The number of trials necessary to arrive at a new construction, is commonly so great, that, without something of an affection, or fascination, for the subject, one grows weary of the task. The patient thought of the naturalist desirous of rising to new classifications, grows out of his liking for the subject, which makes it to him a sweet morsel rolled under the tongue, and gives an enjoyment even to fruitless endeavours. (Bain, 1868, p. 593)
The invention of Daguerre [of the first photographic process] illustrates--by a modern instance--the probable method whereby some of the most ancient inventions were arrived at. The inventions of the scarlet dye, of glass, of soap, or gunpowder, could have come only by accident; but the accident, in most of them, would probably fall into the hands of men engaged in numerous trials upon the materials involved. Intense application--"days of watching, nights of waking,"--went with ancient discoveries as well as with modern. In the historical instances, we know as much. The mental absorption of Archimedes is a proverb. (Bain, 1868, p. 596)
We do not scatter our thoughts as widely as possible in order to increase the chances of getting a true one; on the contrary, we call the man who produces the most thought-variations a 'scatter-brain,' and expect nothing inventive from him . . . we succeed in thinking well by thinking hard; we get the valuable thought-variations by concentrating attention upon the body of related which we already have; we discover new relations among the data of experience by running over and over the links and couplings of the apperceptive systems with which our minds are already filled. (Baldwin, 1889, p. 4)
And how far the method of law called by Darwin "natural selection" goes, what its range really is, we are now beginning to see in its varied applications in the sciences of life and mind. It seems to be--unless future investigations set positive limits to its application--a universal principle; for the intelligence itself, in its procedure of tentative experimentation, or "trial and error," appears to operate in accordance with it. (Baldwin, 1889, p. 83)
Darwin gave the death-blow to uncritical vitalism in biology, to occultism in psychology, and to mysticism and formalism in philosophy. Each of these, alike progeny of the obscuratism of dogmatic thought, has in turn yielded before the conception of natural law and order embodied by Darwin in the theory of natural selection. This in turn requires the radical acceptance of a genetic or dynamic view of the world. (Baldwin, 1909, p. 88)
Popper shows that induction does not exist. Rejecting the empiricist theory of learning as primitive and in conflict with biological knowledge, Popper sees the mind as no passive "bucket" into which experience simply rains and which can, at most, recombine that experience in various ways. On the contrary, the mind actively anticipates the future with hypotheses that, of necessity, go far beyond experience: hypotheses precede observations psychologically, logically, even genetically: all experience is theory impregnated. Every animal is born with expectations--that is with something closely parallel to hypotheses, which, if verbalized, express hypotheses or theories. The role of experience is to break expectations: to criticize and to challenge hypotheses. The ability of an animal to learn will depend on the extent to which it can modify expectations contradicted by experience, on the extent to which it is able to invent new expectations or theories to deal with unanticipated situations. (Bartley, 1982, p. 264)
From the vast pool of human-designed variant artifacts, a few are selected to become part of the material life of society. In nature it is the ability of the species to survive that counts--the fact that the organism, and especially its kind, can thrive and reproduce in the world in which it finds itself. The artifact may also be said to survive and pass on its form to subsequent generations of made things. This process requires the intervention of human intermediaries who select the artifact for replication in workshop or factory. (Basalla, 1988, p. 137)
. . .creative thought must always contain a random component. The exploratory processes--the endless trial and errror of mental progress--can achieve the new only by embarking upon pathways randomly presented, some of which when tried are somehow selected for something like survival. (Bateson, 1979, p. 182)
. . . the intracranial stochastic system of thought or learning closely resembles that component of evolution in which random genetic changes are selected by epigenesis. Finally, the cultural historian is provided with a world in which formal resemblances persist through many generations of cultural history, so that he can seek out such patterns just as a zoologist searches for homologies. (Bateson, 1979 pp. 183-184)
If representations cannot emerge, however, then they cannot come into being at all. A narrow focus on this point yields Fodor's innatism: neither learning nor development, as currently understood, can construct emergent representation; therefore the basic representational atoms must be already present genetically. Unfortunately, this conclusion does not follow. If representation cannot emerge, then it cannot emerge in evolution any more than it can in development. The problem is logical in nature, and is not specific to the individual. Conversely, if some way were posited in which evolution could yield emergent representation, then there is no a priori reason why that emergence would not be just as available in the development of the individual. Fodor's innatism, then, simply misses the basic issue. If representation cannot emerge, then it is impossible for it to exist, and evolution is in no better position in this respect than is individual development; on the other hand, if representation can emerge, then there is something wrong with the models of learning and development that cannot account for that emergence. When those models are corrected, that emergence should be as available to the individual as to evolution. In either case, Fodor's strong innatism does not follow. (Bickhard, 1991, pp. 16-17)
The sense in which utterances are understood not by a process of decoding, but by an instrinsically variation and selection process of interactions and apperceptions, just as for other "perceptual" processes, is often not directly evident. Much adult language understanding is of the well practiced and habituated variety that needs only an initial satisfactory interactive trial to be able to complete the interaction--it appears algorithmic. But the underlying variation and selection realities show up whenever language understanding is difficult. Such difficulty can be manifested, for example, in attempting a garden path or ambiguous sentence, or a difficult text, understanding a person in psychotherapy, or learning a language as a child. In all such cases, understanding proceeds, not algorithmically, but with trials and errors, and shifts of considerations among various aspects of the text, attempting to find an interpretation, and understanding, that satisfies the selection pressures of the words, the sentences, the text, the persons, and the context. This process has come to be called the hermeneutic circle (Heidegger, 1962; Gadamer, 1975). (Bickhard, 1992, p. 24)
Thorndike's theories very strongly suggest a view of the brain as an exchange in which lines are connected and disconnected, not by some internal humunculus, but by some process analogous to Darwin's theory of natural selection. Thorndike wrote of 'the struggle for existence among neurone connections' and, following the recent discoveries in neurology of the synaptic junctions between nerve cells, speculated that the physiological basis of S-R connections might be changes in conductivity of individual synapses. (Boakes, 1984, p. 75)
In short, human creativity often benefits from 'mental mutations'. R-random {R for "relative"} phenomena such as serendipity, coincidence and unconstrained conceptual association (what advertisers and management-consultants call 'brainstorming') are useful, because they provide unexpected ideas that can be fed into a structurcan {?} creative process. (Boden, 1990, p. 225)
It is often argued that Darwinian theories of evolution must result in adaptive or functional hypotheses about human behavior (Sahlins 1976a, 1967b). The results of this chapter demonstrate that this argument is incorrect. Nonadaptive, or even frankly maladaptive, cultural variants can spread in a population under the influence of indirect bias, even in the face of selection and direct bias favoring more adaptive variants. Furthermore, the runaway or drift-away situation arises naturally from the genetically adaptive uses of indirect bias. (Boyd & Richerson, 1985, p. 279)
Almost all critics and defenders alike agree that in one important respect conceptual evolution differs from biological evolution. In science, it is claimed, there is progress toward a goal; in biology, there is none. (Bradie, 1986, p. 426)
[HOME] [NEXT]The feature of Campbell's model which has come under most attack is his insistence that the variation in conceptual evolution is blind or unjustified. That it is unjustified, i.e., that there is no before the fact guarantee that any of our conjectures will in fact do the job they are expected to do, is palatable. That the variation is blind, i.e., that our conjectures are not made in response to some pressure from the problem environment, is less palatable. (Bradie, 1986, p. 422)