Evolutionary Epistemology and the Animal/Human Difference

Abstract

Konrad Lorenz, Karl Popper and Friedrich August von Hayek are united in many essential points regarding the distinction between man and animal; even in the case of (Popper's) explicit affirmation of the non (total) reducibility of the former to the latter, human specificity seems lost. One wants to ground reducibility in the dual Aristotelian definition of man as ‘animal rationale’ and ‘animal politicum’, but a deeper analysis of the distinction between extensional and intentional language and their relations to nature and society ends in irreducibility. Even granting intensionality to the animal, there still remains the distance between pleasant/unpleasant on the one hand (subjective evaluation), and good/bad (objective evaluation) on the other: there remains reflection as the prerogative of man that characterises the notions of truth and free will.