How does thought evolve--rationally or irrationally?

Sheldon Richmond
Independent Scholar

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     Last modified: February 10, 2005
     Presentation date: 07/14/2005 4:00 PM in ROZH 105
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Abstract
Freud indirectly, ironically, and somewhat unwittingly predictive of the history of Freudianism, summed up the problem of rationality in an example of what he termed an “innocent” or “conceptual” joke in his book, “Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious” (1905, transl. James Strachey, 1960, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., New York):
‘One person procreates a thought, a second carries it to be baptized, a third begets children by it, a fourth visits it on its deathbed and a fifth buries it.’ (p. 92).
If the intellectual evolution of a “thought” is driven by the logic of fashion; or by social forces; or by historical circumstances; or by psychological developmental patterns—it is irrational. However, if the intellectual evolution of thought is driven by criticism—it is rational. An implication of art and science forming two cultures is that though both the histories of scientific ideas and artistic styles follow the pattern of development outlined in Freud’s joke about the life-history of “a thought”, science is rational because criticism and experimentation drive the life-history of scientific hypotheses; whereas, fashion drives the life-history of artistic styles. However, there is the question whether science is rational, other than in a trivial sense that once one accepts the ultimate premises of a scientific paradigm, rationality plays the role of applying those premises to the solution of puzzles within the paradigm. Moreover, as long as changes in ultimate premises occur other than through criticism and experimentation, then science at a fundamental level is irrational, or at the minimum, non-rational.

Does evolutionary epistemology solve the problem of the rationality of science? The answer is not an unambiguous ‘no’ or ‘yes’ because evolutionary epistemology changes the problem of rationality from the normative problem of how to judge or evaluate change in science to the descriptive problem of whether change in science occurs incrementally or cataclysmically. Just as there is no point to arguing whether the evolution of a species occurs ‘rationally’ or even ‘progressively’, so there is no point to describing the evolution of science in judgmental terms.
Paradoxically, evolutionary epistemology, though intended to solve the problem of rationality in science, side-steps the problem and solves another problem: how science changes through incremental step-building, or through radical shifts in the fundamental themata or ‘meme’ structures of science.