916). Mach argued that there is no such thing as a real tree, out there in the garden, because when we claim to see it, what we actually see is an image of a tree as it is presented to our mind by our sensory and cognitive apparatus. There is some truth in this account, because our perception is a function of an elaborate decoding process which converts external signals into mental images. But the presentationalist goes a step further to claim that the external world is entirely a creation or an expression of our senses and cognition. The mind is a lamp, and the external world 'really' has the properties that we project upon it

Such anthropomorphic accounts of the external world can be criticised on biological grounds, as Bartley does in a section titled "About a frog, idealistically disposed". Frogs register only four kinds of visual effects because only four types of signal can be sent to their brains. These visual effects are sufficient to enable frogs to perform tasks such as catching small moving objects and leaping towards dark spaces if a predator appears. The world of the frog, as a projection of its limited visual capacity, is very impoverished and not one that we would accept as the full story, even with our own fairly limited senses. Yet a presentationalist frog would claim that the world consists only of the contrasts, the small dark objects, the moving shadows and sudden dimming of light which it perceives. Thus it would ignore the possibility that its knowledge of the world is not given, but is the product of the evolved sense organs which reflect some, but not all, aspects of the world which frogs inhabit. This view might seem absurd if a frog advanced it, but its human equivalent dominates Western philosophy, with apparent support from the findings of modern physics.

Bartley suggests that the roots of the theory that he labels presentationalism

May be not only deep but also psychological and even metaphysical ... for it seems to me that philosophers of science do not ordinarily choose presentationalism; rather they are driven to it by certain deep structural assumptions that permeate most of western philosophy.

Among those assumptions which he identifies are reductionism, determinism and positivism. These theories, with some others of a more technical nature such as instrumentalism (theories are nothing but instruments) and subjectivism interpretations of the calculus of probability, constitute what could be called the dominant framework of Western thought especially scientific thought. The basic assumptions that support evolutionary epistemology contradict the old framework at almost every point. The traditional set of beliefs gains a great deal of strength from the fact that many of its themes are common to schools of thought which present themselves as rivals: positivists, linguistic analysts, Marxists, existentialists, phenomenologists and structuralists all tend to labour their differences but take for granted the ideas they hold in common. In addition, the themes lend support to each other, for example, reductionism supports subjectivism by demanding that complex beliefs (theories) be reducible to more basic elements in perception. The crisscrossing support these ideas provide for one another means they need to be refuted or replaced as a set, rather than individually.

Donald Campbell contributes two wide-ranging pieces, the first drawing attention to the nineteenth century vogue of evolutionary scholarship which made its mark on the theories of knowledge propounded by many philosophers. But in this century evolutionary epistemology had to be rediscovered. As Campbell noted.

The Spencerian evolutionary epistemology had become a quite dominant view by 1890, a fact difficult to believe so absent has been any evolutionary epistemology in the major philosophical discussions of the last fifty years.

This remarkable disappearance can be partly attributed to the rise of the philosophy of physics to dominate the philosophy of science, but the real damage was done by the particular philosophy of physics that achieved dominance, a philosophy thoroughly permeated by the themes of determinism, reductionism, subjectivism and inductivism. As an aside, it may be noted that the nineteenth century vogue of evolutionary thinking had a rather perverse effect on twentieth century literary criticism due to the powerful influence of T.S. Eliot and T.E. Hulme (1883-1917). Hulme's essays and voluminous notes, partly collected in Speculations (1924), contain a polemic against the principle of evolutionary continuity which he saw as reducing God and man to the organic or rnaterial level. Linked with this was an almost hysterical rejection of humanism. individualism and "that bastard thing. Personality". Eliot assimilated various of Hulme's themes into his poetry and his criticism, and so gave continuing effect to some of Hulme's obsessions after Hulme's demise in the Great War.

 

Part II of Evolutionary Epistemology, "Rationality and Self Reference", treats Bartley's ideas. He has the first and last word, with John F. Post (three short pieces), John W.N. Watkins and Gerhard Radnitzky sandwiched in between. The point of departure is the theory of rationality and the limits of criticism which Bartley advanced in The Retreat to Commitment. Bartley proposed that all statements are open to criticism, including any statement of the principle of rationality itself. Post and Watkins wonder whether such a statement (which appears to refer to itself) can hold up under logical analysis, or whether it may fall into some kind of semantic paradox. As problems of logic Radnitzky and Bartley answer these criticisms and also by Vollmer's chapter in Part I. Bartley's theory of rationality generalizes Popper's critique of the notion that a belief is nothing if it is not positively justified. This approach abandons the quest for positive justification and instead settles for a critical preference for one option rather than others in the light of critical arguments and evidence offered up to that point. As Radnitzky puts it, "Questions of acceptance are replaced by questions of preference". Many people are likely to regard this result as a purely verbal 'solution' to the problem of justification, merely shifting the problem from the source of justification to the source of critical preference. But the shift is from the impossible task of justification to productive tasks such as exploring the types of criticism that can be used to form critical preferences.

Several forms of criticism can be identified including the test of empirical evidence and the test of logical consistency. Another form of criticism consists of a check on the metaphysics. This is greatly facilitated by Popper's theory of 'metaphysical research programmes' which came to light in the long-awaited Postscript to The Logic of Scientific Discovery, and especially in Quantum Theory and the Schism in Physics (1982). This theory can be used to draw attention to that cluster of ideas, which was referred to above as the traditional framework of Western thought. These may be called basic categories of thought, ultimate presuppositions or framework assumptions. Among them are the theories of determinism, justificationism, subjectivism (knowledge as belief) and the method of conceptual analysis. These assumptions are shared by many schools of thought and so they are seldom in dispute. They operate as invisible boundaries, which dictate the type of problems that people choose to work on, the way that they are formulated and the type of solutions that are deemed acceptable.

These boundaries render certain theories and methods wrong, or stupid, or ideologically unsound, or, in extreme cases, simply unthinkable. They provide the intellectual equivalent of an ecological niche where some species of ideas are stunted or killed outright while others survive and flourish. They are not amenable to experimental test or falsification and so have persisted unchallenged by the rise of empiricism in the philosophy of science and by the triumphs of science itself. Far from being challenged by science, some of ideas are located at the core of modern physics as indicated above in Bartley's critique of presentationalism, and they derive strength from their association with popular interpretations of quantum physics.

The influence of metaphysical ideas is in no way reduced by the positivists' aversion to metaphysics in toto. The philosophy of science from the time of Hume has been intensely hostile to metaphysics and, in this century alone, the logical positivists have wanted to brand metaphysics literally meaningless. The Oxford philosopher and historian R.G. Collingwood in An Essay on Metaphysics (1940) provided a searching critique of the anti-metaphysical impulse that has striking relevance to Popper's programme. Collingwood pointed out that the advance of science (in the broadest sense that is not restricted to the natural sciences) requires continuous revision of metaphysical assumptions. If the professional metaphysicians do not help in this task because they are doing something else, then the scientists have to do their own metaphysics. They often do this very effectively but if they resent the fact that have to do it, their animus may be directed not only at the unhelpful professionals but at metaphysics itself. And the scientist may regard his own work in metaphysics "...not as a piece of help given by himself to metaphysicians in the pursuit of their own business but as an attack on them and their business too." As an example of this spirit in action Collingwood cites Newton's warning against 'metaphysical hypotheses' in experimental philosophy. This was not meant to warn readers against his own metaphysics but to forestall the criticism, which his own metaphysics was likely to attract from the professionals.

Metaphysical ideas such as determinism and reductionism have proved almost impossible to subject to effective criticism because discussion has mostly proceeded by way of conceptual analysis, isolated from substantive problems and live issues. The resulting proliferation of unhelpful verbiage has done much to prejudice working scientists against metaphysics. as described by Collingwood. It is, moreover, often assumed that metaphysical theories are beyond the limits of rational criticism because they provide the framework of discourse so that the domain of rational criticism may be limited to areas where empirical tests can be used. A further complication is provided by the fact that metaphysical theories play a vital role in creating and supporting self-iniages. world views. ideologies and religions, and a shift of metaphysical allegiance can be as traumatic and unsettling as a radical change of political or religious affiliation.

Popper and Bartley address this situation in four ways. First. Popper's theory of metaphysical research programmes can make metaphysical theories visible. in the same way that an improved microscope brings minute objects into sharp focus where previously they were either invisible or indistinct. Second, Popper has systematically provided criticisms of reductionism, determinism and subjectivism in the context of live scientific problems. (A prime example is Quantum Theory and the Schism in Physics which explores the impact of the old metaphysics on the interpretation of theories in quantum physics.) Clearly there is a need for similar projects in other fields to explore and test the validity of his method. Third, Bartley's work on the limits of criticism shows that we can form critical preferences in the non-empirical field of morals and metaphysics instead of being forced to rely on acts of faith or allegiance to authority. Finally, Bartley's results can be applied to the practical matter of creating "non-dogmatic zones" where people can explore and criticise metaphysical ideas, or other deep structural assumptions which carry high emotional charges. These "zones" could also be used for counseling for psychotherapy and indeed for any type of self-exploration and transformation.

Part III of the volume, "Rationality and the Sociology of Knowledge", branches .off in various directions with essays from Peter Munz, Anthony Flew and Bartley (again). Munz responds to Richard Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, which contends that philosophers should not try to compete with scientists in solving problems but instead, should sustain elegant conversations. Munz shows that Rorty has ignored evolutionary epistemology as an alternative to the 'mirror' theory that the mind passively copies the world (which Rorty rejects) and to the appeal to a select community of peers for settling knowledge claims (which Rorty apparently accepts).

Like children who grow up, leave home and seek fame and fortune in distant lands, ideas can have implications far beyond their point of conception. The ideas of Popper and Bartley (and Collingwood) have the capacity to support many lines of thought in addition to evolutionary epistemology. To understand how this can happen it is necessary to understand how metaphysical theories such as determinism and reductionism permeate so many schools of thought, and to grasp the depth of Popper's arguments in favour of non-determinism and non-reductionism. A revival of unfashionable but potentially fruitful programmes depends on recruiting people from the dominant orthodoxies into which they tend to be locked by three influences: first, by the guild mentality (professional brand loyalty). Second, by ideological commitments (another form of brand loyalty), and finally, by unexamined metaphysical beliefs. The third is probably the most insidious influence because it traps people who might otherwise be prepared to resist brand loyalties. The ideas of Popper and Bartley hold out hope for real progress in throwing off the fetters of counter-productive metaphysics because they provide methods for exposing the roots of deep structural assumptions and they show how to subject them to non-dogmatic criticism.

Rafe Champion

 

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