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Darwin Meets Socrates: Evolutionary Psychology and the Innate Ideas

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Darwin Meets Socrates: Evolutionary Psychology and the Innate Ideas Copyright is owned by the Author of the thesis. Permission is given for a copy to be downloaded by an individual for the purpose of research and private study only. The thesis may not be reproduced elsewhere without the permission of the Author. -------- DARWIN MEETS SOCRATES: EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY AND THE INNATE IDEAS DEBATE --···==+<···-- A thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the - · requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Psychology at Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand. STEVE STEWART-WILLIAMS School of Psychology Massey University 2004 Acknowledgements Primarily, my thanks go to John Podd, Stephen Hill, James Battye, and Kevin Ronan, my PhD supervisors. I have been very fortunate to have had such a scholarly and likeable group of supervisors, with such a diverse range of knowledge and expertise. Thanks in particular to John, my chief supervisor, for allowing me to change the original topic of my thesis and pursue a theoretical project. Thanks also to Mark Baker, Denis Dutton, Stephen Laurence, Elizabeth Spelke, Todd Shackelford, and Dan Sperber, for correspondence and the provision of recent papers. Finally, thanks to my wife, Jane, for help and support, and to my baby son, Darwin, for being extremely cute. This research was supported by a Bright Future Top-Achiever Doctoral Scholarship, administered by the Foundation of Research, Science, and Technology (FRST). iii Abstract The underlying premise of this thesis is that evolutionary psychology and philosophy can exert a productive mutual influence on one another. To illustrate this, I focus on the innate ideas debate in philosophy. This debate concernsthe originand justification of our concepts and beliefs, and is intimately linked with the empiricist-rationalist debate of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The empiricists claimed that all ideas derive ultimately from experience, whereas the rationalists claimed that some ideas are innate. An evolutionary psychological perspective updates this issue in various ways. For instance, it provides a naturalistic explanation for the origin of any innate contributions to our mental representations of the world, and has implications for the subject matter and accuracy of these contributions. Not only does an evolutionary perspective have implications for philosophy, the philosophical literature contributes to an evolutionary psychological perspective on the innate design of the human mind. In particular, various suggestions for innate content can be drawn from the philosophical literature. Among these are the belief in other minds, belief in an objective and mind-independent external world, causal cognition, moral cognition, and elements of our understanding of space and time. Finally, an evolutionary perspective raises an important question: If certain aspects of our worldview are innate, does this provide any reason to think that these aspects accurately depict the world? The simple version of the argument for this conclusion is that if an aspect of mind is innate, it must be useful, and the best explanation for its usefulness is that it accurately depicts the world. Although there are important criticisms of this position, I argue that, in certain circumstances, it is reasonable to assume the approximate accuracy of some innate mental content. V Table of Contents Page Acknowledgements i Abstract lll Ta ble of Contents V Introduction 1 Part I Evolution and Evolutionary Psychology 11 1. Evolutionary Theory 13 2. Evolutionary Psychology 31 Part II Evolutionary Psychology and the Innate Ideas Debate 79 3. Innate Ideas after Darwin 81 4. Elements of an Evolved Conceptual Framework 111 5. Darwin and Descartes' Demon: On the Possible Evolutionary Originof Belief in an ExternalWorld 133 6. Silencing Roosters and Skinning Cats: The Evolution of Causal Cognition 151 7. Selfish Genes and Moral Animals: Morality as an Adaptation 175 8. Innate Content Related to Other Philosophical Issues 195 9. Innate Ideas as a Naturalistic Source of Metaphysical Knowledge 223 Discussion 259 Vl References 267 Appendix A: "Darwin and Descartes' Demon" Publication 307 Appendix B: "Evolved Conceptual Framework" Publication 317 1 Introduction Thelist of philosophical problems that thinkers, without evident success, have long struggled with - the problems of induction, of other minds, of the existence of the external world, of justifying rationality - all mark assumptions that evolution has built into us. -Robert Nozick, The Nature of Rationality, 1993, p. 121. Th e scientists, not the philosophers, now address most effectively the great questions of existence, the mind, and the meaning of the human condition. -Edward 0. Wilson, The Philosophers' Magazine, Autumn 1999. The title of this thesis, Darwin Meets Socrates, might be somewhat misleading. It hints at a mixture of biology and philosophy, but in fact it is psychology and philosophy that is the focus of the work. The reference to Charles Darwin relates to the fact that it is a particular approach to psychology that will be considered, namely, evolutionary psychology. This approach involves the application of Neo-Darwinian principles to the study of the human mind (Barkow, Cosmides, & Tooby, 1992; Barrett, Dunbar, & Lycett, 2002; Buss, 1999; Crawford & Krebs, 1998; Evans & Zarate, 1999). The underlying premise of this work is that evolutionary psychology and philosophy can exert a productive mutual influence on one another. More specifically, I focus on the mutual influence of these two disciplines in regard to the innate ideas debate. The innate ideas debate, which was at the heart of the empiricist-rationalist controversy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, concernsthe origin and 2 DARWIN MEETS SOCRATES justification of our concepts, beliefs, and cognitive abilities. The rationalists claimed that some ideas are innate, whereas the empiricists claimed that all ideas derive ultimately from experience. As Block (1981) noted, "this issue, like many others discussed under the heading of 'philosophy of psychology' is not easily pigeonholed either as science or as philosophy" (p. 280). Consequently, it offers a suitable case study for the thesis that psychology and philosophy can exert a healthy mutual infl uence on one another. Furthermore, with the recent groundswell of interest in the application of evolutionary theory to human psychology, the topic of innate ideas is once again timely. There are various ways that evolutionary psychology and philosophy can inform one another. To begin with, an evolutionary perspective on psychology has a number of important implications for philosophy. The innate ideas debate has its origin in pre- Darwinian philosophy. Evolutionary psychology updates this debate, and has implications fo r classical empiricism, rationalism, and Kantian philosophy. One of the most important implications of an evolutionary perspective is that it provides a naturalistic explanation for 1 the origin of any innate mental content. As Peter Carruthers (1992) put it, "the only suggestion that is consistent with current scientific knowledge is that innate beliefs might be determined through evolutionary selection" (p. 111). In addition, an evolutionary perspective has important implications in regard to the function and subject matter of innate ideas. Another set of implications of evolutionary psychology for philosophy relates to the justification of knowledge. If evolutionary psychology reveals that certain aspects of our representation of the world have an innate origin,this raises an important question: Does 1 The phrase 'mental content' will refer to all explicit aspects of phenomenology, including perceptions, concepts, beliefs, memories, and imagery. lNTRODUCfiON 3 the innateness of these aspects of mind give any reason to think that they are accurate? Later I argue that, in certain circumstances, it may. Just as evolutionary psychology can inform philosophy, the philosophical literature can inform evolutionary accounts of the mind. Primarily, this literature is a fertile source of hypotheses concerning innate concepts and beliefs. In some cases, the aspects of mind suggested by the philosophical literature are aspects people might otherwise have overlooked. Some components of our mental representations of the world may be so deep­ seated that we do not notice them. Furthermore, even if we do notice them, they may seem so trivially obvious and natural to us that we do not think they need to be explained. An example is the idea that the futurebut not the past can be influenced by voluntary behaviour. Such aspects of our understanding may seem obvious and unimportant to us, simply because they are so deep-seated. As a result, we may overlook some of the most important and fundamental aspects of our minds. Philosophers, with their habit of relentlessly questioning even the most fundamental aspects of our belief systems (for instance, asking questions about the nature of time), may help to unmask these important but overlooked aspects of the mind, and bring to light facts about our nature that we were unaware of, or had not thought needed explanation. Many of the innate aspects of cognition I propose in later chapters relate to topics in philosophy. This includes the belief in other minds, belief in an objective, mind­ independent external world, causal cognition, moral cognition, and elements of our understanding of space and time. According to Stace (1945), these are unreasoned beliefs : beliefs that are not derived from experience but
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