Can we give our cognitive faculties a biological legitimation?

Abstract

The search for just ification of the methods, or citeria of science, is not a mere academic exercise. The article analizes the influential answer to this problem, provided by the evolutive epistemology, constituted by two diferent families. One of them searches for analogies between life evolution and history of ideas, particularly, the history of our changing science; it is interested in the comprehension of the growing of knowledge over and individual or specie base and, to achieve this, it invokes analogies with natural selection. The other family tries to comprehend, explain and justify our basic cognitive mental abilities and our innate methodological tendencies just as the result of evolutive mechanism as they are understood at present.