Epistemic Implications of two biological Concepts

Abstract

Traditional foundationist epistemology and its modern successor, philosophy of science, with their ambition to ground knowledge before cognition and to justify science without pre­ supposing it, have failed to provide us even with a modest comprehension of the totality of their subject. After the failure became evident in the late fifties we have witnessed several turns. Historicist and sociologist turns have pointed out that cognition and science are primarily historical and social phenomena, and that consequently epistemology should be replaced by history and sociology of cognition and science. Recently Rorty (Rorty 1980, 1982) advocated' something that, keeping the same style, might be named the literary-criticist tum. He emphasizes, like the celebrated linguistic tum, that science express itself in writing and, therefore, it is essentially a literary phenomenon which should then be studied and interpreted by the hermeneutic method. All these turns suffer from two grave shortcomings: they are external to the best possible knowledge we presently have - science; and they are incorrigibly incomplete. As to the first drawback Quine (Quine 1968) has proposed a new setting for epistemology. He has harbored it inside the body of natural science as a chapter of psycho­ logy. However, that appears to be just a -modernized behavoristic version of ssomething already experienced and abandoned. Similar­ ly, the ideas that cognition and science are, besides their other qualifications, natural phenomena, that their' development ought to be treated as natural process in the sense that at no stage has there been any transfusion of knowledge from the outside (of nature), nor of mechanisms of knowing; nor of fundamental certainties (Campbell, 1974, 413), and that epistemology should be compa