Abstract
Cognition takes place in our heads. Using the signals that we receive from our sense organs our brain builds up a picture of the world in to a whole worldview. We construe the world as three-dimensional, as ordered and directed in time, as regular, even structured by laws of nature, and causally connected. With some of our constructions we are successful, with others we fail. The principles by which we construct this world picture are not only dictated by our sense organs or exclusively by external stimuli. How did they come into our heads? This question is answered by evolutionary epistemology. We recapitulate its main theses, characterizing it as a naturalistic position and answering three typical objections. We then turn to more recent arguments, concerning language, realism, and the theory of natural selection.
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Vollmer, G. (2012). Between biology and philosophy: Our knowledge of the real world. In: Barth, F.G., Giampieri-Deutsch, P., Klein, HD. (eds) Sensory Perception. Springer, Vienna. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-211-99751-2_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-211-99751-2_5
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