The farmers who founded and refined the wet-rice system and maintained its high levels of production for centuries knew nothing of nitrogen cycles and oxygen transportation in plants. They worked purely by trial and error. In the process, however, they acquired a sound appreciation of just what made the system work, and of how to keep it working. (Reader, 1988, p. 68)
This epistemological hypothesis is grounded in a compelling hypothesis adumbrated by {William} James: if novel ideas are not innate, and are not simply logically induced from observation, then only a kind of blind or unjustified variation could first introduce them; and they will be retained only if they are adapted to the intellectual problem conditions to which they are applied. There are now several epistemologists for whom this evolutionary theory of knowledge has struck home. (Richards, 1987, p. 449)
[HOME] [NEXT]Our account of how organisms have evolved phylogenetically presupposes that every successful adaptive step marks a gain of information about what furthers them in their environment. To evolve is to gain knowledge, where "knowledge" is not the technical term of the philosophers but the ordinary world, as when living systems, by gradually adapting, have come to bring out the laws of optics. This biological approach frees the study of cognition from the shackles of philosophical enquiry: the phenomenon is no longer confined to reason but becomes itself an evolving object. (Riedl, 1984a, p. vii)