McKay & Dennett/The Evolution of Misbelief

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This unedited draft has been prepared only for potential commentators who wish to nominate themselves for formal commentary invitation. Please DO NOT write a commentary until you receive a formal invitation. If you are invited to submit a commentary, a copyedited, corrected version of this paper will be posted in the invitation letter. The commentary invitation list is compiled by the Editors so as to balance proposals, areas of expertise, and frequency of prior commentaries in BBS. TITLE: The Evolution of Misbelief AUTHORS: Ryan T. McKay & Daniel C. Dennett ABSTRACT: From an evolutionary standpoint, a default presumption is that true beliefs are adaptive and misbeliefs maladaptive. But if humans are biologically engineered to appraise the world accurately and to form true beliefs, how are we to explain the routine exceptions to this rule? How can we account for mistaken beliefs, bizarre delusions and instances of self-deception? We explore this question in some detail. We begin by articulating a distinction between two general types of misbelief: those resulting from a breakdown in the normal functioning of the belief formation system (e.g. delusions) and those arising in the normal course of that system’s operations (e.g. beliefs based on incomplete or inaccurate information). The former are instances of biological dysfunction or pathology, reflecting “culpable” limitations of evolutionary design. Although the latter category includes undesirable (but tolerable) by-products of “forgivably” limited design, our quarry is a contentious subclass of this category: misbeliefs best conceived as design features. Such misbeliefs, unlike occasional lucky falsehoods, would have been systematically adaptive in the evolutionary past. Such misbeliefs, furthermore, would not be reducible to judicious – but doxastically noncommittal - action policies. Finally, such misbeliefs would have been adaptive in themselves, constituting more than mere by-products of adaptively biased misbelief-producing systems. We explore a range of potential candidates for evolved misbelief, and conclude that, of those surveyed, only positive illusions meet our criteria. KEYWORDS: Adaptive, Belief, Delusions, Design, Evolution, Misbelief, Positive illusions, Religion, Self-deception. FULL TEXT: http://www.bbsonline.org/Preprints/McKay-08262008/Referees/ ================================================================== ================================================================== Instructions for BBS Associate Membership Commentators must be BBS Associates, or suggested by a BBS Associate. If you are not a BBS Associate, please follow the instructions below: Eligibility "Eligibility" usually means being an academically trained professional contributor to one of the disciplines mentioned earlier, or to related academic disciplines. 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