An Evolutionary Sceptical Challenge to Scientific Realism

Abstract

Evolutionary scepticism holds that the evolutionary account of the origins of the human cognitive apparatus has sceptical implications for at least some of our beliefs. A common target of evolutionary scepticism is moral realism. Scientific realism, on the other hand, is much less frequently targeted, though the idea that evolutionary theory should make us distrustful of science is by no means absent from the literature. This line of thought has received unduly little attention. I propose to remedy this by advancing what I will call an evolutionary sceptical challenge to scientific realism. I argue that, given standard evolutionary theory, our possession of sound innate metaphysical intuitions would have taken an epistemically problematic 'lucky accident'. This, as I will show, entails that scientific realism is a selfundermining position. I discuss objections to my argument's two premises, including ones that appeal to the success of the sciences and to the possibility that sound innate metaphysical intuitions evolved as an evolutionary 'by-product'. I then draw out an advantage of my argument over a similar one recently put forward by Graber and Golemon (Sophia, 2019. https ://doi.org/10.1007/s1184 1-018-0695-0). I finish by submitting that scientific realism, given the soundness of my argument, is faced with a new 'Darwinian Dilemma', and briefly address the significance of this for the debate between realists and anti-realists in the philosophy of science.

Naturalized metaphysics in the image of Roy Wood Sellars and not Willard Van Orman Quine

“…Whether this is so is, of course, debatable, and from the perspective of naturalized metaphysics a further question is whether our capacities for naturalized metaphysics depend solely on our representational or also on our imaginative limits. Relatedly, Christophe de Ray (2022, 1) develops an “evolutionary sceptical challenge to scientific realism” that he explicitly directs against Ladyman and Ross's argument “that our metaphysical beliefs can be immune to evolutionary scepticism if they are formed by scientific means” (de Ray 2022, 14). This is not the place to review these concerns, since the point is not to argue that they defeat naturalized metaphysics.…”

“…Ladyman and Ross, in contrast, see the need for a further distinctly philosophical argument, the no‐miracles argument, to justify realism for science‐based metaphysics. An argument to this effect, however, easily comes to depend on the very same philosophical methods that naturalized metaphysics is so critical of, which has explicitly been argued to be the case for attempts to defend the no‐miracles argument (e.g., Psillos 2011; Jaksland 2017 and 2023; de Ray 2022). This is also the worry raised by Quine when he observes that such wholesale discussions of the epistemic credibility of science are prone to take the form of the illegitimate “first philosophy.”…”

A trilemma for naturalized metaphysics

“…75-76), Andrew Melnyk (2013, p. 94), andAlyssa Ney (2012, p. 66), though only Bryant and Humphreys explicitly repeats the evolution-based argument for this conclusion. Given (2), an undertaking based on the traditional methods of metaphysics cannot, as Bryant states above, be considered an "inquiry that produces justified theories about the nature of the world" (see also de Ray, 2022). As an undertaking that alleges to do so, autonomous metaphysics must therefore be discontinued, what was denoted (3) above.…”