The Cooperative Origins of Epistemic Rationality?

Abstract

Recently, both evolutionary anthropologists and some philosophers have argued that cooperative social settings unique to humans play an important role in development of both our cognitive capacities and the "construction" of "normative rationality" or "a normative point of view as a self-regulating mechanism" (Tomasello 2017, 38). In this article, I use evolutionary game theory to evaluate the plausibility of the claim that cooperation fosters epistemic rationality. Employing an extension of signal-receiver games that I term "telephone games," I show that cooperative contexts work as advertised: under plausible conditions, these scenarios favor epistemically rational agents over irrational ones designed to do just as well as them in non-cooperative contexts. I then show that the basic results are strengthened by introducing complications that make the game more realistic.

Recalibrating evolutionary debunking

“… See Tomasello (2014;,Mercier andSperber (2017), andDethier (2023) for some discussion of these issues. 17 Some authors, includingBerker (2014), have wondered whether evolutionary debunking arguments really depend on the finer details of how we evolved, or if they can instead be constructed for any causal history our normative beliefs might turn out to have.…”