Meta-epistemology - Four Different Natural Epistemologies, and Their Common Features

Four Different Natural Epistemologies, and Their Common Features

The immunologist Niels Jerne (1911–1994) seems to have been the first to explicitly comment on the formal similarity between different "learning" situations — where "learning" is used in a broad sense to include (i) Unconscious natural processes, (such as the immune system learning which proteins etc. are intruders which it should attack), as well as (ii) Learning in the conventional sense. There was arguably some overlap in the cases suggested by Jerne himself, but Popper (1975) and Traill (1999) independently selected the same short list of four significant cases, as follows below. (Also see the references cited by these two authors).

The noteworthy point is that the most basic strategy in all these cases is to depend on Trial and Error — to have a large repertoire of "candidate solutions" which have to compete (yes, in a Darwinian way) — and not by some process of "writing it all down" like a movie-camera or tape-recorder (the Lamarckian strategy).

This task of creating knowledge (knowledge in the broad sense, and perhaps implicit in structure), and doing so ultimately out of nothing-reliable, looks like an impossible task. Hence Traill argued that there is not likely to be more-than-one solution-strategy to this general epistemology problem; so all four domains are likely to be using the same single formal strategy, even if their material embodiments and time-scales are vastly different. (Traill 1999; 2008 Table S)