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A comparison between Evolutionary and Genetic Epistemology or: Jean Piaget's contribution to a post-Darwinian epistemology

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Summary

The viewpoint of Evolutionary Epistemology (EE) and of Genetic Epistemology (GE) on classical epistemological questions is strikingly different: EE starts with Evolutionary Biology, the subject of which is population's dynamics. GE, however, starts with Developmental Psychology and thus focusses the development of individuals. By EE knowledge is seen as portraying or copying process, and truth is interpreted as a product of adaptation, whereas for GE knowledge is due to a construction process in which the production of true insights is only one possibility among others: Like falsity, error and deception, true knowledge goes back to a free relationship to reality. The difference between scientific and common knowledge is hard to be checked by EE, since both result ultimately from human hereditary structures. The study of how scientific knowledge emerges from everyday cognition is rather the task of GE.

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  1. Institut für Philosophie, Universität Bern, Länggasstrasse 49a, CH-3000, Bern, Switzerland

    Thomas Kesselring

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This paper was produced in the context of Research Project No. 10-2224.87 of the Schweizerischer Nationalfonds.

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Kesselring, T. A comparison between Evolutionary and Genetic Epistemology or: Jean Piaget's contribution to a post-Darwinian epistemology. J Gen Philos Sci 25, 293–325 (1994). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00763826

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