Natural Selection Does Care about Truth

Abstract

True beliefs are better guides to the world than false ones. This is the common-sense assumption that undergirds theorizing in evolutionary epistemology. According to Alvin Plantinga, however, evolution by natural selection does not care about truth: it cares only about fitness. If our cognitive faculties are the products of blind evolution, we have no reason to trust them, anytime or anywhere. Evolutionary naturalism, consequently, is a self-defeating position. Following up on earlier objections, we uncover three additional flaws in Plantinga's latest formulation of his argument: a failure to appreciate adaptive path dependency, an incoherent conception of content ascription, and a conflation of common-sense and scientific beliefs, which we diagnose as the ‘foundationalist fallacy’. More fundamentally, Plantinga's reductive formalism with respect to the issue of cognitive reliability is inadequate to deal with relevant empirical details.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Stephen Law, Eric Schliesser, Herman Philipse, and Alex Broadbent for commenting on an earlier version of this paper. Thanks also to two anonymous reviewers, and to James McAllister, for their valuable comments.

Notes

[1] For the time being, we take for granted that belief formation directs behaviour in the first place (premise 2). As Fales (1996) has argued, the cognitive machinery for belief formation is energy-consuming for the organism, and is unlikely to have evolved without making a difference in behaviour. Beliefs are not on a permanent holiday.

[2] Indeed, the natural properties realizing content need not be (solely) neurophysiological. If one takes an externalist point of view, for example, content would be determined by the physical state of the brain-plus-environment. For the sake of brevity, however, we will keep on referring to NP properties as instantiating meaning.

[3] There are always contrived ways of avoiding this conclusion, for example, by imagining an agent with an internal compass that has the wind directions exactly in reverse.

[4] This assumes a (moderate) form of semantic holism: beliefs ‘come to life’ in relation to other mental states, and cannot be interpreted in splendid isolation.

[5] Plantinga (2011b, 338) has a reply of sorts to this objection, but it forces him to call the whole semantics of counterfactuals into question. His alternative proposal accepts reasoning about counterpossibles (‘if 2 had been greater than 3’). This, for instance, would permit him to say things such as ‘If 13 were divisible by a natural number apart from one and itself, it would not be a prime number’. This is already quite strange. So is it ‘in virtue of’ not having any positive divisors, other than 1 and itself, that 13 is a prime number? Or the other way around? But this is to talk nonsense. In any case, Plantinga writes that he will not open ‘that particular (and large) can of worms’. So neither shall we.

[6] For a critique of Plantinga's far-fetched scenarios where corrupt beliefs happen to result in felicitous behaviour, see Fales (2002).