Evolution and Normativity 213ary history of human kind. He went on to develop an ‘instrumental’ conception of
knowledge that saw concepts and theories as ‘tools’ that we develop to cope with
our environments. I do not know whether he explicitly invoked Darwin in support
of this but the view certainly has a Darwinian flavour that Don Campbell, for
one, might have approved of. In any case, Dewey went on to challenge traditional
epistemological thinking in a number of books including his pragmatic challenge
to traditional epistemology,The Quest for Certainty[Dewey, 1960]. In that book,
he challenged the correspondence theory of truth and knowledge and promoted
his own instrumental views. The quest for certainty, most familiar to moderns as
a legacy of the Cartesian tradition, is a version of epistemological essentialism —
a search for the unshakable foundations of human knowledge. It creates impos-
sible demands for knowers to satisfy and in this respect parallels the impossible
demands of traditional moral theories. In an age where we could believe that we
had a touch of the divine, one could imagine that epistemic certainty might be
realizable if only one was prepared to follow the proper regimen. But once the
epistemic ‘image of God’ thesis had been undermined by Darwinian theory, the
quest for certainty appears to be chimerical. What to put in its place? Nineteenth
century pragmatists promoted, although they did not invent, the epistemic doc-
trine of fallibilism that can be understood as the doctrine that all foundations are
temporary respites. This view seems quite compatible with a Darwinian perspec-
tive on the world. Evolved human beings have finite limitations and are subject to
errors and mistakes. We live in a constantly evolving world and need to re-adapt
to changing circumstances as they occur. Under such conditions, the quest for
certainty appears as folly. Darwinism does notentailthat it is a mistake but it
does seem to undermine the grounds for taking the quest seriously in much the
same way that Rachels argued that Darwinism undermines traditional absolutist
moral theories.
Can evolutionary considerations justify norms?
Some naturalists such as the American philosopher W. V. O. Quine, at least
in some of his writings, suggested that epistemology (and, one presumes, ethics
as well) should abandon the demand for justification in favor of giving a bio-
psychological account of how we acquire knowledge. This is consistent with Don-
ald Campbell’s call for a ‘descriptive epistemology’ that would provide a scientific
account of the evolution of our cognitive faculties and of our methods of knowl-
edge acquisition. Campbell, of course, thought that a descriptive epistemology
rooted in evolutionary biology and developmental psychology would complement
the normative approach of traditional philosophers. Quine, when pressed, pro-
vided an ‘instrumental’ view of normativity that drew on the analogy between
engineering and science. Some Popperians, such as Peter Munz, have argued that
the fallibilistic implications of Darwinism undermine the rationale for any attempt
to provide justifications [Munz, 1993]. And, of course, Popper is well known for
arguing that we are never ‘justified’ in believing anything – the best we can hope