Evolutionary Epistemology Today: Converging Views from Philosophy, the Natural and the Social Sciences

Abstract

Evolutionary epistemology (EE henceforth) exists. Or does it? Beginning with the speculations of many legitimate or illegitimate founding fathers in the nineteenth century, an imposing array of studies somehow relevant to EE has seen the light (see the comprehensive bibliographies in Campbell, 1974a, and at the end of this volume). Yet on closer inspection one gets the feeling that on the whole, little has been accomplished to date in terms of dependable theory or relevant application. As Ronald Giere neatly put it at the conference out of which this volume grew, what seems to be lacking most “is a number, or even one really good Kuhnian exemplar, i.e. an important problem, recognized as such, solved by the clever application of EE; an exemplar on which one could model further solutions of important problems”.