"The presentations and conceptions of the average man of the world are formed and dominated, not by the full and pure desire for knowledge as an end in itself, but by the struggle to adapt himself favourably to the conditions of life"
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Human concepts are largely fashioned for living rather than for knowing. Ernst Mach, a physicist-philosopher who championed an economical, experience-based view of science, argues that everyday presentations and conceptions answer first to the pressures of survival, status, and practical success. The mind, on this view, is a tool honed by adaptation: it distills sensations into habits, rules of thumb, and convenient fictions that help an organism cope. Truth as an end in itself rarely leads; usefulness usually does.
Mach’s empirio-critical program treated scientific concepts as economical summaries of experience, not as windows into hidden essences. He drew on Darwinian ideas to suggest that cognition evolves like any other trait: what works persists. Categories such as substance, cause, and even the unity of the self are not sacrosanct metaphysical givens; they are expedients that proved effective in navigating the world. The average man of the world, immersed in commerce, politics, and daily contingencies, naturally privileges what secures advantage over what satisfies a disinterested desire to know.
This stance underwrites Mach’s attacks on absolute space and time and on untethered metaphysics. Because our mental economy is built for prediction and control, many sturdy intuitions are parochial. Common sense treats the table as solid and motion as absolute, because those pictures are serviceable at human scales; refined inquiry shows their limits. Science, ideally, pushes beyond adaptive convenience, but even science advances by selecting the simplest, most efficient conceptual tools that fit experience.
The claim anticipates later pragmatism and evolutionary epistemology and resonates with contemporary studies of motivated reasoning. It is not a counsel of cynicism but of sobriety. If our conceptions are shaped by the struggle to adapt, then humility and method are required to pry them loose from immediate interests. Knowledge remains entangled with life, and the work of inquiry is to discipline that entanglement without pretending to escape it.
Mach’s empirio-critical program treated scientific concepts as economical summaries of experience, not as windows into hidden essences. He drew on Darwinian ideas to suggest that cognition evolves like any other trait: what works persists. Categories such as substance, cause, and even the unity of the self are not sacrosanct metaphysical givens; they are expedients that proved effective in navigating the world. The average man of the world, immersed in commerce, politics, and daily contingencies, naturally privileges what secures advantage over what satisfies a disinterested desire to know.
This stance underwrites Mach’s attacks on absolute space and time and on untethered metaphysics. Because our mental economy is built for prediction and control, many sturdy intuitions are parochial. Common sense treats the table as solid and motion as absolute, because those pictures are serviceable at human scales; refined inquiry shows their limits. Science, ideally, pushes beyond adaptive convenience, but even science advances by selecting the simplest, most efficient conceptual tools that fit experience.
The claim anticipates later pragmatism and evolutionary epistemology and resonates with contemporary studies of motivated reasoning. It is not a counsel of cynicism but of sobriety. If our conceptions are shaped by the struggle to adapt, then humility and method are required to pry them loose from immediate interests. Knowledge remains entangled with life, and the work of inquiry is to discipline that entanglement without pretending to escape it.
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| Topic | Knowledge |
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