| 1. |
- Löfgren, Lars, et al.
(författare)
-
Knowledge of evolution and evolution of knowledge
- 1981
-
Ingår i: The evolutionary vision : toward a unifying paradigm of physical, biological, and sociocultural evolution. - 0865311404 ; , s. 129-151
-
Bokkapitel (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- It is argued that evolution goes beyond that which can be described in a well-defined language) and that it instead enforces a language that is itself evolving. Evolution is the unfolding of this self-reference. The unfolding methodology of the logician Alfred Tarski is taken as a basis for the explicability of evolution. Looking at Tarski´s results as a linguistic complementarity, we get a view with the productivity of this complementarity as the srource of evolutionary phenomena. These extend to the biological domain upon recognition of life as an autolinguistic phenomenon. In particular, a describability theory for induction (the epistemological counterpart to biological natural selection) is developed. It explains how induction functions can exist, although not effectively describable. Furthermore, the so called Popper-Carnap controversy is found to have a natural origin in the linguistic complementarity. Another question under philosophical debate, that of self-supporting rules of induction, is analyzed in terms of the describability theory and found to have a positive answer. Finally, a systems approach to evolution of knowledge is outlined, aiming at extensions of fragmented areas of knowledge to uncover cyclic connections, admitting self-consistency as a criterion for acceptability. The method for establishing self-consistency is the basic unfolding, the divergence of which entertains the evolutionary process. Underneath is the productivity of the linguistic complementarity. By comparison such a productivity seems to be lacking in the complementarity conception of Bohr. The systems approach is compared with "bootstrap" philosopby in physics.
|
|
