From: John Wilkins (wilkins@wehi.edu.au)
Date: Mon 16 Feb 2004 - 01:53:56 GMT
On Monday, February 16, 2004, at 11:58 AM, Scott Chase wrote:
> This is a very preliminary view, but in reading through the first parts
> of Durkheim's _The Elementary Forms of Religious Life_ (I have two
> separate translations to go by), it seems that Durkheim is grounding
> Kant's categories in the social realm, that is that categories of
> thought are socially imposed upon us from without. This could be a
> reversal of Kant's view in his _Prolegomena_ that we impose our laws
> upon nature. For Durkheim, our laws would instead be imposed upon us
> from collective representations that have been established through the
> generations.
>
> It would be interesting to compare Durkheim's views with those of
> Popper
> in _Objective Knowledge_ where the categories would IIRC instead derive
> from within via an evolutionary process of conjecture and refutation.
> Popper's views would be much more aligned with those of evolutionary
> psychology than Durkheim's would be.
>
> Popper and ev psychers would say that Kant's a priori categories are an
> evolutionary derived natural given, where Durkheim seems to be arguing
> that they came from the social milieu.
>
It is my understanding that this view, that the Kantian synthetic a
prioria are the evolutionary post hoc traits of cognition, was first
proposed (in a Nazi journal!) by Konrad Lorenz in 1941.
-- John S Wilkins Head, Communication Services The Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research Parkville, Victoria, Australia =============================================================== This was distributed via the memetics list associated with the Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission For information about the journal and the list (e.g. unsubscribing) see: http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit
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