Michael Smithurst; II*—Hume on Existence and Possibility, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 81, Issue 1, 1 June 1981, Pages 17–38, https://doi.org.

Sociobiology uses neo?Darwinism to make wide?ranging explanatory conjectures about man and society. The ?naturalism? of such an enterprise recommends it, but a thoroughgoing and Darwinian naturalism is compatible with a rejection of sociobiological conjectures. Retention of juvenile characteristics explains various human physical features and can be used to account for the playful and curiosity?driven nature of human intelligence. The malleable and hedonistic character of human sexuality is similarly explained. It has been argued (Wallace and latterly T. Nagel) that human intellectual (...) capacity transcends what is necessary for survival and so cannot be explained by natural selection. This wrongly supposes that all characteristics explained by Darwinism are explained as specifically selected for. Fears about biologically imposed limits to human understanding misrepresent intelligence as an aggregate of specifically adjusted capacities. Conceiving human intelligence as a product of neotenization frees us from the demand to explain everything as adaptive, and if the thesis is analogical, it is but one analogical conjecture against the plethora sociobiology requires. (shrink)

Borrowing perhaps from mathematics, there is a custom of speaking of science as pure science and applied. Platonism, and other classical positions in the philosophy of mathematics, did not think of the applications of mathematics as a test of the truth of its theorems. 1 But the picture is otherwise for science and technology. It is initially tempting to say that the theories of pure science are empirical generalizations and that the applications of these theories in the makings and doings (...) of technology, accordingly as they succeed or fail, test the theories. Qualifying factors and counter-acting causalities needing to be allowed for, falsification will not be immediate, but inexplicable and apparently irremediable technological failure is likely to be taken as falsifying a theory, and a continued and expanding pattern of technological achievement, a triumph of technology, as the superannuated trope has it, will be taken as a confirmation of a theory, from the inductivist perspective, adding in spadesful to the evidence for its truth. (shrink)

Michael Smithurst; II*—Hume on Existence and Possibility, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 81, Issue 1, 1 June 1981, Pages 17–38, https://doi.org.

[Popper and the Scepticisms of Evolutionary Epistemology, or, What Were Human Beings Made for?].

There is a sort of scepticism, or, at least, epistemological pessimism, that is generated by appealing to Darwin's theory of evolution. The argument is that nature, that is the selective pressures of evolution, has clearly fitted us for certain sorts of learning and mundane understanding, directly beneficial in point of individual survival and chances for reproduction. Very likely then, it is argued, nature has not fitted us for arcane intellectual accomplishments remote from, or quite disconnected from, those ends. So, it (...) is suggested, perhaps we cannot understand, perhaps never will understand, because we are not made to understand, such matters as consciousness, its nature and causes, the origins of life, the beginning of the universe, or astro-physics in its more finalist pretensions. Sometimes, taken with the claim that manifestly we do understand some of these things, the argument becomes a reductio, and its exponents claim that consequently Darwinism must be false, or of only limited application. More commonly, however, in ‘naturalized epistemology’, it is made the vehicle of a claim about the limits of science, limits imposed by the evolutionarily derived frailty of human understanding. Popper, the late Popper, is one of the progenitors of naturalized epistemology. I want to ask what Popper's response would be, or ought to be, to this epistemological nihilism conjured out of Darwinism. (shrink)