Global Debunking Arguments

This video outlines the skeptical challenge posed by global debunking arguments, focusing on the evolutionary debunking argument.

Andrew Moon, "Global debunking arguments"
Diego Machuca, "Global evolutionary arguments: Self-defeat, circularity and skepticism about reason"
Guy Kahane, "Evolutionary debunking arguments"
Michael Bergmann, "Commonsense naturalism"

0:00 - Introduction
2:19 - Debunking arguments
5:48 - Evolutionary debunking
18:48 - Appeal to other propositions
22:55 - Appeal to non-propositional evidence
26:35 - Circularity?
32:20 - Are global debunking arguments self-defeating?
39:36 - Other global debunking arguments

[mikip]

This reminds me of the book "The case against reality". It's exactly the evolutionary argument against true knowledge of the external world. But I find the proposition philosophically dangerous since it defeats science and the idea that evolutionary processes themselve exist.

[jacksaetveit]

It truly is a joy to be American and die laughing every time Kane says, "Source, " because I always hear, "Sauce."

[abdulrahmanalhamali]

This was a lot of fun to watch. Thanks!
I have an idea that might be worth exploring. We can possibly explore science as a belief-formation process that is emergent from (but more reliable) than evolution in truth-tracking. If we accept that, then the defense you presented earlier about extra propostions might work

[whycantiremainanonymous]

So, what do you trust, mortal? Evolutionary theory or your own lying eyes?
Seriously, if belief in evolutionary theory defeats belief in the reliability of direct perception, the logical conclusion should be that evolutionary theory is unreliable, at least as an account for forming beliefs. For the argument to work, you need not only to trust evolutionary theory (despite your skepticism), but to trust it *more than anything else, * at least _prima facie._
A way to save evolutionary theory could be to ask ourselves what does "true" even mean. We have no access to the world of things-in-themselves (if such a world even exists). The very idea of perceiving the world in a way that is somehow identical to how it *really* is, is incoherent. Given this constraint, one could *define* truth, at least for perceptions, as what promotes survival and reproduction. What other non-circular definition of a true perception can you propose?
(Note a nuance here: you can define a *false* or *illusory* perception as one that is inconsistent with other perceptions, but that assumes other perceptions are generally reliable. It is that general reliability that can either be just postulated by fiat or defined in evolutionary terms).
(Also, by the way, the claim that evolution should favour false positives when it comes to threats ignores the harm too many false positives can cause to an organism's chances to sustain itself and reproduce).

[TheMahayanist]

My own position is an Evolutionary Debunking Argument (EDA) against realist epistemic access. It seems like if evolutionary processes merely entail our survival, and not truth or access to reality, then it would be special pleading to claim humans uniquely have this access, and would make the probability of humans over all other existing species AND all other possibly existing species as having this unique faculty is virtually non-existent.

It's definitely a type of global skepticism, but I'm okay with that lol

[jvnpvmx]

Maybe reliability is not a black and white property, but rather it could be anywhere between 0% to 100%? To cast doubt on our belief-forming process, doesn't mean it's completely unreliable. There is, afterall, a correlation between forming accurate beliefs and survival even if our belief-forming system is biased for false positive

[fable]

28:19 but isn’t the global defeater argument itself self defeating? If I assume naturalism and the evolutionary story (like in the argument) then we conclude that we can not rely on observations, but the premises also rely on obervations. So we can‘t trust the premises, which makes the conclusion also untrustworthy. So the argument itself is circular?

And if the argument succeeds anyway, we don’t have an alternative.

[bengreen]

I think it should be noted that while the notion that false beliefs are sometimes useful in the sense that it is better to run from a 'lion' and sometimes end up running from a 'false lion' - if you run away from too many 'false lions', that will impact your likelihood of fully satiating your thirst at the waterhole, and waste too much energy and time that could be better spent finding food - and that's a detriment to survival.

Plantinga gives these bizarre cases where weirdly inappropriate behaviours somehow lead to a survival enhancing action. This, to me seems waaay more of a stretch than the probability of our senses more or less accurately perceiving reality. There is at least pretty obvious logical coherence in the idea that senses merely see reality as it is - but Plantinga wants us to accept a world in which trillions of interactions between our senses and the world all happen by chance to allow us to survive in it. The probability of that is surely preposterous.

[elijahdick]

The evolutionary debunking argument is useful for explaining why specific kinds of belief formation are unreliable, but it doesn't follow that ALL perceptions are truth independent

[tomol]

I think examples of people who risk their lives knowingly (And not just to protect other people's lives.) because of their belief-forming processes cast a bit of doubt on premise #2 without being circular (I think?).
This wouldn't be selected for but also stems from generic features of our reasoning since the average person is often able to understand and even praise the behavior. The archetypical example here would be someone like Socrates.
It still seems that natural selection influenced our belief-forming processes, but it doesn't obviously follow that all aspects of it were directly selected for, some or many could just stem from weird interactions between more underlying stuff.

This way maybe it's not that unlikely that we really did just get lucky and our belief-forming processes are generally truth tracking despite it not being advantageous to us (Or maybe they're "good enough" without being the best option for maximizing survival.).

[kennethconnally]

It seems to me that the evolutionary story does make it highly likely that our perceptual and cognitive faculties are unreliable, including in some cases in systematic ways. But we already knew that (optical illusions, cognitive biases etc.). In order for it to be a *global* debunker (one that should cause us to cease believing *all* our beliefs), we would need it to be likely, according to the evolutionary story, for organisms as complex as us (which I take to be evident based on the complexity of our mental representations alone--even if we are deluded about everything, the delusion is certainly a complex one) to have perceptual and cognitive structures that fail to track real features of their environments with any degree of regularity. That seems to me highly unlikely. Take Plantinga's "Delia and the lions" thought experiment. It's still necessary in that case for most of Delia's beliefs to be true in order to get the adaptive "running away from lions" behavior: lions exist, she exists, the ground, trees, and so on are roughly where she thinks they are, running is a way of getting from one place to another, etc. It's hard to even imagine a scenario in which desires and beliefs could be fitted together so that such an enormous number of interconnected beliefs as we have 1) are adaptive when combined and 2) utterly fail to track reality in any way. But even if that were possible, evolution favors simplicity. Organisms don't evolve endlessly complicated Rube Goldbergesque solutions to problems when a much simpler, more energy-efficient solution is available. And it seems to me that a mental system that's trying to kill itself and avoid reproducing but reliably manages to survive and reproduce because its representation of the world is completely wrong in all the "right" ways, were it even possible, would be far more complicated affair than a mental system that's (generally) trying to survive and reproduce and has a mental representation of the world that's "true enough" to let it succeed most of the time.

I think the evolutionary story should make us more skeptical, just not in a global way. We should be more skeptical of beliefs that would seem to favor survival and reproduction, for instance the belief that life is preferable to death, that death is something we ought to fear. If suicide were preferable to going on for beings like us, natural selection would definitely want to hide that from us. But it couldn't do that in a way that undermines all our belief-forming processes' reliability because then we would just die out from stupidity.

[slouch]

Imagine the look of disappointment on the face of a man with a purple headress who's favorite book about his own tribe turned out to be a fabrication.

[bernardhurley]

I think I have sorted out my objection to the evolutionary debunking argument. If I claim it is possible for to reach correct beliefs in spite of the argument that allow us to satisfy our needs I do not thereby assert that all my beliefs are true. The mere fact that it is possible for an evolved being to have false beliefs does not contradict the possibility of this being reaching true beliefs.. Normally we correct false beliefs in the course of interacting with the environment or interacting linguistically with either ourselves or others. For the evolutionary debunking argument to work it is not enough for its proponent to show that an evolved being can have deviant belief/desire sets. It is also necessary to show that, assuming the being to be perfectly rational, the false beliefs in the set cannot, even in principle, be replaced in the course of the normal activities of this being by true beliefs that the this being knows to be true and that also allow the being to satisfy the corresponding desires. Absent such a demonstration the argument fails.

(In the following I will assume the being to perfectly rational and I will call the process to be demonstrated “correcting the beliefs” although that does not quite catch what is going on.)


However any such purported demonstration must show that the beliefs cannot be corrected, even in principle, using language. This implies that the holder of the beliefs, even if perfectly rational, cannot be induced, even in principle, to believe something that has the linguistic form that we would take to express a correction of the beliefs in normal language. I find it very difficult to see how this could occur if she were not speaking a deviant language. This coupled with the fact that in all cases of deviant belief/desire sets I have seen it is fairly easy to specify such a deviant language that the believer could be speaking that would make the beliefs true leads me to think that all cases of supposed belief/desire sets are capable of being analysed into either situations where the believer could substitute the incorrect beliefs by true beliefs in the course of normal life or situations where the believer is speaking different language.

I don’t think I have done enough to prove this conclusion but I do think I have done enough to challenge the evolutionary debunking argument in a way that appears to be very difficult to answer. Other global debunking arguments may well be susceptible to similar challenges although I have not thought it through.

[amasalevi]

20:30

I don't know if anyone pointed this out. But what you said here doesn't make sense. It seems question begging. All the information we have (models, faculties and their function, etc.) is based on natural selection. Saying that they track genuine features of the world is like saying natural selection-based tools are showing us the real world but this precisely the is what need to be proved.

[MyContext]

The first time I heard the EAAN, I considered it to be absurd - and I still do.

The moment one takes a moment to think about all the errors of reasoning that one has made and consider the various errors of reasoning that humanity makes, one can ideally recognize that truth determinations for humanity can be difficult. We have all sorts of biases and other factors that make for erred reasoning. We observe a continuum of cognitive ability which strikes me as being reasonable given evolution. The idea of a supposed omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent entity which supposedly created cognitively deficient creatures strikes me as absurd and grotesque (given the background knowledge of the argument author's position).

I consider my position to be the defeater to the defeater, since it is the case that we have a continuum of reasoning errors and thus suffer at various truth determinations. This immediately results in the argument being a difference without a distinction, since it must be the case that under either scenario we suffer reasoning issues and thus by appeal to the simplest explanation, we are a product of evolution as opposed to some mix of something else and evolution.

No matter how poor our reasoning, it is the only reasoning that we have.

I suspect the power of the argument is in an appeal to vanity (something that can cause reasoning errors). Most people like to think of themselves as being reasonable; and I like to think of myself as being reasonable. However, I immediately thought about all the errors that I have made as well as all the errors that I observe of others as well as the continuing errors of reasoning while an individual proclaims themselves to be reasonable.

[warptens]

global evolutionary debunking depends on the idea that, since evolution only cares about survival and reproduction, it doesn't predict truth tracking beliefs.
which seems very, very dumb
evolution doesn't care about walking and obviously it's still evolutionary good to be able to move. Nobody would say that legs are unexpected under evolution. And nobody should think that truth tracking beliefs are unexpected either.

[Opposite]

Computer Interface: 14:38
-let’s say I play a computer game with virtual objects that are being depicted.
-Since the objects appear again and again even if they vanish from the interface, I would then expect that a corresponding electronic pattern is stored somewhere in the computer.
-And if those virtual objects interact, I would expect that the electronic patterns influence each other.
-So it seems like as if the interface accurately represents the interactions between the electronic patterns.

Self-defeat and XX-pill:
-When it comes to the XX-pill, even if my memories are somewhat reliable, I often misremember something.
Edit:
-So there seems be three solutions, either my memory is mistaken or it is correct, if it is correct then the pill got the 5% chance of not working and my memory is still intact or I took the pill, got the 95% chance scenario and I just where lucky that my memory just happen to be correct.
-It seems that any scenario is equally unlikely, the last one is unlikely because it would be a miracle to get correct fully unreliable memories.

Otherwise I fully agree with everything what you said in the video. I know what I am doing is a little bit nit-picking. Therefore I would like to say, that I genuinely enjoy your video(s).

[silverharloe]

It seems to me that anyone who actually believes such an argument would not make the argument - they lack all reason to do so. I suppose they might just enjoy saying their beliefs aloud even though they don't believe anyone is listening.

[GottfriedLeibnizYT]

Plantinga's argument is just idiotic. He makes a necessary connection between how our cognitive faculties evolved and its unreliability a priori. That's just reductive and dumb. You have to look at all the facts in cognitive and neuroscience. etc ...

[dbass]

the contradiction arises from the language Itself