Philosophy Seminar Series: 23 Aug 2011, 2-4pm, Philosophy Resource Room; Speaker: Nicholas Smith, James F. Miller Professor of Humanities, Lewis & Clark College; Moderator: Dr. Ben Blumson

Abstract:
In this paper, I review the arguments for and against a defense of naturalized epistemology in terms of survival, and then offer a rather different account of why human evolution supports the reliability of our cognitive equipment.  I argue that philosophers’ appeals to the processes of natural selection that are adaptive in terms of survival have provided an incomplete picture of what naturalists have available to them to make the sort of defense skeptics claim cannot be made.  To supplement this picture, I provide evidence from what Darwin called “sexual selection” and also what others now call “social selection”  to provide a more complete picture of why it is reasonable to suppose that evolution has supplied human beings and many other animals highly reliable and also veridical cognitive processes.