Abstract
Recent literature has paid attention to a demarcation problem for evolutionary debunking arguments. This is the problem of asking in virtue of what regulative metaepistemic norm evolutionary considerations either render a belief justified, or debunk it as unjustified. I examine the so-called ‘Milvian Bridge principle’ (cf. Griffiths and Wilkins (in: Maclaurin, Dawes (eds) A new science of religion, Routledge, New York, 2012; Sloan, McKenny, Eggelson (eds) Darwin in the 21st century: nature, humanity, and God, University Press, Notre Dame, 2015)), which offers exactly such a called for regulative metaepistemic norm. The Milvian Bridge principle suggests that the metaepistemic norm is: adaptive reliability for truth of cognitive processes that the existence of corresponding truth-making facts evolutionary theory justifies. I argue that the Milvian Bridge principle is problematic on a number of counts, something that is shown via spiraling ‘companions in guilt arguments’. Finally, I consider ‘the core reductionist objection’ to the critique of the Milvian Bridge principle and offer a response. I conclude that the Milvian Bridge principle is destabilized.
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Notes
Such ‘genealogical’ arguments need not be evolutionary in particular (cf. Shafer-Landau (2012: pp. 1–2) for the same point). They could be sociological, psychological, historical etc. and understand the causal premise accordingly. See Harman (1977: pp. 3–10) for a sociological genealogical argument against moral beliefs and Freud (1989) for a psychological argument against religious beliefs.
I assume an understanding of the tracking condition in terms of the first-order epistemic norm of reliability. Roughly, a process is on-track iff it reliably tracks respective facts and produces a preponderance of true beliefs. Otherwise, it is off-track and unreliable.
See Joyce’s (2006), Kitcher’s (2007) and Street’s (2006, 2009) debunking of normative beliefs, Schechter (2013) for logic beliefs, Clarke-Doane’s (2012) for maths beliefs, Boghossian’s and Velleman’s (1989) for color beliefs, Korman’s (2014) for ordinary objects beliefs, McKay’s and Dennett’s (2009) for positive illusions beliefs, De Cruz’s et al. (2011) for thermoreceptive beliefs and Dawkins’ (2006a) for religious beliefs. With positive illusions McKay and Dennett (2009: p. 505) refer to ‘unrealistically positive self-evaluations, exaggerated perceptions of personal control or mastery, and unrealistic optimism about the future’. With thermoreception De Cruz’s et al. (2011: p. 532) refer to ‘the system that reacts to surface skin temperatures’. This cognitive process is not very reliable since it tends, for evolutionary reasons, to represent the temperature conducive to an organism’s fitness and survival, not the accurate temperature.
See, for example, Quine (1975) and Street (2009) for induction, Goldman (1990) for abduction, Schechter (2013) for deduction, Stewart-Williams (2005) for the belief in an independent external world, Millikan (1984) and Griffiths and Wilkins (2012, 2015) for perception/representation, Papineau (2003) for understanding of other minds and Boulter (2007) for memory.
See for example the discussion in Bradie (1990: pp. 35–36), Kahane (2011), Shafer-Landau (2012: p. 35), Clarke-Doane (forthcoming: section 3) and Woods (2016: section 4). Shafer-Landau (2012), in particular, makes explicit that evolutionary debunking arguments about a philosophical domain quickly over-generalize to domains that seem beyond serious epistemological doubt and, therefore, we need to disambiguate the metaepistemic norm in virtue of which debunking arguments run and confer unjustifiedness.
As there is general consensus about the first-order epistemic norm of reliability, the question is about the metaepistemic norm regulative of its application to different domains and beliefs.
They name it ‘the Milvian Bridge’ principle after the Milvian Bridge battle (312 AD) of Constantine the Great that allegedly Constantine won due to the truth of Christianity. The idea is that Constantine won due to the perceived truth of Christianity that helped galvanize the morale of his troops, independently of whether Christianity is really true. In analogy, moral, religious and other talk and thought may have been adaptive although there are no corresponding moral and religious facts/truths. Such talk and thought is useful but it doesn’t correspond to anything.
It should be observed that Griffiths and Wilkins (2015: section 5) are more lenient with naturalistic-reductionist moral realism. They allow that if such positions are defensible and there are reductive, natural moral facts, the Milvian Bridge principle would allow them a place in our ontology. They do not consider naturalistic-reductionist religious realism, presumably, because this is less plausible.
Worthy of attention is that the claim that evolution does not justify these beliefs does not show, as some have thought, that they are straightaway unjustified (cf. Joyce 2006: p. 106) or likely to be false (cf. Street (2006: p. 122). This is the case because if some body of evidence does not justify a class of beliefs, then it does not follow that the class of beliefs is false or unjustified, given that they are further justified by independent evidence. See Brosnan (2011) and Setiya (2012) for similar points against Street (2006) and Joyce (2006). In Kyriacou (2015) I explore the serious costs a version of moral relativism—a candidate moral theory if evolutionary debunking works—incurs.
Compare Ruse (1995: p. 183) on natural necessity: ‘Although there may not be an objective necessity in the world...it is part of our evolved nature that we are inclined to think that there is such a necessity in the world. Because we are thus deluded by our biology, we act in ways that are advantageous to us.”
Such self-defeat arguments are often run by anti-reductionists against naturalistic metaphysical principles. See for example Shafer-Landau (2003: pp. 110–114) on the Shoemakerian ‘causal criterion of ontological legitimacy’. I explore epistemic self-defeat worries against evolutionary debunking in Kyriacou (2016a) and in Kyriacou (2017a) rely on results from cognitive psychology to run an evolutionary debunking argument against expressivism (or at least against ‘the core expressivist maneuver’).
I assume here the relatively uncontroversial thesis that epistemic claims are evaluative (cf. Kim (1988), Cuneo (2007), Kyriacou (2012), Kyriacou (2016c)). Some philosophers go even further and suggest that the evaluative/normative aspects of epistemic and moral domains run in parallel and therefore they should share the same metanormative fate (realist or antirealist). See Kim (1988), Cuneo (2007), Rowland (2013), Das (2016b) and Cuneo and Kyriacou (forthcoming). Others such as Lenman (2008), Heathwood (2009), Olson (2011) and Cowie (2014, 2016) contest this. Much depends on this contention, as we shall discuss in the next section.
Epistemic self-defeat that implies undercutting is to be distinguished from the stronger logical self-defeat that implies contradiction and, thus, rebutting (e.g. the self-referential semantic paradoxes). See Fumerton (1995: pp. 43–53) for discussion of the distinction.
See Vavova (2014: p. 12) and Kyriacou (2016a) for a similar point against evolutionary normative debunking. See Pust (2001) for the same general point against Harman-style, genealogical debunking arguments that seek to undermine ‘the evidential worth’ of intuitions (moral, metaphysical and epistemic). Thanks to an anonymous referee that brought Pust (2001) to my attention.
Of late, the a priori is not seen with as much Quinean skepticism. See Bonjour (1998) for a defense of a priori justification and Huemer (2008) and Cuneo and Shafer-Landau (2014) for a defense of moral a priori, what Cuneo and Shafer-Landau (2014) call ‘moral fixed points’. If the moral-epistemic parity holds and the Cuneo-Shafer-Landau argument is sound, there may also exist epistemic fixed points, such as that knowledge entails truth. I explore this possibility elsewhere (MS).
See Lemos (2004) for Reid, Moore and Chisholm on common sense and Grecoric (2007) for Aristotle on common sense. Lemos (2004: p. xii) seems to think of common sense as ‘the things we ordinarily think we know’. This falls under our first understanding of common sense, which is problematic for Griffiths and Wilkins. Grecoric (2007: preface) distinguishes between our modern conception that has to do with ‘a rational ability’ and Aristotle’s conception that has to do with ‘a perceptual ability’. The Aristotelian reading seems similar to our second understanding, which is also problematic for Griffiths and Wilkins.
See Boghossian (2006), Cuneo (2007), Rowland (2013) and Kyriacou (2016a, 2017a, MS) for versions of this idea. For a bold epistemologist that has openly accepted skepticism about justification/reasons for belief see Unger (1975). Of note, is that a moderate skeptic about knowledge need not be a skeptic about justification/reason for belief, see Kyriacou (2017b). In addition, if logic norms are debunked, then the very principle of non-contradiction goes by the board. See Putnam (1978) for a similar point against Quine (1953)). I have to forgo discussion of this delicate issue here.
See also Shafer-Landau (2006) for a defense of the parity between science and philosophy/ethics.
As an anonymous referee pointed out, the Quine-Duhem thesis about under-determination of theory by evidence indicates that ‘no theory in isolation justifies beliefs in anything’ and if the background of assumed metaphysical beliefs are not justified by the Milvian Bridge principle itself, then ‘we are back to square one with the original demarcation problem’.
See FitzPatrick (2015) and Das (2016a: section 2) for discussion of the point. Compare FitzPatrick (2015: p. 883): “...evolutionary debunking arguments...rely on strong explanatory claims about our moral beliefs that are simply not supported by the science unless it is supplemented by philosophical claims that just beg the question against realism from the start.”
It is also to be noted that the very phenomenon biology studies, life, seems by the lights of many biologists and biochemists irreducible to more basic molecular mechanisms. So it is a moot point whether even biology’s own subject-matter is reducible. See Ball (2003: pp. 33–35) for such pessimism. Others of course are more optimistic, such as Dawkins (2006b: Ch. 6).
See Shafer-Landau (2003: p. 64), Das (2016a: pp. 418–419, ftn. 3) and Kyriacou (2016b: p. 3) for similar points. Of note is that we could have an even stronger form of naturalism than strong reductionism: eliminativist naturalism such as Churchland (1981) about mental states, Garner (2007) about morality and Dawkins (2006a) about religion.
Similar reductionist, evidentialist theories are hinted to by other evolutionary debunkers. See Dawkins (2006a: pp. 319–323) for instance.
It should be observed that Heathwood (2009) suggests that reasonable belief is conceptually reducible to probability and empirical evidence (via an ‘open question argument’). Yet this is an a priori analytic truth that by the stipulation of his account of reasonability should not be considered reasonable because reasonability is ultimately reduced to descriptive evidence. Hence, either his account of evidence is self-defeating because it is too restrictive or he is talking about the reasonability of empirical beliefs in particular (while also allowing for a priori justification). For charity’s sake I assume the latter.
As we have seen, this is more contentious than it might seem at first sight because both moral and religious perception have competent defenders. But we can concede, for the sake of argument here, that a serious case can be made that there is no real moral and religion perception of a corresponding ontology.
Of course, this is easier said than done, but for current purposes we can concede that, in principle, it opens a possible line of response to the overgeneralization worry.
See Rowland (2013) and Cuneo and Kyriacou (forthcoming) for a critique of naturalistic reductionism about epistemic reasonability. Cuneo and Kyriacou (forthcoming) explore some of the themes canvassed in this section against epistemic reductionism.
See Rowland (2013), Das (2016b) and Cuneo and Kyriacou (forthcoming). For some optimism see Lenman (2008), Olson (2011) and Cowie (2014, 2016). Lillehammer and Moller (2015) explore a version of coherentism about epistemic rationality that could still be friendly to error theory. I attempt to criticize this position elsewhere (MS).
Note that many epistemologists would be inimical to such a probabilistic understanding of reasonability on various grounds (cf. Pollock (1986), Nozick (1993)). For one thing, many externalists (e.g. reliabilists) would question any appeal to prima facie internalist notions like evidence and/or probability. Reformed epistemologists come to mind such as Alston (1991, 2006), Plantinga (1993) and Wolterstorff (2008) who have inveighed against ‘enlightement evidentialism’.
The example here is in the spirit of Greco’s (2017) contextualist explication of Bayesian updating. Greco (2017: p. 2.3) argues that from context to context the propositions that we can treat as foundational can shift. In Heathwood’s table example, we treat it as foundational that our experience of a table is veridical, but in the context of our presentation of the case we cannot take the experience of the table as veridical because there is a salient possibility that we are deceived by a hologram. Therefore, the proposition is not anymore foundational. According to the Bayesian account of defeaters Greco (2017: section 2.1) sketches, we can formalize the above as follows. In Heathwood’s scenario Pr(H/E) is sufficiently high, but in the revised scenario there is a defeater E and, therefore, the Pr(H/E&E) is not sufficiently high.
The claim that probability is entirely descriptive and nonnormative would surprise at least some probability theorists. Handfield (2012: pp. 22–23), for example, suggests that ‘the central role of chance’ is normative and discusses at some length (2012: pp. 17–33) the concepts of ‘given information’, ‘admissible’ and ‘available evidence’.
As an anonymous referee observed, debunkers have to assume a non-subjective interpretation of Bayesian epistemology if a debunking argument is to have any cogency because moral, religious, metaphysical etc. beliefs could have perfectly probabilistically coherent priors within a subjectivist Bayesian framework. At any rate, Heathwood’s (2009: p. 93) account of probability is objectivist and a good fit for debunkers because he insists that probability facts are ‘objective patterns in the world’. Thanks to the anonymous referee for the point.
See Greco (2017: p. 13) for presentation and discussion of these two questions. Williamson (2000: pp. 2016–2017) also underlines that it is a critical question what evidence an agent has and should conditionalize upon. As an anonymous referee observed, there is also the further question whether we should strictly conditionalize and be fully confident in some empirical claims or only Jeffrey conditionalize. Greco (2017) seems to suggest that we should strictly conditionalize upon some empirical claims in some contexts but not in some other contexts. This contextualist approach allows us to accept that some empirical claims can be treated as foundational in some contexts but not in all and, therefore, no empirical claim is in principle non-revisable. Greco’s contextualist maneuver is meant to strike some middle ground between traditional foundationalism and coherentism. Thanks to an anonymous referee that brought Greco (2017) to my attention as well as the Williamson (2000) discussion of evidential probability.
Such a possible world if real (not fictional or a noncognitive projection) and not reducible (concrete a la Lewis), would presumably be a Plantingian abstract entity and, therefore, we would be committed to an antireductionist understanding of the subset of possibilia that are probability facts. It would offer us what Handfield (2012: p. 33) calls a ‘primitivist’ account. I suppose that epistemically probable possible worlds are those that, given the relevant evidence, are sufficiently nearby the actual world. Remote possible worlds would represent improbable facts, given the relevant evidence. Worlds with epistemic probability 1 would be worlds where the possible and probable worlds are identified because they would represent necessary states of affairs. In the case of Heathwood’s deductive example, the represented world is necessary for all possible worlds and therefore it is by entailment a probable world as well. As a necessary world, it also includes the actual world.
Compare Hume (1777/2005: p. 95): ‘Chance...means not any real power which has anywhere a being in nature’.
I would like to thank three anonymous referees for their helpful comments and suggestions.
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Kyriacou, C. Evolutionary debunking: the Milvian Bridge destabilized. Synthese 196, 2695–2713 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-017-1555-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-017-1555-0