The Limits of Natural Knowers

Abstract

Most existing theories attribute the limited evolvability of premodern science, technology, and economy to external factors. Like new growth theorists, unified growth theorists, and world-system theorists, most scholars on both sides of the great divergence debate tacitly assume unlimited human creativity, leading to their adoption of such external conditions as globalization, capitalism, property rights, and resource endowments as the explanatory variables. Most of them have not paid enough attention to the epistemic limits of natural entrepreneurs and knowers.

But by far the greatest hindrance and aberration of the human understanding proceeds from the dullness, incompetency, and deceptions of the senses; in that things which strike the sense outweigh things which do not immediately strike it, though they be more important.

—Francis Bacon, 1620, The New Organon