Abstract
Evolutionary debunking arguments (EDAs) seek to infer from the evolutionary origin of human beliefs about a particular domain to the conclusion that those beliefs are unjustified. In this paper I discuss EDAs with respect to our everyday, commonsense beliefs. Those who seriously entertain EDAs for commonsense argue that natural selection does not care about truth, it only cares about fitness, and thus it will equip us with beliefs that are useful (fitness-enhancing) rather than true. In recent work Griffiths and Wilkins argue that this is a mistake. Fitness-tracking and truth-tracking are not rival, but rather potentially complementary, hypotheses about the function of our cognitive belief-forming systems. It may be that those systems maximise fitness by tracking the truth. I argue that while they are right about the standard EDAs for commonsense, the threat of evolutionary scepticism remains, because cognitive systems whose function is to track the truth may still be highly unreliable. I propose an alternative, Moorean approach to vindicating our commonsense picture of the world and dispelling the threat of scepticism. Once this has been established, however, we may appeal to evolution to explain the good fit between our cognition and the world. I thus propose that an evolutionary explanatory project ought to replace the troubled evolutionary justificatory project. This ought to be appealing to those such as Griffiths and Wilkins who seek a naturalistic non-sceptical account of our commonsense beliefs and their origins.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
‘By “commonsense,” we mean those everyday beliefs that guide mundane action and whose subjective certainty was famously appealed to by Moore (1925). Moore's examples included the existence of his body, and of other human bodies and inanimate bodies, all arranged in space and time, as well as the fact that those other human bodies knew similar things’ (Griffiths and Wilkins 2015, 213).
These positions can be cast in global terms, as pertaining to all our beliefs. But even if they are, as I noted above, it is their implications for commonsense beliefs that I am interested in.
He also argues, famously, and relatedly, that naturalism is self-undermining, as if naturalism were true, and our minds were the product of natural selection, we would have no reason to suppose any of our beliefs were true, including the belief in naturalism itself.
Alfred Russell Wallace held a similar view about the human mind—if the human mind was the product of natural selection, he argued, humans would be incapable of gaining any knowledge other than commonsense, day-to-day practical knowledge; yet clearly we do have knowledge beyond this (science, philosophy, mathematics, etc.); thus the human mind is not (or not solely) the product of natural selection, but rather requires the intervention of ‘spirit’. This is a more limited anti-naturalism than Plantinga’s.
It is true he makes much of the evidence for systematic failures of rationality I mentioned in the introduction, and raises (without necessarily answering) the question whether humans could be irrational by nature. But his argument is not an EDA; his evidence for irrationality comes from the psychological literature (experiments such as the Wason selection test), not primarily from general features of evolution by natural selection. When he discusses the latter it is in order to refute ESAs, not defend EDAs. I do not interpret him as defending either the standard EDA (SEDA) or the revised EDA (REDA) that I discuss below. If however I am wrong about this, and he should be classed as an evolutionary sceptic/debunker, that doesn’t affect my taxonomy: we can still define a coherent position of naturalistic neutrality.
I interpret Downes (2000) as a neutralist. He argues against ESAs, but there is no reason to suppose he endorses EDAs.
His schema actually covers all debunking arguments, not just evolutionary debunking arguments. Evolution is just one among a number of substitutions for ‘X’ that have been made in debunking arguments.
They argue both that evolutionary supporting arguments for the truth of religious beliefs are unsound, and that evolutionary debunking arguments about religious beliefs are sound. These are closely connected in their discussion, but they are logically distinct claims, and one may endorse the former without endorsing the latter.
This is more controversial that in the case of religious beliefs, and is disputed by many, including some who are sympathetic to first-order evolutionary explanations of our moral beliefs and responses, e.g. Sterelny and Fraser (2017).
An anonymous reviewer pointed out that non-biological forms of evolution plausibly help to explain some beliefs of this sort, especially beliefs about artifacts such as tables or buildings.
That is, inasmuch as they confer a fitness advantage at all. We should distinguish between adaptationist and nonadaptationist evolutionary accounts of religious belief. On the former, religious beliefs evolve because they confer a fitness advantage, possibly on human social groups (they contribute to social cohesion or some such thing). On the latter, they are not themselves adaptive, but are ‘spandrels’: they arise as a side effect of other processes that have been selected for. For example, it has been suggested (Boyer 2001) that we have an evolved tendency to attribute agency and intentionality to things (take the ‘intentional stance’ towards them, in Dennett’s words). This tendency has generally served us well, and contributed to fitness (arguably this is an on-track process – the intentional stance may have been adaptive because generally it has been correctly applied to real intentional systems). But we over-apply the intentional stance, treating non-intentional systems and entities as if they have beliefs, desires, agency and so forth. And therein, on this account, lies the origin of religious beliefs. The beliefs are not themselves adaptive, but arise as non-adaptive or possibly even maladaptive side-effects of cognitive processes that are adaptive (this is of course common in evolution).
This is my interpretation of their view. They do not explicitly endorse such an argument, but I take it to be implicit in their discussion. If in fact they do not endorse it (they may, perhaps, prefer the Quinean version of the argument I discuss below) and I have constructed a straw man, the argument is still worth considering, firstly because it is, as I said, a natural reading of the line of argument of their paper, and secondly because others would presumably endorse such an extension of their reasoning.
They would prefer to express the conclusion as: ‘it is reasonable to accept and act on commonsense beliefs’.
Although Stich is not a debunker, and in fact his position is, as we shall see, consistent with Griffiths’ and Wilkins’ arguments, he does occasionally fall into this error of counterposing truth-tracking and fitness-tracking, e.g. (1990, 62).
The same goes for evolutionary explanations of the origin of religious beliefs. Suppose someone offers a group selectionist account—say, that religious beliefs contribute to social cohesion, and are thus adaptive for human groups. Here ‘contributing to social cohesion’ and ‘contributing to group fitness’ are not rival hypotheses about the origin of the beliefs. It is being suggested that the beliefs increase group fitness by increasing social cohesion. There are two levels of analysis at work.
Thus they would say it is equally mistaken to try to debunk, say, religious beliefs, on the conceptual grounds that natural selection cares about fitness, not truth. One may, without making a conceptual error, claim that cognitive systems that produce religious beliefs track fitness by tracking truth (evolution is an on-track process in this domain). This is conceptually coherent, they will argue, but false. Evolution is, the evidence suggests, an off-track process with respect to religious beliefs.
‘Positive illusions’, which, as Griffiths and Wilkins note, are an example debunkers offer of potentially fitness-enhancing false belief in humans, are going to be hard to deal with in the same way. We tend, it has been empirically shown, systematically to overrate our own intelligence, attractiveness, abilities and prospects (2015). This seemingly has an evolutionary rationale; people with unrealistically positive views of themselves are generally happier and possess the confidence and self-assurance required to succeed in various tasks. It is hard to interpret this phenomenon in terms of constrained truth-tracking. It is not true beliefs about oneself that are being aimed at here, but useful beliefs – beliefs that increase one’s self-confidence and so on. Such beliefs will be adaptive irrespective of their truth value. Of course, the beliefs may be true – one may in fact be accurately estimating one’s abilities etc. But the point is that what makes the beliefs adaptive is that they cast one in a favourable light, whether or not this fits the facts. In other words, this is an off-track process.
There are of course other examples of false beliefs that are pragmatically useful, or, more precisely, beliefs whose pragmatic utility is independent of their truth. Any time it is suggested that the production of such beliefs is an evolutionary adaptation there will be a case that is difficult to deal with using Griffiths’ and Wilkins’ framework. Their own evolutionary debunking arguments about religious and moral beliefs are similar to these cases.
Stich (1990) offers the similar example of the adaptive value of caution when it comes to judgments to the effect that some food is not poisonous, given the potential consequences of error, compared to the judgment that some food is poisonous, mistakes with respect to which will have much less serious consequences. An ultra-cautious poison-detection system will likely be favoured by selection over a less-cautious one than generates more truth, but at too great a risk. Again, Griffiths and Wilkins will interpret this in terms of constrained truth-tracking. (Incidentally, although Stich doesn’t talk in these terms, this interpretation is, as far as I can see, consistent with what he says, and he would have no reason to deny it. Call it constrained truth-tracking if you like, one could imagine him saying, the central point is about the unreliability. More on this below.).
Thus the mechanism would be favoured over a mechanism that was too unreliable. A system which generated the belief ‘that’s a predator’ in response to absolutely every moving object in the organism’s field of vision would not be adaptive, as it would cause the organism to spend its entire life running away, leaving little time for anything else. A system which generates more truth than this, but is still cautious, will be favoured over the too-cautious system. The system that evolves will be one that generates as much truth as the organism can afford, no more and no less.
We may not want to call every case of a trait failing to perform its function a case of malfunction. A trait may fail to perform its function because the environment is abnormal, or it is not given the opportunity, or for some other ‘blameless’ reason (Neander 2017, 1152).
If the notion of evolutionary success at the species level is thought to be problematic (what could it mean exactly?), there may be a way of interpreting Quine’s argument so that it doesn’t rely on it. Whether or not our species counts as evolutionarily successful on the relevant criteria, Quine may argue, we know that present-day humans are the product of an extended evolutionary process governed by natural selection. Thus we would expect current humans to be good at thinking and reasoning, and to have true beliefs about their environment, because these traits are presumably adaptive in a large-brained, cognitively sophisticated species—past humans who did not have these traits would’ve had (on average) low fitness, and would have been less likely to pass on their genes. In that case the work is really being done by the assumption that true beliefs and reliable inferences are adaptive, not by any kind of inference from species success. I have nonetheless interpreted the argument as an inference from species success because this is a natural reading of it, and because it preserves the connection with the IBE version of the argument I discuss below, which unequivocally is an inference from species success.
It is only ‘part of’ the best explanation; it would be bizarre to claim that the entire explanation for our evolutionary success is that our commonsense beliefs are true.
This is also the response some anti-realists have made to the argument for scientific realism. Famously, Laudan (1981) offered a number of examples of false, but highly empirically successful, theories from the history of science, to call into question the inference from success to truth.
Griffiths and Wilkins defend the heuristic interpretation of human fallacies and biases on p. 210.
Kornblith’s interpretation of the law of small numbers has anti-sceptical implications since he regards this inferential tendency as not just truth-tracking, but reliable in a world (such as ours) structured into natural kinds. That is, it generates true beliefs a majority of the time in normal environments.
Kornblith argues that our primary reason for thinking that there must be this good fit between our cognition and the world is the success of science. I do not wish to follow him in this, which indicates a point at which my argument diverges from his.
This explanation of true beliefs in terms of evolution is of course to be sharply distinguished from the explanation of evolutionary success in terms of true beliefs, which as we have seen is a type of ESA.
If we take the debunking argument to be SEDA:
-
Causal premise. Commonsense beliefs are explained by evolution.
-
Epistemic premise. Evolution is an off-track process with respect to such beliefs.
-
Therefore
-
Such beliefs are unjustified.
Plantinga would respond by rejecting the causal premise, accepting the epistemic premise. Griffiths and Wilkins, as we have seen, accept the causal premise and reject the epistemic premise. Plantinga, in effect, offers the following argument:
-
P1. Evolution is an off-track process with respect to commonsense beliefs.
-
P2. We know that our commonsense beliefs are true.
-
C. Our commonsense beliefs are not explained by evolution.
-
Coady offers a similar Moorean response to EDAs with respect to morality (Coady unpublished manuscript), such as those that Joyce defends. I am less persuaded of the viability of the Moorean response in this domain. By ‘commonsense beliefs’ I, and Griffiths and Wilkins, mean non-evaluative beliefs about everyday, ordinary objects and states of affairs in our environment, cast in the language of our commonsense conceptual scheme. Moral beliefs would not fall into this category, even though, of course, ‘you shouldn’t torture babies for fun’ is a moral belief that could be classed as ‘commonsense’ (as, indeed, in some communities, could religious beliefs like ‘God exists’). The Moorean tradition of defending commonsense, as I understand it, is restricted to beliefs of the sort I am referring to (‘I have two hands’ etc.), and doesn’t typically extend to defending commonsense moral, or normative, beliefs, or beliefs about other domains. Thank you to an anonymous reviewer for encouraging me to clarify this point.
Note that the relevant explanandum here is not the truth of the beliefs, but our having true beliefs. The explanation for the truth of ‘there are cats’ is arguably equivalent to the explanation of why there are cats, which is of course not what we are interested in.
For Downes (2000), the whole idea of true-belief generating cognitive mechanisms as evolutionary adaptations is flawed. This is in part because we do not possess an account of truth itself on which the idea can be made good.
References
Boyer, P. (2001). Religion Explained. Basic Books.
Coady, D. Unpublished Manuscript. ‘Moral Error Theory and Evolution’.
Dennett, D. C. (1987). The intentional stance. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Devitt, M. (1991). Realism and truth (2nd ed.). Oxford: Blackwell.
Downes, S. M. (2000). Truth, selection and scientific inquiry. Biology and Philosophy, 15, 425–442.
Griffiths, P. (1993). Functional analysis and proper function. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 44, 409–422.
Griffiths, P., & Wilkins, J. (2015). Crossing the Milvian Bridge: When do evolutionary explanations of belief debunk belief? In P. Sloan (Ed.), Darwin in the 21st Century: Nature, Humanity and God (pp. 201–231). Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press.
Harman, G. (1977). The nature of morality. New York: Oxford University Press.
Kahane, G. (2011). Evolutionary debunking arguments. Nous, 45(1), 103–125.
Kornblith, H. (1995). Inductive inference and its natural ground: An essay in naturalistic epistemology. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Kornblith, H. (ed.) (1987). Naturalising epistemology. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Laudan, L. (1981). A confutation of convergent realism. Philosophy of Science, 48(1), 19–49.
Lemos, N. (2007). An introduction to the theory of knowledge. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Millikan, R. G. (1984). Language, thought, and other biological categories. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Moore, G. E. (1925). A defence of common sense. In J. H. Muirhead (Ed.), Contemporary British philosophy (Second Series) (pp. 192–233). London: George Allen & Unwin.
Neander, K. (2017). Functional analysis and the species design. Synthese, 194, 1147–1168.
Plantinga, A. (1993). Warrant and proper function. New York: Oxford University Press.
Quine, W.V.O. (1969). Natural kinds. In Ontological relativity and other essays. New York: Columbia University Press.
Sterelny, K., & Fraser, B. (2017). Evolution and moral realism. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 68(4), 981–1006.
Stich, S. P. (1985). Could man be an irrational animal? Some notes on the epistemology of rationality. Synthese, 64(1), 115–135.
Stich, S. P. (1990). The fragmentation of reason: Preface to a pragmatic theory of cognitive evaluation. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Wilkins, J. & Griffiths, P. (2012). Evolutionary debunking arguments in three domains: Fact, value, and religion. In J. Maclaurin & G. Dawes (Eds.), A New Science of Religion. Routledge.
Acknowledgements
Thank you to Adrian Walsh, David Coady, and two anonymous referees for this journal, for helpful comments and suggestions. The ideas in this paper originated from discussions with Howard Sankey about evolution and commonsense, thank you to Howard for encouraging me to pursue this project.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Boucher, S.C. Evolutionary debunking arguments, commonsense and scepticism. Synthese 198, 11217–11239 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02782-1
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02782-1