Session 4

Epistemology, technology and knowledge growth

Thursday, March 19, 2015 - 5:30 PM

CQUni Melbourne (Central Queensland Uni, Melbourne Campus)

Here I get into the Subject or meat of the book, building on Karl Popper's evolutionary epistemology and Thomas Kuhn's scientific revolutions.

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Popper's ideas are set out in his 1972 "Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach" and 1994 "Knowledge and the Body-Mind Problem: In Defence of Interaction". Popper's key ideas elaborated through the remainder of the book are his definition of knowledge as solutions to problems of life, implicit radical constructivism (all knowledge of the world is mentally constructed), "general theory of evolution"/"tetradic schema", and "three worlds" ontology.

Building and using knowledge in real life is more complex than is obvious from a first reading of Popper's ideas.

Thomas Kuhn's ideas of scientific revolution, paradigms, and paradigmatic incommensurability as set out in his 1962/1970 "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions". Based on Kuhn's ideas I develop the the ideas of knowledge revolutions, and follow that up with a look at evolution and revolutions in biology.

Technological and cognitive revolutions that reinvent the nature of humanity highlights how various revolutions in technology and cognition have affected the biology of Homo sapiens. These interacting revolutions are analyzed in detail in the remainder of the book.

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