ABSTRACT
As David Hull points out, the majority of evolutionary epistemologies have tried to explain conceptual development in science by devising analogies to biological evolution. Hull suggests that the solution lies in a more general analysis of selection that would include both biological and conceptual evolution, and he thinks that he has just the right mechanism to buttress that analysis. Hull’s view of science encounters an obstacle that hinders so many other naturalistic epistemologies: the jump from a description of how science works to epistemological prescription. For epistemological reasons, then, science ought to exhibit the mode of organization. Hull’s analysis of selection becomes very perplexing. According to him “selection is a process in which the differential extinction and proliferation of interactors cause the differential perpetuation of the replicators that produced them”. Hull’s mechanism is that scientists strive to have their ideas accepted by other scientists and that their striving is kept within bounds by the need to use each other’s research.
