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Evolution, Language, and the Horizon of Knowledge
How language lets us transcend our evolved cognition
A major critique of evolutionary epistemology is that evolution doesn’t select for sense organs or brains capable of representing the world as it is in itself. Instead, evolution selects for modes of perception and cognition that help the organism get into satisfactory relations with the adaptively relevant features of its environment.
As Donald Hoffman, professor of cognitive science at UC-Irvine puts it, our perception of the world is a lot like the desktop interface we use to navigate our computers.
You could not form a true description of the innards of the computer if your entire view of reality was confined to the desktop. And yet the desktop is useful. That blue rectangular icon guides my behavior, and it hides a complex reality that I don’t need to know. That’s the key idea. Evolution has shaped us with perceptions that allow us to survive. They guide adaptive behaviors. But part of that involves hiding from us the stuff we don’t need to know. And that’s pretty much all of reality, whatever reality might be. If you had to spend all that time figuring it out, the tiger would eat you.
I have no problem with this analysis so far as it applies to biological evolution, but I hasten to add that…