From Natural History to History. The scope and limits of Evolutionary Epistemology and Teleosemantics (original) (raw)
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Teleology, Intentionality, Naturalism
This paper is the author’s translation of a lecture he delivered in Hungarian at a conference entitled Action and Social Science, on June 18, 1993, at ELTE, Budapest, Hungary. The paper argues for the contemporary tenability of a "mentalist, Scholastic-Aristotelian" theory of teleological explanations, pace contemporary physicalism/naturalism.
Beyond Evolution and Historicism
An analysis of the directive projection of society and thought over a 500 year period in which common presuppositions of evolution, determinism and teleology are shown to be flawed and misguided. Its takes both an historical & process approach to phenomena, incorporating the *process of forming the subject-as-agent. For the UNESCO world knowledge systems database for universal access and nation-states members of the U.N.
What's at stake in the debate over naturalizing teleology? An overlooked metatheoretical debate
Synthese, 2023
Recent accounts of teleological naturalism hold that organisms are intrinsically goal-directed entities. We argue that supporters and critics of this view have ignored the ways in which it is used to address quite different problems. One problem is about biology and concerns whether an organism-centered account of teleological ascriptions would improve our descriptions and explanations of biological phenomena. This is different from the philosophical problem of how naturalized teleology would affect our conception of nature, and of ourselves as natural beings. The neglect of this metatheoretic distinction has made it difficult to understand the criteria we should use for evaluating proposals to naturalize teleology. We argue that a clearer distinction between scientific and philosophical contexts shows that we need more than one set of criteria for evaluating proposals to naturalize teleology, and that taking these into account might advance or dissolve recurring debates in the literature.
A major lesson to be learned from narrativist philosophy of history since Danto is that history and science differ in the organization and presentation of knowledge rather than in their subject-matter. This insight is most often seen as a decisive argument in favour of the 'literary' or 'cultural' character of history. However, if their subject-matter does not create an insurmountable barrier between history and science, the insight leaves room, too, for a 'historical' approach to issues ordinarily believed to belong to the domain of 'science' . A case in point is the subject of evolution. Thus the leading evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr considers the nature of evolution to be historical rather than scientific. This might invite historians to overcome their fear of social Darwinism and to apply their own (narrativist) tools for organizing knowledge to evolutionary theory. This essay attempts to show that Niklas Luhmann's theory of social evolution does just this by satisfying the criteria of historical representation as defended by narrativist philosophy of history. Luhmann's system concept will be interpreted as a 'colligatory concept' in the sense meant by William Walsh. Furthermore, Luhmann's idea that social systems are ultimately based on meaning processing will be shown to agree with the fundamental role assigned to meaning in Ankersmit's recent work on historical representation. Keywords social evolution -historicism -meaning -narrativist philosophy of history -systems theory -historical representation -Frank Ankersmit -Niklas Luhmann 244 den hollander journal of the philosophy of history 8 (2014) 243-264 journal of the philosophy of history 8 (2014) 243-264 the meaning of evolution and the evolution of meaning
Towards an Evolutionary Epistemology
2007
This work concerns a non-traditional approach to logic and epistemology, based on a challenging, albeit conjectural, articulation of views proceeding from Evolutionary Psychology and Biology, Non-Monotonic and Decision Logics, and Artificial Intelligence. The hinges to the latter inevitably suggest the emergence of an innovative symbiotic form of evolutionary epistemology. 1. Evolution and the Brain The first bipedal primates establish the separation between the human species and the other simians. To fathom the abilities of the human brain it is necessary to understand what exactly the problems our ancestor primates were trying to solve that led them to develop such an extraordinarily intricate brain. We cannot look at the modern human brain, and its ability to create science, as if the millions of evolution-years which attuned it to its present configuration had never taken place. Among the eventual problems we certainly have those of status, territorialism, mating, gregariousness...
Neo-Darwinism and Neo-Aristotelianism: How to Talk About Natural Purpose
Why do birds migrate? The obvious answer to this question might appear to be that they do so in order to find food, a more favorable habitat, and favorable weather conditions that will allow them to survive and satisfy their needs. Yet this answer appears to many objectionable, or at least requiring serious technical qualification, because it implies a kind of goal or purpose that a bird has when it acts, and, more importantly, that this goal both describes and explains its behavior. Descriptions that impute goaldirectedness to activities and processes in nature are called teleological and the question of whether, and in what sense, this language of function and purpose can be valid in the study of life and its evolution is one of the perennial problems in philosophy of biology.
Evolutionary Causation and Teleosemantics
Evolutionary Causation and Teleosemantics, 2023
Disputes about the causal structure of natural selection have implications for teleosemantics. Etiological, mainstream teleosemantics is based on a causalist view of natural selection. The core of its solution to Brentano's Problem lies in the solution to Kant's Puzzle provided by the Modern Synthesis concerning populational causation. In this paper, I suggest that if we adopt an alternative, statisticalist view on natural selection, the door is open for two reflections. First, it allows for setting different challenges to etiological teleosemantics that arise if a statisticalist reading of natural selection is right. Second, by providing a different solution to Kant's Puzzle based on individual causes of evolution, statisticalism promotes a different answer to Brentano's Problem, what I label as Agential Teleosemantics.
Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 1989
This book is a collection of papers centering on the application of the paradigm of natural selection to theories of epistemology, rationality, and the growth of knowledge. The book presents some current work on this theme which has been presented at a series of conferences from 1982 through 1985, along with seminal articles in this literature by Karl Popper, W.W. Bartley, and Donald Campbell. Its stated purpose is to be 'an example of the continuing attempt to attain a theory of knowledge and a theory of rationality that are in basic harmony' (p. 3). Although many of the articles deal with topics which may seem to be of interest only to professional philosophers, the idea of applying the natural selection paradigm to theories of rationality is one which ought to intrigue economists. This is especially true if, as some of the authors try to argue, the theory has important implications for any maximizing theory of rationality.
Whose purposes? Biological teleology and intentionality
Teleosemantic theories aspire to develop a naturalistic account of intentional agency and thought by appeal to biological teleology. In particular, most versions of teleosemantics study the emergence of intentionality in terms of biological purposes introduced by Darwinian evolution. The aim of this paper is to argue that the sorts of biological purposes identified by these evolutionary approaches do not allow for a satisfactory account of intentionality. More precisely, I claim that such biological purposes should be attributed to reproductive chains or lineages, rather than to individual traits or organisms, whereas the purposes underlying intentional agency and thought are typically attributed to individuals. In the last part of the paper I suggest that related difficulties are also faced, despite appearances, by accounts of intentionality relying on alternative organizational approaches to biological teleology.
Towards an Evolutionary Epistemology of History
Journal of the Philosophy of History, 2015
What has come to be known as the ‘linguistic turn’ in historical theory over the past forty years or so has finished what the two World Wars began in demolishing the confidence that the historical discipline possessed at the turn of the twentieth century. This confidence was most memorably expressed by Lord Acton that one day we would possess ‘ultimate history’. Today most historians are probably more inclined to subscribe to Pieter Geyl’s view that history is ‘an argument without end’. Yet the jettisoning of a teleological goal for historical accounts does not mean that we have to also part with the idea of progress; we just need a new definition of it. In this article I argue that we should adopt an evolutionary epistemology of history which sees progress as something pushed from behind, rather than aiming at an undefined point in the future; but this is not the only advantage an evolutionary epistemology can offer us. I go on to outline two further aspects of evolutionary epistem...