Perhaps our thinking exemplifies a selective system. First lots of random scattered ideas compete for survival. Then comes the selection for what works best--one idea dominates, and this is followed by its amplification. Perhaps the moral . . . is that you never learn anything unless you are willing to take a risk and tolerate a little randomness in your life. (Pagels, 1988, p. ?)
Let me first briefly summarize the critical approach [to education]. It is based on evolutionary epistemology, which claims that we never receive knowledge, but rather create it; we create it by modifying the knowledge we already have; and we modify our existing knowledge only when we uncover inadequacies in it that we had not recognized heretofore. Accepting this as an explanation of how knowledge grows, I have suggested that teachers construe their roles as facilitators of the growth of their students' knowledge. (Perkinson, 1993, p. 34)
Either chance and selection can explain everything or else behavior is the motor of evolution. The choice is between an alarming waste in the shape of multitudinous and fruitless trials preceding any success no matter how modest, and a dynamics with an internal logic deriving from those general characteristics of organization and self-regulation peculiar to all living beings. (quoted in Vidal et al., 1983, p. 87)
Despite all its complex guises, learning can always be analyzed as a set of "hypotheses" the organism is capable of entertaining and of a "confirmation function" by which the environmental input tells the organism which one to keep (Fodor, 1975; Osherson, Stob, and Weinstein, 1985; Wexler and Culicover, 1980). Characterizing the learner's possible hypotheses is the first step to characterizing its learning mechanisms . . . and the more constrained the set of hypotheses, the better the explanation of how the learning succeeds. (Pinker, 1989, pp. 166-7)
This process, though it is capable, given the right assumptions, of accounting for the acquisition of verb meaning in a brute-force way, is plausible only to the extent that the child can converge on the correct configuration of semantic structures reasonably quickly. The child must not spend decades refuting silly hypotheses about a verb meaning (such as that see selects a semisolid object, or that splash selects a goal thing that is meant to be taken away) while waiting for his mental dice to fall in such a way as to cause him to posit the correct structures. There are several sources of "practical constraints" on the child's hypotheses. I call them "practical" constraints since they act to reduce the size of configurations of semantic structure and to increase the likelihood of their being correct, as opposed to the "representational" constraints discussed in chapter 5, which dictate the form and content of possible semantic structures. (Pinker, 1989, p. 256)
Why is babbling so important? The infant is like a person who has been given a complicated piece of audio equipment bristling with unlabeled knobs and switches but missing the instruction manual. In such situations people resort to what hackers call frobbing--fiddling aimlessly with the controls to see what happens. The infant has been given a set of neural commands that can move the articulators every which way, with widly varying effects on the sound. This is a prerequisite to duplicating the speech of their parents. Some computer scientists, inspired by the infant, believe that a good robot should learn an internal software model of its articulators by observing the consequences of its own babbling and flailing. (Pinker, 1994, p.266)
One other area in which I disagree with Dan [Dennett] is the explanation of human intelligence in an evolutionary context. Dan makes heavy use of Richard Dawkins' concept of the meme--an idea that replicates, mutates, and differentially spreads in the medium of brains in the same way that a gene replicates, mutates, and differentially spreads in the medium of bodies. This is Dan's main way of placing cognition in the context of evolution, rather than having it appear by magic; thoughts are created by a process analogous to the process of natural selection. But there are many other ways of explaining the emergence of human intelligence in a nonmiraculous way. I think it's more plausible that evolution designed a brain that's a kind of computer that can generate complex ideas, in ways that need not be analogous to the operation of natural selection itself. (Pinker, 1995, p. 196)
There must have been genetic variation among individuals in their grammatical competence. There must have been a series of steps leading from no language at all to language as we now find it, each step small enough to have been produced by a random mutation or recombination, and each intermediate grammar useful to its possessor. Every detail of grammatical competence that we wish to ascribe to selection must have conferred a reproductive advantage on its speakers, and this advantage must be large enough to have become fixed in the ancestral population. And there must be enough evolutionary time and genomic space separating our species from nonlinguistic primate ancestors. (Pinker, & Bloom 1990a, p. 721)
The essential difference between instructionist and selectionist processes is that in the case of the latter an entity exists prior to its being "required" whereas in the case of the former it is created after the "need" for it arises (Plotkin 1987). Selectionist theory usually involves overproliferation of diverse forms (variation), whereas instructionist theory requires a malleable substrate which is moulded into an adaptive form by that which is being adapted to, usually some external event. The distinction goes back to the differences between Lamarckianism and Darwinism, and it is fundamental to all of biology concerned with explaining the adaptive fit between organisms and their environment. (Plotkin, 1991a, p. 488)
In other words, the process by which adaptive traits are produced is initially independent of these potential adaptive usefulness. And it is in this sense that Darwinian evolution is often referred to as blind or undirected. . . . Compare this with Lamarck, for whome adaptive traits are produced after and in response to the environment changes for which they are required. For this reason Lamarkian evolution is thought of as directed, with the production of adaptive traits being instructed by environemntal events. (Plotkin, 1994a, pp. 32-33)
If the primary heuristic {biological evolution} works by selectional processes, which is most certainly does; if, as will be argued in the next chapter, culture works by selectional processes, which is fairly widely agreed to be the case; and if that other embodiment of the secondary heuristic that deals with our uncertain chemical futures, namely the immune system, works by selectional processes, which is now universally agreed: then why should one be so persverse as to back a different horse when it comes to intelligence? (Plotkin, 1994a, p. 172)
One evening, contrary to my custom, I drank black coffee and could not sleep. Ideas rose in crowds; I felt them collide until pairs interlocked, so to speak, making a stable combination. . . .
What happens then? Among the great numbers of combinations blindly formed by the subliminal self, almost all are without interest and without utility; but just for that reason they are also without effect upon the esthetic sensibility. Consciousness will never know them; only certain ones are harmonious, and, consequently, at once useful and beautiful. . . .
Perhaps we ought to seek explanations in that preliminary period of conscious work which always precedes all fruitful unconscious labor. Permit me a rough comparison. Figure the future elements of our combinations as something like the hooked atoms of Epicurus. During the complete repose of the mind, these atoms are motionless, they are, so to speak, hooked to the wall; so this complete rest may be indefinitely prolonged without the atoms meeting, and consequently without any combination between them.
On the other hand, during a period of apparent rest and unconscious work, certain of them are detached from the wall and put in motion. They flash in every direction through the space . . . where they are enclosed, as would, for example, a swarm of gnats. . . . Then their mutual impacts may produce new combinations. . . .
In the subliminal self . . . reigns what I should call liberty, if we might give this name to the simple absence of discipline and to the disorder born of chance. Only this disorder itself permits unexpected combination. (Campbell, 1974b, pp. 427-428)
The way in which knowledge progresses, and especially our scientific knowledge, is by unjustified (and unjustifiable) anticipations, by guesses, by tentative solutions to our problems, by conjectures. These conjectures are controlled by criticism; that is, by attempted refutations, which include severely critical tests. They may survive these tests; but they can never be positively justified: they can neither be established as certainly true nor as 'probable' (in the sense of probability calculus). Criticism of our conjectures is of decisive importance: by bringing out our mistakes it makes us understand the difficulties of the problem which we are trying to solve. This is how we become better acquainted with our problems, and able to propose more mature solutions: the very refutation of a theory--that is, of any serious tentative solution to our problem--is always a step forward that takes us nearer to the truth. And this is how we can learn from our mistakes. (Popper, 1974, p. vi)
If an experiment or observation seems to support a theory, remember that what it really does is to weaken some alternative theory--perhaps one which you have not thought of before. And let it be your ambition to refute and replace your own theories: this is better than defending them, and leaving it to others to refute them. But remember also that a good defence of a theory against criticism is a necessary part of any fruitful discussion since only by defending it can we find out its strength, and the strength of the criticism directed against it. There is no point in discussing or criticizing a theory unless we try all the time to put it in its strongest form, and to argue against it only in that form." (Popper, 1979, p. 256)
The theory of knowledge which I wish to propose is a largely Darwinian theory of the growth of knowledge. From the amoeba to Einstein, the growth of knowledge is always the same: we try to solve our problems, and to obtain, by a process of elimination, something approaching adequacy in our tentative solutions. (Popper, 1979, p. 261)
. . . the growth of our knowledge is the result of a process closely resembling what Darwin called 'natural selection'; that is, the natural selection of hypotheses . . .(Popper, 1979, p. 261)
I thus submit a variation of Darwinism in which behavioural monsters play a decisive part. (Popper, 1979, p. 283)
[HOME] [NEXT]My conjecture concerning the origin of mind and the relation of the mind to the body, that is the relation of consiousness to the preceding level of unconsious behavior, is that its usefulness--its survival value--is similar to that of the preceding levels. On every level, making comes before matching; that is, before selecting. The creation of an expectation, of an anticipation, of a perception (which is a hypothesis) precede its being put to the test. (Popper, 1987c, p. 152)