Glen, 

In haste:  "what is the validator of a veridical perception?"

Nick 

Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
Clark University
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of u?l? ?
Sent: Thursday, September 12, 2019 6:25 PM
To: FriAM <friam@redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] query and observation

The best answer to "so what?" comes in Hoffman's paper:

  Natural selection and veridical perceptions
  http://www.cogsci.uci.edu/~ddhoff/PerceptualEvolution.pdf

from the abstract:
> We find that veridical perceptions can be driven to extinction by 
> non-veridical strategies that are tuned to utility rather than objective 
> reality.This suggests that natural selection need not favor veridical 
> perceptions, and that the effects of selection on sensory perception deserve 
> further study.

I haven't seen the book Dave mentions. But I suspect whatever it says cites 
these *games*. It's basically antithetic to the idea that the truth will win 
out over time/evolution. I.e. trust in the progress of metaphysical ideas is 
misplaced.

Coincidentally, I found this article interesting:

  Anti-Realist Pluralism: a New Approach to Folk Metaethics
  https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13164-019-00447-8

> Abstract
> 
> Many metaethicists agree that as ordinary people experience morality as a 
> realm of objective truths, we have a prima facie reason to believe that it 
> actually is such a realm. Recently, worries have been raised about the 
> validity of the extant psychological research on this argument’s empirical 
> hypothesis. Our aim is to advance this research, taking these worries into 
> account. First, we propose a new experimental design for measuring folk 
> intuitions about moral objectivity that may serve as an inspiration for 
> future studies. Then we report and discuss the results of a survey that was 
> based on this design. In our study, most of our participants denied the 
> existence of objective truths about most or all moral issues. In particular, 
> many of them had the intuition that whether moral sentences are true depends 
> both on their own moral beliefs and on the dominant moral beliefs within 
> their culture (“anti-realist pluralism”). This finding suggests that the 
> realist presumptive argument may have to be rejected and that instead 
> anti-realism may have a presumption in its favor.



On 9/12/19 10:59 AM, Steven A Smith wrote:
> By coincidence I had dinner and beers with Glen along the way, and I'm 
> pretty sure he has brought Hoffman's work up here a few times?
> [...]   So while I think Hoffman might be dead on, I still hold a bit 
> of "so what?" and "what does it help me do?".

--
☣ uǝlƃ
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