Commonsense Darwinism by John Lemos

Author:John Lemos
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780812699364
Publisher: Open Court
Published: 2015-10-30T04:00:00+00:00

Plantinga’s Case Against Naturalistic Reliabilism

A central component of Plantinga’s attack on NNE is his argument for the view that if we are simply the products of natural selection and not of intelligent design then it is unlikely that we have reliable cognitive capacities. In defending this thesis he presents us with five scenarios in which we could survive and reproduce sufficiently well even if our cognitive capacities were not reliable producers of true beliefs. He argues that since from the naturalistic perspective these scenarios are equiprobable alongside the scenario in which our cognitive capacities are reliable producers of true belief, it follows that from the naturalistic perspective it really is not very likely that our cognitive capacities are reliable.

Evan Fales provides a very nice summary account of these five scenarios. He writes:

(1)The first possibility is that there might be no causal connection between beliefs and action at all. Since the only thing survival and procreation demand are getting one’s body parts into the right places at the right times, we can imagine creatures whose adaptive responses to their environment are handled in an entirely cognition-free way, while their beliefs are on permanent holiday. In such creatures, the unreliability of belief-forming mechanisms would be no liability at all (nor would reliability confer a selective advantage).

(2)A second, related possibility is that beliefs are causally connected with behavior, but only by way of being effects of that behavior, or “side-effects” of the causes of behavior. Here again, the truth or falsity of a belief will play no role in the appropriateness of the behavior it is linked to; and so truth will confer no selective advantage.

(3)Beliefs might indeed causally affect behavior, but do so in a way that is sensitive only to their syntax, not to their content or semantics. Then once again, the truth-value of a belief would be irrelevant to its role in producing adaptive behavior.

(4)Perhaps beliefs could be causally efficacious, and their content materially relevant to the behavior they help generate, while the behavior thus generated is maladaptive. No organism, perhaps, is perfectly efficient, perfectly attuned to its environment. Maladaptive characteristics are a burden which can be borne provided they are not too maladaptive. Natural selection can even favor maladaptive traits, when these are closely linked on the genome with genes which confer strongly adaptive traits—so that the benefits of inheriting that region of a genome outweigh the costs. This can happen when the two genes lie closely adjacent on a chromosome, so that they tend to travel together during genetic reshuffling; or it can happen by way of pleiotropy—a single gene coding for two or more traits. Indeed, adjacency and pleiotropy can be invoked to provide mechanisms that would explain possibilities (1) and (2) as well. The present point is that an organism may be able to hobble along with lots of false beliefs and misdirected actions.

(5)Finally evolution might produce organisms in which false belief leads to adaptive action. As Plantinga points out, this can happen in several ways.

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