212 Michael Bradie
for criticalmoralrealism could be made as well.
This ignores, of course, all the arguments that have been made to the effect that
moral claims have an absolutely different status from physical claims and I am far
from suggesting that an appeal to evolutionary theory is likely to resolve this
debate. In fact, since I do not think that Campbell’s argument should persuade
us of the truth of “critical physical realism” as he understands it, I do not think a
parallel argument would persuade anyone of the truth of “critical moral realism”
either. With respect to the ultimate status of moral claims evolutionary theory is,
to this point, silent.
The evolution of cognitive norms
Just as the latter part of the nineteenth century saw a cottage industry of attempts
to apply Darwinian insights to matters political, social and moral, so too the
beginnings of what Donald Campbell was to call ‘evolutionary epistemology’ can
be found in the latter part of the nineteenth century as well. I have spilled a lot
of ink on the history of the development of evolutionary epistemology over the
years and rather than rehearse it all here again I commend to your attention the
excellent surveys by Campbell [1974] and myself [Bradie, 1986].
Here I just want to suggest that the Darwinian impact on our understanding of
the evolution of cognitive norms has, in parallel with the Darwinian impact on our
understanding of moral norms, both a positive and a negative dimension. On the
positive aspect, we can cite the work of Nick Rescher and Michael Ruse. Rescher
distinguishes between what he calls “thesis Darwinism” and “methodological Dar-
winism” [Rescher, 1990]. He endorses the latter but not the former. Ruse goes so
far as to suggest that the adoption by nineteenth century philosophers of science of
the norms of the modern scientific method have a Darwinian explanation. In the
course of developing this thesis he tells an amusing parable about two ancestors
looking for a cave to spend the night and encountering a band of sabre toothed
tigers entering a likely cave. All but one of the tigers eventually comes out. One
of the pair, with limited mathematical skills, enters the cave. The other demurs.
Ruse asks: which one do you think was your ancestor?
I have reservations about the cogency of all such stories as I think they conflate
the two programs that I have here distinguished asEMandEN. Evolutionary
stories about the development of the physical and mental mechanisms that enable
us to count and to reason are one thing but evolutionary accounts of the emergence
of specific norms or theses are quite another. There is a strong analogical pull to
co-opt what evidence there is for the former in support of the latter but it is not
clear to me that doing so throws any explanatory light on the emergence of theses
or norms.
On the negative side, I want to go back and draw some implications from
Dewey’s 1910 article. In that piece, Dewey argued that Darwinism properly under-
stood undermined many of the traditional pursuits of philosophers. He thought, in
particular, that the search for essences was a lost cause in the light of the evolution-