Does Evolution Favor Accurate Perception? [Special Issue]
Issue: Issue 17 • Author/s: Adriano Angelucci, Vincenzo Fano, Gabriele Ferretti, Roberto Macrelli, Gino Tarozzi
Topics: Cognitive science, Epistemology, Metaphysics, Philosophy of mind, Philosophy of science, Theoretical philosophy
The currently mainstream view is that, in normal conditions, our perceptual representations are largely accurate, as natural selection tends to favor epistemically reliable perceptual systems. This latter assumption has been questioned by Donald Hoffman and his collaborators by drawing on the formal tools of evolutionary game theory. According to their model, an organism whose visual system were tuned to objective reality would be driven to extinction. We argue that their model fails to take environmental modifications into due account, and we show that, once such changes are incorporated into the…