Reason, Regulation, and Realism: Towards a Regulatory Systems Theory of Reason and Evolutionary Epistemology

by C.A. Hooker

This book develops a new naturalist theory of reason and scientific knowledge from a synthesis of philosophy and the new sciences of complex adaptive systems. In particular, the theory of partially self-organizing regulatory systems is now emerging as central to all the life and social sciences, and this book shows how these ideas can be used to illuminate and satisfyingly reconstruct our basic philosophical concepts and principles. Evolutionary epistemology provides a unifying subject for the book. It is taken as proposing some important commonality between cognitive biological and cognitive epistemic processes. Here, that commonality is found by embedding both in a common model of complex adaptive system dynamics. New reconstructions are offered on the theories of Jean Piaget, Karl Popper, and Nicholas Rescher which show how their ideas are more deeply illuminated from this perspective in contrast to the formal rationalist interpretations standard among philosophers and scientists.

Paperback

First published March 1, 1995

Reviews

[Campbell Rider]

this is another text in the regulatory/self-organising systems tradition of biological thought. In the first few chapters it elaborates a nice and detailed account of self-regulating systems and argues that the adaptive complexity of organisms derives from the intricate interplay of low-level circuits and higher-level regulatory mechanisms. Specialisation at lower levels frees up resources for higher levels, which became more autonomous and able to accommodate and interpret increasingly diverse environmental data. While one can say how this works at the evolutionary scale, the author's interest is really behavioural complexity -- how do organisms learn to redeploy existing traits and systems in the face of new environments, to solve new problems?

This interest in the cognitive/behavioural aspect of biological complex systems derives from the real aim of the text, which is to elaborate an 'evolutionary epistemology': that is, a theory of the scientific knowledge process as a highly complex instantiation of the very same dynamics of evolutionary change that produced humans and scientific institutions in the first place. Hooker insists that his line of argument is not merely analogical: the rational structure of science as an objective truth-seeking process is deeply tied to its status as an organic self-regulatory adaptive system of the same kind that has yielded adaptive breakthroughs and increases in complexity in the living world.
This line of thought is intuitively attractive, because of course science works through the same kind of trial and error process we see in nature. But to argue that scientific reasoning is basically an evolutionary adaptation of the same order as bipedalism or tool-use, just on a grander scale of complexity, is ridiculous.
And of course in the final chapter the rationality and normativity of science is tied to the success of the Western project of enlightenment rationality etc. So the supremacy of western thought is ultimately naturalised in evolutionary terms, which should set off alarm bells for any reader. I don't mean that in the sense that it's fundamentally racist, just criminally lazy and unreflective