Brian has already “critiqued Christopher Peacocke’s argument”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002108.html#comments that a belief in our capacity to accurately represent the the external world is justifiable _a priori_ by appeal to the mechanism of natural selection. Accurate representations of the world are selected for, so (Brian summarizes) “we probably get basic things right most of the time.”
Brian’s the philosopher, so he’s better able than me to spot the big problems in the argument. (He was selected by graduate school for this.) An additional one strikes me. Elsewhere in the world of arguments from natural selection we find arguments that practices like religion or a belief in God are also fitness-enhancing for a whole bunch of reasons and thus likely to be selected for. But the people who make these arguments do so to explain why religious beliefs are useful fictions, not to show that they therefore accurately represent facts about the world. So while Peacocke’s argument seems plausible as long as we restrict ourselves to the contemplation of tables, contemplation of the varieties of religious experience seems to cause him some problems. Of course, you can say that while accurate representations of the world are selected for in the case of the perception of tables, inaccurate representations are selected in the case of perception of divine entities. But then “basic things” and “most of the time” start to do an awful lot of work in the argument, distinguishing what we get right from what we get wrong starts to look much harder, and the seemingly elegant _a priori_ bridge effected between reality and representation by means of natural selection seems shaky. That’s the problem with arguments from adaptation. They’re a bit too adaptable.
{ 8 comments }
novakant 07.02.04 at 1:39 pm
Getting “basic things right most of the time” (e.g. the position of objects in space and time) is essential to survival, while believing in God or whathaveyou is definitely not.
Keith 07.02.04 at 2:58 pm
It’s also the problem whenever you use an a priori argument; it makes an assumption about the Universe that cannot be proven (in this case, that natural selection is a 100% acurate model, a claim that even evolutionary biologists do not make). Natural selection may give us an acurate picture but it doesn’t fill in all the holes. We simply don’t have that data, yet.
christopher 07.02.04 at 3:06 pm
This whole debate also side-steps the even more basic notion that some kinds of “basic facts” about the universe are inaccessible because they are basically subjective value judgments.
joe 07.02.04 at 4:24 pm
Paul Bloom of Yale has lately been working on the implications for philosophy of developmental psychology. (Google for his recent talk “Natural-Born Dualists”.) I think many of his conclusions are speculative but welcome the approach: “common-sense” ideas about philosophy are persistent across nearly all cultures, and since they have been selected for by human evolution we must regard them as meaningful in some significant way. The task of philosophy then is at least in part to define what that significant way is, even if philosophy also leads to a different idea of how things “really” are. Basically, throwing evolution into the mix means that for the first time ontology needn’t be addressed from a complete theoretical vacuum.
Anna 07.02.04 at 8:46 pm
Here’s the Bloom URL – interesting talk –
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/bloom04/bloom04_index.html
“That’s the problem with arguments from adaptation. They’re a bit too adaptable.”
I think that we _could_ distinguish between a characterestic being due to “selection for accuracy” vs. pure “selection for functionality” – since the latter would only? primarily? involve social interactions. If we all shared a belief that had _no_ consequences for how we treated each other, this would be likely due to “selection for accuracy”.
except that I’m wrong – e.g. as Bloom points out, introspection doesn’t tell us how our brains work. So maybe this is a “spandrel of San Marco”? (i.e. it doesn’t _matter_ to natural selection what we believe about neuropsychology, so the fact that we come up with good stories to tell ourselves why we do what we do is just a byproduct of a brain that was primarily designed for other things.)
Related article – Carl Zimmer on evolution of morality (Joshua Greene using fMRI on subjects facing moral quandaries) – here:
http://www.carlzimmer.com/articles/2004/articles_2004_Morality.html
Shai 07.02.04 at 11:13 pm
It seems Dennett is writing a book about religion as “a natural phenomenon”. It may turn out better than David Sloan Wilson’s “Darwin’s Cathedral”. Of course, I haven’t actually read “Darwin’s Cathedral”
That particular use of a priori makes me a little bit sick. I can see how it figures in Kant’s rationalism — our basic faculties are pretty apparent, nevermind radical skepticism. There’s a gap that between the phenomenal nature of these faculties and their causes, which may let in noumena (my Kant is really sketchy), but that requires a strong argument, as would natural selection.
vivian 07.03.04 at 2:44 am
The thing about highly local mechanisms of selection is they need not be continuous – a generalization like “Accurate representations of the world are selected for” is almost certainly wrong. Replace it with something like “models that give accurate predictions leading us to plan better are selected for.” If I’m an actuary, I want a model that predicts which people will cost me more money, not one that models their lives or decisionmaking processes. Survival only implies that the trait doesn’t make the population too much less fit, and even that is only when compared to the then-current competition.
Hilary Putnam argues that we don’t need an a priori idea of a table, nor fully-specified criteria for tables, in order to function quite well, and even improvise when a table is needed but none are seen. So I’m not at all sympathetic to claims that not only are there some antecedent (cross-cultural) criteria for gods (or tables), but that this implies they have some objective reality. (Putnam makes the ‘reality’ point in The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy, a wonderful book. He manages to demolish arguments and make jokes without ever seeming disrespectful or dismissive of the other thinkers. That’s rare.)
But Anna (minor quibble only): introspection alone won’t give a full biological description of brain cells at work, but introspection gives quite a lot of (sometimes wrong, sometimes right) insight into thought patterns, processes, and predictions about what oneself and others will do or say. Incomplete knowledge is quite powerful (yeah, anyone reading a blog knows that, right?).
john c. halasz 07.03.04 at 9:47 am
Why would any question of “accurate representation” be at issue, prior to the more or less progmatic context that would give rise to the issue?
Comments on this entry are closed.