138, ,11.

Studies in the Philosophy of Biology

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when touching its own body, hearing its own voice, and by intense feelings mainly pain, hunger and thirst. This primary concept of the own self becoIl1e; enhanced by gradually storing memories about experiences concerning his own body, memories of how far the child can grasp and jump and memories concerning many experienced actions and reactions with regard to the living and nonliving environment. All this can arise in a corresponding manner in higher animals. Gardner's chimpanzee Washoe even learned to use correctly a use a plastic symbol own self, to gesture to express itsfor herself. and Premack's chimpanzee Sarah learnt Later on, human children develop a special human kind of concept of the 'own self' because this becomes connected with a special word or the mental image of this word. All volitional thinking and planning is then connected with this central concept. And this is probably also the case when a chimpanzee plans a more complicated action. Thorpe I agree that the concept of 'own self' is not a given phenomenon, in the sense that it springs full-blown into existence at birth, or at any other clearly definable point in the foetal or post-foetal life history. But the fact that it is circumstances, in no way contradicts the view that it is an essential, basic feature, a sine qua non of all human accounts of the world and all human pretensions to knowledge. I am- much attracted by the 'three-level' view of conscious experience propounded by Pol ten (1972) and discussed by Eccles

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UnjustifiedVariation and Selective Retention in Scientific Discovery

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DONALDT. CAMPBELL

~ ~ Are you awed by the exquisite fit between organism and environment, and

acquired gradually, and is to some degree dependent on environmental

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in his paper at this conference.Moreover, Popper has argued in severalofhis papers that mankind has been creating himself, through countless millenia,"I

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find in this fit a puzzle needing explanation? Does the power of visual perception to reveal the physical world seem so great as nearly to defy explanation? Do you marvel at the achievements of modern science, at the fit between scientific theories and the aspects of the world they purport to describe? Is this a puzzling achievement? Do you feel the need for an explanation as to how it could have come about? The epistemological setting Many philosophers and no doubt some biologists do not have these problems. The impressive fit that others claim to see they deny. For how can one claim that perception maps with accuracy a world of independent objects when we can know of these objects only through perception? Are we not creating a needless shadow world from the evidence of perception, and then claiming an undemonstrable fit between the two? Again, how can we claim a fit between the theories of science and the real world, when we know that real world only through the theories of science? Especially how can we, now that Werecognise (as I too do) that the facts against which theories are checked are themselves theory-laden, even down to the simplest visual perceptions? With regard to the fit of organism and environment, are not our descriptions to explain the same specific characteristics of the animals which we nowclaim as evidence of fit (Scriven, 1959; Campbell, 1960, 396-7)? This work was supported in part by National Science Foundation Grant GS30273X. In order to create space for the note on downward causation in hierarchically organised biological systems, this version differs from the privately circulated one in the elimination of sections entitled 'Is there a logic of discoveryl' and 'Thomas Kuhn's naturaI-selectionist epistemology'. of the ecological niches of animals in fact post hoc explanations designed just

in all aspects of 'World 2', by creatinghis culture, whichis in 'World 3'.

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