International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 28 (1):65-77 (2014)
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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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DOI | 10.1080/02698595.2014.915651 |
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References found in this work BETA
The Fragmentation of Reason: Preface to a Pragmatic Theory of Cognitive Evaluation.Stephen Stich - 1990 - Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.
Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, & Naturalism.Alvin Plantinga - 2011 - Oxford University Press.
The Fragmentation of Reason: Preface to a Pragmatic Theory of Cognitive Evaluation.E. J. Lowe & Stephen P. Stich - 1992 - Philosophical Quarterly 42 (166):98.
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Citations of this work BETA
Old Wine in New Bottles: Evolutionary Debunking Arguments and the Benacerraf–Field Challenge.Michael Klenk - 2017 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 20 (4):781-795.
Can Moral Realists Deflect Defeat Due to Evolutionary Explanations of Morality?Michael Klenk - 2017 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 98 (S1):227-248.
Evolution and Epistemic Justification.Michael Vlerick & Alex Broadbent - 2015 - Dialectica 69 (2):185-203.
Darwinism in Metaethics: What If the Universal Acid Cannot Be Contained?Eleonora Severini & Fabio Sterpetti - 2017 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 39 (3):1-25.
Truth and Consequences: When Is It Rational to Accept Falsehoods?Taner Edis & Maarten Boudry - 2019 - Journal of Cognition and Culture 19 (1-2):147-169.
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