Beyond blindness: On the role of organism and environment in trial generation

•Hypothesis and biological variation generation are guided by the environment.•Organisms modulate environmental information through phenotypic plasticity.•Epistemic agents modulate environmental information through manipulative abduction.•Phenotypic plasticity is analogous to manipulative abduction.•Manipulative abduction is an embodied process.

In this paper we aim to amend the traditional analogy at the heart of evolutionary epistemologies. We shall first argue, contrary to what has been frequently done, that both hypothesis generation and the processes of generation of genetic and phenotypic change are often directed as well as environmentally conditioned. Secondly, we shall argue that environmental influence does not affect trial generation directly but that environmental information is processed by the epistemic agent and by the biological organism respectively. Thirdly, we suggest conceiving hypothesis generation as a process of manipulative abduction and the generation of biological variation as a process mediated by phenotypic plasticity. Finally, we argue that manipulative abduction and environmentally-induced biological variation modulated by plasticity are analogous because they both involve a conjectural response to environmental cues. Our analysis thus vindicates a revised version of evolutionary epistemology ascribing a fundamental role to both organism and environment in trial generation. This perspective, in our opinion, offers support to the thesis, inspired by the theory of embodied cognition, that hypothesis generation is sometimes explained by an appeal to phenotypic plasticity.