Jason Zinser

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This work was inspired by a simple question with a very complex answer; where does our knowledge come from? Although this question can be addressed from many different perspectives, I approach this question from an evolutionary perspective by surveying philosophical interpretations of evolutionary theory. Contemporary treatments of evolution by philosophy fall under the title of evolutionary epistemology, which is considered in the naturalized epistemology camp. Within evolutionary epistemology, two very different branches emerge: the evolutionary epistemology of theories (EET) and the evolutionary epistemology of mechanisms (EEM). The EET approach attempts to provide an evolutionary framework for scientific progress, or culture in general, by modeling Darwinian evolution. The EEM approach looks directly at the evolution of humans in order to determine the effects of natural selection on intelligence. One result of the EEM approach is natural skepticism, which holds that human intelligence is inherently limited in its reasoning abilities

“Modality” refers to the concepts (and surrounding controversies) of “possibility” and “necessity.” Recently, a great deal of attention paid to these concepts in metaphysics. Not surprisingly, this literature has not been adopted in the field of philosophy of biology. In this work, I ague that there is a need to understand how modal concepts function in biology. Biologists already employ modal concepts in a variety of contexts. However, they do not explain how these concepts function or ought to function within the biological domain. From a philosophical perspective, there is a framework for how modal concepts operate in physics. But this framework cannot be adopted by the biological sciences. Since work on modality is relatively new to philosophy of biology, I spend the first three chapters justifying, defining, and restricting the project of creating a modal framework in biology. In the penultimate chapter, I present and criticize the single account of “biological possibility” found in the literature, which is offered by Daniel Dennett. Finally, I provide a positive account of how we should apply modal concepts in the biological sciences