Abstract
Evolutionary epistemology takes various forms. As a philosophical discipline, it may use analogies by borrowing concepts from evolutionary biology to establish new foundations. This is not a very successful enterprise because the analogies involved are so weak that they hardly have explanatory force. It may also veil itself with the garbs of biology. Proponents of this strategy have only produced irrelevant theories by transforming epistemology's concepts beyond recognition. Sensible theories about “knowledge and biology” should presuppose that various long-standing problems concerning relations between the mental and the physical are solved. Such problems are wrongly disregarded by evolutionary epistemologists.
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van der Steen, W.J. Methodological problems in evolutionary biology VI. The force of evolutionary epistemology. Acta Biotheor 35, 193–204 (1986). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00052600
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00052600