Abstract
Cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman and others have recently advanced an evolutionary debunking argument aimed at our perceptual beliefs in ordinary objects, based on the Interface Theory of Perception. In contrast with most recent criticisms of Interface Theory, which have targeted its characterizations of perception and veridicality, I raise a broad dialectical problem for Hoffman’s debunking argument. I show that the argument is self-defeating, and that responding to this problem by appealing to Universal Darwinism leads to a fatal dilemma for the view.
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Notes
See Hoffman (2009) for the original, non-technical presentation of ITP as it applies to perceptual categories. See Hoffman et al. (2015) for a full statement of the view and a summary of the original interface games. See also Prakash et al. (2020) for the most recent game theoretical results, and Hoffman (2019) for the most recent comprehensive statement of the view and its implications, presented for the general reader.
For an argument that Hoffman’s characterization of veridicality is too strict in a way that advantages his own arguments, see Hummel (2015) and Chalmers (2022). For a defense of the view that Hoffman’s own models of non-veridical perception actually smuggle in some kind of veridicality, see Cohen (2015).
In addition to male Western Australian jewel beetles (see below), Hoffman lists “dragonflies that mistake gravestones for water, gull chicks that prefer red disks on cardboard to their real mothers, frogs that die of starvation when surrounded by mounds of unmoving edible flies, and birds that prefer brightly speckled rocks or the eggs of cowbirds to their own eggs” (Hoffman et al. 2015, p. 1490).
David Marr, in his theory of vision, seems to suggest a kind of distinction between human perceptions, which really represent features of the external world and more primitive perceptual mechanisms in, e.g., frogs and flies (1982, p. 340). However, it may be that these creatures veridically represent things (like “a surface I can land on” or “a black speck I can eat”) but simply have very few representational types, and nothing to match our general representations of 3-dimensional space or 4-dimensional spacetime.
Perhaps male jewel beetles just represent shiny, dimpled, brown things as something-to-be-mated-with, rather than as attractive female jewel beetles. See Cohen (2015, pp. 1514–1515) for more objections to Hoffman’s assumptions about perceptual representation.
This is a generalization from Hoffman’s experimental results, not to be confused with the more specific “’Fitness Beats Truth’ (FBT) Theorem,” from Prakash et al. (2020, p. 17). See also footnote 14.
The results of this latter series of games are captured in a technical ‘Fitness Beats Truth’ (FBT) Theorem, which is not to be confused with the Fitness Beats Truth thesis in this paper. The following is the technical ‘Fitness Beats Truth’ (FBT) Theorem: “Over all possible fitness functions and a priori measures, the probability that the Fitness-only perceptual strategy strictly dominates the Truth strategy is at least (X − 3)∕(X − 1), where X is the size of the perceptual space. As this size increases, this probability becomes arbitrarily close to 1: in the limit, Fitness-only will generically strictly dominate Truth, so driving the latter to extinction” (Prakash et al., 2020, p. 17).
These experiments are based on algorithms introduced by M. Mitchell (1998).
See Hoffman et al. (2015, pp. 1487–1488) for a summary of the experimental setup and results of Mark (2013) and see Prakash et al. (2020) for resource competition games between more sophisticated, Bayesian perceptual strategies. See Prakash et al. (2020, pp. 8–9) for the appeal to Gaussian fitness payoff functions.
“[T]he argument is that evolution by natural selection, one of the best-confirmed theories of contemporary science, applies not just to bodily traits but also to perceptual and cognitive traits” (Hoffman et al., 2015, p. 1490).
See footnote 3 for more on this kind of objection to ITP.
For instance, Hoffman replies to the objection appealing to human brain size by noting that in recent evolution our brains have been shrinking rapidly (Hoffman, 2019, pp. 64–65).
For a positive, realist constructivist view of perception, see Gładziejewski (forthcoming).
See Hoffman (2019, pp. 17–21).
See Hoffman (2019, pp. 123–124).
See footnote 5.
See Dawkins (1976, Chap. 11) for an introduction to memes as replicators, and Dawkins (1983) for a preliminary statement of Universal Darwinism. For a detailed characterization of Universal Darwinism as an algorithmic process, see Dennett (1995, pp. 48–60), and see Dennett (1995, pp. 335–369) for a detailed account of cultural evolution as a Darwinian process operating on memes.
See Prakash et al. (2020, p. 17). See footnote 14 for a full statement of the theorem.
Hoffman’s own position is not entirely clear. For instance, when scientists like Richard Dawkins and philosophers like Daniel Dennett draw inferences from evolutionary biology to Universal Darwinism, they seem to be doing so on the assumption that the former is an instance of the latter—and Hoffman is eager to enlist their support in justifying such a move (2019, p. 57). See Dawkins (1983) and Dennett (1995) for these more conventional characterizations of the relation between evolutionary biology and Universal Darwinism. Moreover, Hoffman sometimes invokes empirical evidence from evolutionary biology as if the latter is an instance of Universal Darwinism (2015, p. 1489). In other places Hoffman explicitly states that the claims made by our empirical scientific theories are false. See, e.g., Hoffman (2019, p. 65) and Hoffman et al. (2015, p. 1501).
However, Hoffman also seems to contradict (2) at key points. Recall that he leaves open the possibility that we can reason from the contents of our interfaces to those of the actual world (2019, p. 124) and that he takes the findings of ITP to contribute to empirical research in visual psychology (2009, §1.8). Moreover, he explicitly states that ITP makes testable predictions, at least in principle, about whether or not there are physical objects when no one’s looking (Ibid., Chap. 6). I shall take him to mean that these are in-principle possible inferences and empirical predictions, but ones that are exceedingly remote. Anything stronger would undercut ITP’s radical conclusions.
It is possible that we could have learned Universal Darwinism from a false scientific theory. When, as a child, one reads a story about fictional bears counting apples and learns that 2 + 2 = 4, one learns a truth even though the story is literally false. Perhaps Universal Darwinism is a priori justified, and evolutionary biology is just a set of experiences that enable us to learn it. This is Kant’s qualification that we can learn a priori truths through enabling empirical experiences. See Kant (1787 [1965, 43(B3)]).
I want to thank an anonymous reviewer for bringing this possibility to my attention.
Indeed, Hoffman presses the point that we ultimately should not believe our conscious processes arise from neural activity at all (see Hoffman, 2019, Chap. 3).
See footnote 25 above.
See Van Gulick (2022, §5.4) for a list of dualists so-motivated and their physicalist opponents, as well as context for the larger debate.
For a contrasting positive, realist theory that also takes perception as indirect evidence of the real world, see Gładziejewski (forthcoming).
I want to thank an anonymous reviewer for pointing out the importance of some of these connections.
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Acknowledgements
My deepest thanks to Dan Korman, Kevin Falvey, Thomas Barrett, Christopher Britton, Jason Hanschmann, David King, Alex LeBrun, Tom Costigan, Daniel Story, Celine Geday, Sangsu Kim, Rick Lamb, and Seán Pierce for helpful discussions and comments over many revisions. I am also grateful for the very valuable feedback and suggestions from several anonymous reviewers.
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Bagwell, J.N. Debunking interface theory: why Hoffman’s skepticism (really) is self-defeating. Synthese 201, 25 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-022-04021-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-022-04021-1