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The innate predisposition of living beings to orient themselves in their worlds is made possible by what some evolutionary epistemologists refer to as a "hypothetical realism."¹ This term suggests that creatures have a kind of "abstract" and "innate hypothesis' that seeks confirmation through success and coherence in the external world.² This internal evolutionary hardwired cognition, which Kant, for instance, would call a priori, seems at first glance to be more idealist than realist in flavor. Now a more evolutionary interpretation of the Kantian categories by Konrad Lorenz and others tends to read the a priori as an evolutionary a posteriori.³ Lorenz's point is that what now appears as an a priori condition began as an empirical experience. Thus, Lorenz asks, "Is not human reason with all its categories and forms of intuition something that has organically evolved in a continuous cause-effect relationship with the laws of human nature, just as has the human brain?"⁴ Yet where exactly is this empirically constituted a priori, and to what extent should we continue to approach it by means of a transcendental method — even an expanded one?⁵

DOI: 10.1057/9781137412232_20

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