Acta Biológica Colombiana (Sep 2016)
Toward an extended evolutionary epistemology: feedback between variation and selection
Abstract
This paper is situated from naturalized epistemology perspective. It is an attempt to describe the evolution of knowledge using the theoretical structure of the evolution of species. The main objective of this work is to address whether is it possible to maintain the analogy in evolutionary epistemology and which aspects of the evolution of knowledge are similar to organic evolution? This question arises after some critics against the nucleus of its formulation. The analysis presented in this work suggests that the evolution of the knowledge can be understand through an framework analogous to that of the theory of organic evolution. For this, is necessary to take into account novel feedbacks relations between variation and selection, which are part of the Extended Synthesis theory. In such way, this paper begins with an introduction to evolutionary epistemology. After that, it shows why modern synthesis theory is not enough to maintain this kind of epistemology. It ended with the idea of an extended evolutionary epistemology
Keywords