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Evolutionary epistemology is an approach that sees knowledge in the first
place as a product of the variation and selection processes characterizing evolution...
Campbell's framework rests on three basic ideas:
- the principle of blind-variation-and-selective-retention,
which notes that at the lowest level, the processes that generate potential new knowledge are "blind", i.e.
they do not have foresight or foreknowledge about what they will find; out of these blind trials, however, the bad ones will
be eliminated while the good ones are retained;
- the concept of a vicarious selector: once "fit" knowledge has been
retained in memory, new trials do not need to be blind anymore, since now they will be selected internally by comparison with
that knowledge, before they can undergo selection by the environment; thus, knowledge functions as a selector, vicariously
anticipating the selection by the environment;
- the organization of vicarious selectors as a "nested hierarchy":
a retained selector itself can undergo variation and selection by another selector, at a higher hierarchical level.
This allows the development of multilevel cognitive organization, leading to ever more intelligent and adaptive systems. The
emergence of a higher-level vicarious selector can be seen as a metasystem transition.
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