An Evolutionary Argument Against Evolutionary Psychology

[Bono]

Evolutionary psychology has philosophical implications that go way beyond those of garden variety causal determinism.

In a compatibilist understanding of free will, your decisions are free if the causal chain that lead to them include your own conscious decision process made free of any external compulsions. Thus, a person being tied to a chair is not free to decide whether he wants to stay seated or get up, but a person who gets up from a chair unimpeded was free in his decision even if it was caused by him wanting to go to the bathroom, which in turned was caused by the canned beans he had last night.

However, for evolutionary psychologists, our reasons are nothing but clever ruses invented by our brain to satisfy our consciousness (how consciousness arose in the first place they of course don't dedicate a line to), and are completely different from the "real" cause of our actions. Thus, I hang around with my best friend not because I enjoy his company, but because I want to insure that he remains friendly to me and doesn't steal any females with whom I could reproduce from me. This was supposedly an adaptive behavior for our caveman ancestors. This poses problems for the compatibilist understanding of free will because for them our consciousness is nothing but a powerless actor watching an external drama unfold.

I'll try to show that this renders evolutionary psychology self-stultifying by borrowing a page from Alvin Plantinga's book and slightly modify one argument of his for application to EP.

Evolutionary psychology carries with it the extraordinary conclusion that most of our beliefs regarding our courses of action are false. But this casts doubt not only on our beliefs as narrowly applied to volition, but to all of our beliefs. If it is accepted that forming beliefs that do not correspond with reality confers an evolutionary advantage in this case, the possibility cannot be excluded that it would confer advantages in general. This is not to say that evolutionary psychology implies that all our knowledge, including for instance the existence of the external world, is demonstrably false. But it does imply that the probability of it being true is either low or inscrutable, because it would give a reason to doubt the reliability of our belief-forming process, and as such, of all our beliefs. But this would include the evolutionary psychologist's belief that evolutionary psychology is true. If EP provides a defeater for all our beliefs, the belief that EP itself is true cannot possibly be excluded from the wider set of our beliefs.

Thus, simpliciter, EP is self-defeating and cannot rationally be accepted.

[Bono]

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See my critique: I know that I believe that eliminative materialism is incorrect. I have introspection after all, I have a very vigorous mental life (I think so, which is good, when constrating it to my non-existant social life. But that's another thing), I think often without function.. gazing into space, often actually I feel I think too much and that my thoughts bore me. I would like to do other things, but feel depressed. I believe all this to be true, from my experience.

All this shows is that Wittgenstein was right: most philosophical problems are language problems. (Even the word "I" is problematic, as we tend to use it in reference to our selves or essences rather than our bodies: "When I die, I will cease to be of this world but my body will rot in the ground")

EM is just an elaborate effort to deny our own mental life. What I'm going to say touches on what you said here, which is why I quoted it, but it's not strictly about EM.

Evolutionary psychologists claim that our "real" reasons are different from our conscious reasons. But how can a brain by itself have reasons--the old intentionality problem. Our mental states are about something, but a brain isn't about anything, it doesn't have purposes or aspirations. Most functionalists just say that our mental states are wholly identical to functional properties of brain states. I'm not a functionalist, but this is not self stultifying as EP is because they are not postulating a complete divorce of our mental reality from our brain reality the way EP is.

[Bono]

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1) The Bit in Bold - usually via some supposed mechanism, like genes or the subconcious (now that I consider it, EP isn't as different from Psychoanalysis as it likes to pretend.), this o/c I find ridiculously confining. Though I tend to take a social constructivist approach.

Well yes but I think you may be missing my point (or maybe I' the one misunderstanding you). Having reasons--or thoughts, beliefs whatever--isn't a physical property, it's a mental property. It doesn't make sense to speak of a brain's reasons anymore than it does to speak of a sofa's reasons for letting people sit on it. Functionalists can get away with it because for them there is a identity relation between mental and physical properties, but EP has no such a way out since they basically deny that our mental life has any relevance to our actions.

[Bono]

The key point here is “false” motivations. We perceive one motivation but are in fact motivated by something else. That this can happen should be a surprise to no one, and it is rather insulting to our intelligence to suggest otherwise. You might, for example, be attracted to someone and not realize it—in the mean time, you make mental excuses to go to the store or the library or walk down the street in order to see that person. At some point, of course, you realize your attraction, and from then on are conscious of that as a part of your motivation.

So clearly some of our motivations are hidden from us. They may not remain hidden for very long, but that’s neither here nor there. If the reductio ad absurdum of the original argument is to function, it must be able to explain why this particular, very clear-cut, case, does not make the case that we don’t know anything. Unfortunately, the basis of the argument is a logical fallacy. What Bono quoted says, in reduced form, “We don’t know everything; therefore, we don’t know anything.” That this argument is invalid should be trivial.

The problem is not that we don't know everything, or even that all of our beliefs aren't true. The problem is that evolutionary psychology casts such a doubt on the reliability of our belief-forming processes that the probability of any individual belief being true is either low or inscrutable. Reliability doesn't imply that we come to form true beliefs 100% of the time, but it does require that our cognitive faculties furnish us with mostly true beliefs. For instance, suppose Tom comes to believe that he ingested a dangerous toxin that in nine out of ten cases induces permanent loss of cognitive reliability. Obviously through this belief, wether  true or not, Tom has reason to doubt all of his beliefs in account of it undermining the belief that his cognitive faculties are reliable. The situation for someone who believes in EP is no different than Tom's.

[Bono]

The key point here is “false” motivations. We perceive one motivation but are in fact motivated by something else. That this can happen should be a surprise to no one, and it is rather insulting to our intelligence to suggest otherwise. You might, for example, be attracted to someone and not realize it—in the mean time, you make mental excuses to go to the store or the library or walk down the street in order to see that person. At some point, of course, you realize your attraction, and from then on are conscious of that as a part of your motivation.

So clearly some of our motivations are hidden from us. They may not remain hidden for very long, but that’s neither here nor there. If the reductio ad absurdum of the original argument is to function, it must be able to explain why this particular, very clear-cut, case, does not make the case that we don’t know anything. Unfortunately, the basis of the argument is a logical fallacy. What Bono quoted says, in reduced form, “We don’t know everything; therefore, we don’t know anything.” That this argument is invalid should be trivial.

The problem is not that we don't know everything, or even that all of our beliefs aren't true. The problem is that evolutionary psychology casts such a doubt on the reliability of our belief-forming processes that the probability of any individual belief being true is either low or inscrutable. Reliability doesn't imply that we come to form true beliefs 100% of the time, but it does require that our cognitive faculties furnish us with mostly true beliefs. For instance, suppose Tom comes to believe that he ingested a dangerous toxin that in nine out of ten cases induces permanent loss of cognitive reliability. Obviously through this belief, wether  true or not, Tom has reason to doubt all of his beliefs in account of it undermining the belief that his cognitive faculties are reliable. The situation for someone who believes in EP is no different than Tom's.

The problem is that the things that are doubted aren't randomly distributed.  To be more precise, belief in evolutionary psychology is predicated upon a belief in science and empiricism.  Though we know that our senses can be fooled (see optical illusions), scientific thought entails that our senses can still in a general sense be trusted.  For example, when seeing the below image:



Our minds make the jump to assume that the blue shape is a rectangle just like the red one.  Of course, this isn't necessarily true; for all we know, it's a polygon cut just to match the red rectangle, or is completely irregular.  But it is true that cognitive psych says that we complete the figure the way that is "most likely", and evolutionary psych says that that is because it is evolutionary advantageous to assume so.  Yet, despite the fact that the possibility of misidentifying the blue shape exists and is a result of preexisting cognitive biases, we have no reason whatsoever to believe that the red shape is anything other than a red rectangle with the information given.  This isn't a result of cognitive biases; it's because we are directly perceiving it with our senses, and it isn't some clever human-produced puzzler specifically designed to ensnare them.

This isn't about the senses--in fact, I specifically disclaimed that in my original post.
In epistemology, reliabilism is the view that we are justified in knowing something if we have arrived at that belief through reliable processes. This doesn't require 100% accuracy, otherwise we could never know anything. But it does require that they are mostly true. While of course we can't pinpoint an exact point where they become reliable, this isn't a problem due to fuzzy logic. The reliability criterion doesn't apply only to the senses, but also to the cognitive processes in the mind/brain. You say that belief in EP is predicated upon belief in empiricism, but empiricism is only viable if your cognitive processes are reliable, which obviously EP implies are not.

You deliberately choose an example you know isn't likely to be very controversial. But Gully raises a very good counterpoint--people are religious for many reasons, but I bet the vast majority of religious people aren't religious because they want to bond socially otherwise they'll perish in the long winters without hunter-gathering. And yet this is exactly what EP implies--more to the point, it implies that most of our reasons for doing things are nothing but lies our brain imposes on our consciousness. If you don't see how this destroys any hope of reliability, then I don't think I can help you.

Evolutionary psychologists do not base their predictions and expectations upon themselves, unlike your hypothetical Tom.  Introspection has no merit under scientific methods.  The beliefs that evolutionary psychologists hold are based on direct observation of others.  As, again, evolutionary psychologists come from a scientific background, and they have no reason to doubt most of their sensory information, they are freely able to use their observations without fear of contradicting those observations.

Whether or not science is a legitimate way to study something is a different question (supposedly ), and so is whether evolutionary psychology is scientific, but...

How can they observe directly other people's conscious processes?