Mind and Cosmos by Nagel Thomas;

Author:Nagel, Thomas;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press USA - OSO
Published: 2012-11-14T16:00:00+00:00

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The first problem arises only if one presupposes realism about the subject matter of our thought. We want to know how likely it is, for example, that evolution should have given some human beings the capacity to discover, and other human beings the capacity to understand, the laws of physics and chemistry. If there is no real, judgment-independent physical world, no judgment-independent truths of mathematics, and no judgment-independent truths of ethics and practical reason, then there is no problem of explaining how we are able to learn about them. On an antirealist view, scientific or moral truth depends on our systematic cognitive or conative responses rather than being something independent to which our responses may or may not conform. The “worlds” in question are all just human constructions. In that case an explanation of how those responses—including our scientific theories—were formed will not have to explain their objective correctness in order to be acceptable (although it will have to explain their internal coherence).

Antirealism of this kind is a more serious option for the moral than for the scientific case. One can intelligibly hold that moral realism is implausible because evolutionary theory is the best current explanation of our faculties, and an evolutionary account cannot be given of how we would be able to discover judgment-independent moral truth, if there were such a thing.1 But it would be awkward to abandon scientific realism for analogous reasons, because one would then have to become an antirealist about evolutionary theory as well. This would mean that evolutionary theory is inconsistent with scientific realism and cannot be understood realistically, which seems an excessively strong result. There would be something strange to the point of incoherence about taking scientific naturalism as the ground for antirealism about natural science.

If we leave the assumption of realism in place, the best hope for a naturalistic response to the first problem would be that evolutionary theory, and in particular evolutionary psychology, is in fact capable of giving a credible account of the success of our cognitive capacities. For factual knowledge, this is the aim of naturalized epistemology. The goal would be to explain how innate mental capacities that were selected for their immediate adaptive value are also capable of generating, through extended cultural evolutionary history, true theories about a law-governed natural order that there was no adaptive need to understand earlier. The evolutionary explanation would have to be indirect, since scientific knowledge had no role in the selection of the capacities that generated it.

The just-so story would go roughly like this. Even in the wild, it isn’t just perception and operant conditioning that have survival value. The capacity to generalize from experience and to allow those generalizations, or general expectations, to be confirmed or disconfirmed by subsequent experience is also adaptive. So is a basic disposition to maintain logical consistency in belief, by modifying beliefs when inconsistencies arise. A further, very important step would be the capacity to correct individual appearances not only by reference to other conflicting appearances of one’s own but also by reference to how things appear to other perceivers.

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