Adaptivity and truth. A critique of Plantinga’s reasoning against evolutionary reliabilism

Abstract

The paper analyses the arguments put forward by Plantinga to justify his refutation of evolutionary reliabilism, i.e. the claim that the probability that the cognitive faculties, developed in the process of unguided evolution, are reliable is low. I argue that all the thought experiments offered by Plantinga to justify this thesis suffer from a common defect – they disregard the condition of evolution or fail to take it into account properly. In addition, I argue that pointing out the difficulties that naturalistic approaches have in explaining mental causation does not lead to Plantinga’s conclusion that in a naturalistic world there would be no mental causation whatsoever.

Keywords

• alvin plantinga
• darwin’s doubt
• evolutionary reliabilism
• the evolutionary argument against naturalism