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Evolved cognitive biases and the epistemic status of scientific beliefs

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Abstract

Our ability for scientific reasoning is a byproduct of cognitive faculties that evolved in response to problems related to survival and reproduction. Does this observation increase the epistemic standing of science, or should we treat scientific knowledge with suspicion? The conclusions one draws from applying evolutionary theory to scientific beliefs depend to an important extent on the validity of evolutionary arguments (EAs) or evolutionary debunking arguments (EDAs). In this paper we show through an analytical model that cultural transmission of scientific knowledge can lead toward representations that are more truth-approximating or more efficient at solving science-related problems under a broad range of circumstances, even under conditions where human cognitive faculties would be further off the mark than they actually are.

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Notes

  1. This broad position is not to be confused with evolutionary psychology in the narrow sense as developed by the so-called “Santa Barbara school”, in particular by John Tooby and Leda Cosmides.

  2. This is a type of extreme probability distribution that models long (finite) sequences of random variables.

  3. Thanks to the anonymous reviewer for pointing this out.

  4. Transmutation is a historical term for what is now denoted by biological evolution which avoids the anachronism of ‘pre-Darwinian evolutionary theory’. The term ‘evolution’ was not routinely used to denote the natural development of life on Earth until Herbert Spencer popularized this sense of the term in the second half of the nineteenth century. Darwin, for example, in his Origin of species (1859), only once used the derivative ‘evolved’.

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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Igor Douven, Krist Vaesen, and an anonymous reviewer, for helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper, and Lesley De Cruz for help with programming in Mathematica. This research is supported by the Research Foundation Flanders and grant COM07/PWM/001 from Ghent University.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Centre for Logic and Analytic Philosophy, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Kardinaal Mercierplein 2, 3000, Leuven, Belgium

    Helen De Cruz

  2. Department of Philosophy and Ethics, Ghent University, Blandijnberg 2, 9000, Ghent, Belgium

    Johan De Smedt

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  1. Helen De Cruz
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Correspondence to Helen De Cruz.

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De Cruz, H., De Smedt, J. Evolved cognitive biases and the epistemic status of scientific beliefs. Philos Stud 157, 411–429 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-010-9661-6

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