Plantinga's Case Against Naturalistic Epistemology

Fales, Evan

doi:10.1086/289920

Cited by 26 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 5 publications

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“…Darwin's idea of natural selection has the power to affect ideas far outside its original domain, including economics, culture, language and epistemology. Since evolutionary theory presents our current best hope to explain design and adaptation from a naturalistic point of view, it is perhaps not surprising that a growing number of philosophers (e.g., Quine 1969, Fales 1996, Stewart‐Williams 2005, Boulter 2007) incorporate evolutionary arguments in their naturalistic theories of mental content.…”

Section: The Evolved Mind and Epistemic Justificationmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Evolutionary Approaches to Epistemic Justification

Cruz¹,

Boudry²,

Smedt³

et al. 2011

Dialectica

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What are the consequences of evolutionary theory for the epistemic standing of our beliefs? Evolutionary considerations can be used to either justify or debunk a variety of beliefs. This paper argues that evolutionary approaches to human cognition must at least allow for approximately reliable cognitive capacities. Approaches that portray human cognition as so deeply biased and deficient that no knowledge is possible are internally incoherent and self‐defeating. As evolutionary theory offers the current best hope for a naturalistic epistemology, evolutionary approaches to epistemic justification seem to be committed to the view that our sensory systems and belief‐formation processes are at least approximately accurate. However, for that reason they are vulnerable to the charge of circularity, and their success seems to be limited to commonsense beliefs. This paper offers an extension of evolutionary arguments by considering the use of external media in human cognitive processes: we suggest that the way humans supplement their evolved cognitive capacities with external tools may provide an effective way to increase the reliability of their beliefs and to counter evolved cognitive biases.

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Section: The Evolved Mind and Epistemic Justificationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Our heavy investment in big brains and otherwise mediocre bodies makes it all the more unlikely that resources would be wasted on elaborate belief‐forming and processing mechanisms that have no practical utility. (Fales 1996, 440)…”

Section: Cartesian God or Cartesian Demon: The Double‐edged Sword mentioning

confidence: 99%

Evolutionary Approaches to Epistemic Justification

Cruz¹,

Boudry²,

Smedt³

et al. 2011

Dialectica

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…A growing number of naturalists, however, have put up a strong case against evolutionary sceptical worries (Fales ; McKay and Dennett ; Law ; Wilkins and Griffiths ; Boudry and Vlerick ). They have forcefully argued that evolutionary considerations are not at odds with epistemic reliability.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Evolution and Epistemic Justification

Vlerick¹,

Broadbent²

2015

Dialectica

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According to the evolutionary sceptic, the fact that our cognitive faculties evolved radically undermines their reliability. A number of evolutionary epistemologists have sought to refute this kind of scepticism. This paper accepts the success of these attempts, yet argues that refuting the evolutionary sceptic is not enough to put any particular domain of beliefs -notably scientific beliefs, which include belief in Darwinian evolution -on a firm footing. The paper thus sets out to contribute to this positive justificatory project, underdeveloped in the literature. In contrast to a 'wholesale' approach, attempting to secure justification for all of our beliefs on the grounds that our belief-forming mechanisms evolved to track truth, we propose a 'piecemeal' approach of assessing the reliability of particular belief-forming mechanisms in particular domains. This stands in contrast to the more familiar attempt to transfer warrant obtained for one domain (e.g., common-sense beliefs) to another (e.g., scientific beliefs) by showing how one is somehow an extension of the other. We offer a naturalist reply to the charge of circularity by appealing to reliabilist work on the problem of induction, notably Peter Lipton's distinction between self-certifying and non-self-certifying inductive arguments. We show how, for scientific beliefs, a non-self-certifying argument might be made for the reliability of our cognitive faculties in that domain. We call this strategy Humean Bootstrapping.

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“…Earlier critics (Fales 1996(Fales , 2002 have defended the common-sense view, against Plantinga, that true beliefs are generally better guides in the world than false ones, barring contrived exceptions, and that our expensive cognitive machinery is unlikely to have evolved without conferring some adaptive benefits. Stephen Law (2012) has argued that there is a strong conceptual link between beliefs and behaviour, which makes beliefs 'visible' to natural selection.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Natural Selection Does Care about Truth

Boudry¹,

Vlerick²

2014

International Studies in the Philosophy of Science

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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.

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Plantinga's Case Against Naturalistic Epistemology

Cited by 26 publications

References 5 publications

Evolutionary Approaches to Epistemic Justification

Evolutionary Approaches to Epistemic Justification

Evolution and Epistemic Justification

Natural Selection Does Care about Truth

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