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Evolutionary Epistemology, Rationality, and the Sociology of Knowledge Paperback – February 2, 1999

by Gerard Radnitzky (Editor), W W Bartley III (Editor), Karl Popper (Contributor),
4.6 4.6 out of 5 stars 6 ratings
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"Bartley and Radnitzky have done the philosophy of knowledge a tremendous service. Scholars now have a superb and up-to-date presentation of the fundamental ideas of evolutionary epistemology."
--Philosophical Books

Previous page
  1. Print length
    492 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    Open Court
  4. Publication date
    February 2, 1999
  5. Dimensions
    6.06 x 1.22 x 9.06 inches
  6. ISBN-10
    0812690397
  7. ISBN-13
    978-0812690392
  8. See all details
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Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Open Court; Third Printing edition (February 2, 1999)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 492 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0812690397
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0812690392
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.58 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.06 x 1.22 x 9.06 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.6 4.6 out of 5 stars 6 ratings

Customer reviews

4.6 out of 5 stars
4.6 out of 5
6 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Kindle Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars Great compilation of Epistemology
Reviewed in the United States on January 5, 2007
Verified Purchase
Although this book is somewhat dated at this point, it is a wonderful volume that deals with evolutionary epistemology in its early days. It has many essays from Cambell and Popper as well as other intriguing writings. I use this book in researching, citation, and general reading. The essays are not so long as to make it impossible to read one or two at one sitting. Great book for the person interested in evolution and epistemology. Highly recommended.
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Rafe Champion
5.0 out of 5 stars A great collection
Reviewed in the United States on August 10, 2002
Evolutionary epistemology applies Darwinian principles of natural selection to scientific theories and to knowledge generally. It is concerned with problem-solving and error elimination under various forms of selective pressure, in contrast with schools of thought which are concerned with the justification of beliefs or the explication of concepts.
The major emphasis in this book is on the biological line of thought, with some attention to William W. Bartley's work on rationality. The articles were not originally planned for this volume; most are based on papers delivered at a series of seminars during the early 1980s and some are much older pieces that are reprinted because they make a specially significant contribution to evolutionary epistemology. The volume stands in need of an introduction to make visible the skeleton of ideas that provides a degree of coherence to the collection. The absence of this guide will create some problems for people who are not familiar with evolutionary epistemology in general, and with Popper's work in particular . For more on this, google on Rathouse+Popper or Rathouse+Bartley.
In Part I the philosophers William W. Bartley and Rosaria Egidi, the scientists Gunter Wachterhauser and Gerhard Vollmer, and the psychologist Donald Campbell, together with Popper, contribute eight chapters which make up almost half the book. Bartley criticises a version of subjectivism or idealism ("the world is my dream") which he labels 'presentationalism'. His critique is relevant to all those epistemologies which equate knowledge with true belief, though few are prepared to follow the consequences with the rigor of presentationalists such as Ernst Mach (1838-1916.) Mach argued that there is no such thing as a real tree, out there in the garden, because when we claim to see it, what we actually see is an image of a tree as it is presented to our mind by our sensory and cognitive apparatus.
This anthropomorphic account of the external world can be criticised on biological grounds, as Bartley does in a section titled "About a frog, idealistically disposed". Frogs register only four kinds of visual effects because only four types of signal can be sent to their brains. These visual effects are sufficient to enable frogs to perform tasks such as catching small moving objects and leaping towards dark spaces if a predator appears. The world of the frog, as a projection of its limited visual capacity, is very impoverished and not one that we would accept as the full story even, with our own fairly limited senses. Yet a presentationalist frog would claim that the world consists only of the contrasts, the small dark objects, the moving shadows and sudden dimming of light which it perceives. Thus it would ignore the possibility that its knowledge of the world is not 'given' but is the product of the evolved sense organs which reflect some, but not all, aspects of the world which frogs inhabit. This view might seem absurd if it were advanced by a frog, but its human equivalent dominates Western philosophy, with apparent support from the findings of modern physics.
Bartley suggests that the roots of the theory that he labels presentationalism
"may be not only deep but psychological, and even metaphysical...for it seems to me that philosophers of science do not ordinarily choose presentationalism; rather they are driven to it by certain deep structural assumptions that permeate most of western philosophy."
Among those assumptions which he identifies are reductionism, determinism and positivism. These theories, with some others of a more technical nature such as instrumentalism (theories are nothing but instruments) and subjectivist interpretations of the calculus of probability, constitute what could be called the dominant framework of Western thought, especially scientific thought. The basic assumptions that support evolutionary epistemology contradict the old framework at almost every point. Hence it is possible to detect a "new program" for western philosophy, with the following elements: non-justificationism, objectivism, non-determinism and non-reductionism.
Part II treats Bartley's ideas. He has the first and last word, with John F. Post (three short pieces), John W. N. Watkins and Gerhard Radnitzky sandwiched in between. The point of departure is the theory of rationality and the limits of criticism which Bartley advanced in The Retreat to Commitment. Bartley's theory of rationality generalizes Popper's critique of the notion that a belief is nothing if it is not positively justified. This approach abandons the quest for positive justification and instead settles for a critical preference for one option rather than others, in the light of critical arguments and evidence offered up to that point. As Radnitzky puts it, "Questions of acceptance are replaced by questions of preference". Many people are likely to regard this result as a purely verbal 'solution' to the problem of justification, merely shifting the problem from the source of justification to the source of critical preference. But the shift is from the impossible task of justification to productive tasks such as exploring the types of criticism that can be used to form critical preferences.
Part III of the volume, titled "Rationality and the Sociology of Knowledge, " branches off in various directions with essays from Peter Munz, Antony Flew and Bartley (again). Munz responds to Richard Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, which contends that philosophers should not try to compete with scientists in solving problems but, instead, should sustain elegant conversations. Munz shows that Rorty has ignored evolutionary epistemology as an alternative to the 'mirror' theory that the mind passively copies the world (which Rorty rejects) and to the appeal to a select community of peers for settling knowledge claims (which Rorty apparently accepts).
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A. Besten
4.0 out of 5 stars Great book, but..
Reviewed in the United States on November 26, 2005
I thought it was a great book, with the contributions of W.W. Bartley III and Karl Popper, experts in their fields of Protestant History and Scientific Philosophy. But what does John F. Post's essay have to do with Scientific Theory? Since he writes in Chapter X that there exists something called the "Possible Liar"-paradox and after that develops it (erronously) into an "Gödelian Theorem for Theories of Rationality", in Chapter XII. In the last chapter he (formally) deduces that no formal reasoning can be applied to science and leaves us hanging in mid-air in order to try to find a decent substitute to critical discussion or rationality.

I believe this error stems from his "choice of instruments". Because when he writes on page 230: "Suppose that X is contingent (ed. aka as a consistent, synthetic statement) and that X's negation implies S (ed. it's criticizer) Most contingent theories are such that if -X is invalid, then X is true. But this means that X's survival of the test verifies X. This too is the opposite of what we want.", he has given himself the instrument to construct his "Gödelian Theorem", which he claims: "It even applies (..) to theories that are not versions of CR (ed. Critical Rationalism), such as positivism, verificationism, instrumentalism, and some forms of pragmatism." (page 264)

When I e-mailed him on his email-address readily obtainable from the internet, I got an answer from him which stated that he hadn't thought about it for about 20 years now and was busy with a book on meta-ethics, but he seemed (at least on the surface) willing enough to start a discussion of his 1971/1983 papers. When I confronted him with the above error in his reasoning he immediately started using manipulative techniques which I learned in high school, like the "appeal to authority"-argument: "I'm puzzled as to why a fellow devotee of logic (ed. italics mine) like yourself did not point to where those arguments might go wrong" (from e-mail he wrote to me on 11-11-2005).

It turns out that the person who has proved "impossible" critical discussion and has made a "Gödelian Theorem" of all known problem-solving techniques, cannot handle a 26-year old who has some affinity with science and who believes Bartley's CR to be formalizable and consistent. The reason why I believe it to be so is not because I have a vested interest in criticizing "Gödelian Theorems", but because Bartley said it all in his book "The Retreat to Commitment(1984, second Edition)", in which he describes (in a fascinating way) the development of Protestantism towards a dogmatic version of Christianity, that: 1) Analytic statements are not per definition true. (RtC, page 240: "The idea that `necessary' truths cannot be revised (..) of science." 2) Synthetic statements CAN BE (but not necessarily) conjunctions (or disjunctions) of (analytic) statements. (Emanates from the whole atmosphere of the book.) 3) There exists something called the notion of deducibility. (RtC, page 133: "The idea of testing and revising in the light of tests (..) needs to be corrected.)

From this foundation I derived the following counterproof (as copied from my e-mail to Sir Post on 1-11-2005): "Although Bartley claims that he didn't aim for statements to be the

"backbone" of his theory, I believe that your statements A, B & C hit his theory quite on the head with their self-referent properties and their logical implications. The part I am disagreeing about is that you are not willing to have the negation of contingent statements to allow them to imply their contingent statement's negation. Why is this? In my view a contingent statement is neither inconsistent nor analytic, and can thus best be described as a consistent synthetic statement. But these kind of statements are VERY hard to come by in a self-refering context and are thus ALL THE MORE likely that their negations to imply that they are false. Because you chose this (instrumental) sort of criticizability you immediately get the two premises which lead to conclusion that C is uncriticizable, namely: 1) (S)(PSC->PSB) and 2) (S)(PSB->-PSC). Without this "choice of instruments" you would get the theory Bartley proposed and the Possible Liar-paradox would not be applicable to this situation anymore(unless B is construed analytically)."

Since I am a rational person who despises armed conflict I was happy (to say the least) when I found out about Bartley's solution to the tu quoque-argument which he explains in his book "Retreat to Commitment". I was aghasted when I read the essay by Post about the inherent problems with all self-referential theories of Rationality. I'm happy to have solved it.
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Berek Qinah Smith
3.0 out of 5 stars Evolution...the answer?
Reviewed in the United States on August 6, 2001
The traditional problems in epistemology led to the binary oppositions of Descartes, Kant, etc. The scholastic "quod" vs. "quo" distinction, the Cartesian subject-object dualism, and the Kantian ding-an-sich versus appearence dualism have been the centers of a considerable amount of debate in the history of epistemological kibitzing. Now, with Sir Karl Popper in the lead, some philosophers have set out to solve the problems of epistemology by approaching it in an evolutionary way! To me, this is all hogwash. I say, prove the theory of evolution BEFORE you use it as the basis for an epistemology! Show us the billions of missing links! Explain to us how in the world language came out of non-verbal life-forms. But, before that, how on earth did life appear from non-life? Is the theory of evolution falsifiable? NO! Actually, what I really want to know is, how did something come from nothing. It is an unfalsifiable presupposition. Furthermore, it is taken for granted that nothing comes from nothing, now. Well, I did give the book 3 stars. I found the part on Rorty, by Peter Munz, to be quite entertaining, as well as insighful. No one, that I know of, can quite criticize Rorty the way that Munz does. But, hey, it is a very scholarly book. Written by many great minds. It is interesting, even if wrong.
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