In the preceding chapter, two principles, BD and NOC, were defended. It was argued that if an organism has adopted the most efficient type of evolutionary strategy then this strategy would be one which (i) obeys BD, and (ii) exemplifies NOC. Chapter 3 put forward two claims, the ontological claim and the epistemological claim, which were said to be constitutive of the position to be developed in this book. There is, in fact a close connection between BD and NOC, on the one hand, and the ontological and epistemological claims on the other.

Firstly, when BD is applied to the strategies that organisms adopt to accomplish cognitive tasks, then it becomes basically an expression of the ontological claim. That is, according to BD, if, with respect to a given cognitive task T, an organism O has adopted the most efficient evolutionary strategy, then the strategy adopted will consist in the development of a combination of internal structures and their operations plus manipulation of environmental structures. Therefore, the processes by which O, adopting the most efficient evolutionary strategy, accomplishes a given cognitive task T will be hybrid, consisting of both internal and external operations. But if this is so, then these processes are not located purely inside the skin of the cognizing organism; they straddle both internal and external components. And this is precisely what the ontological claim asserts.