SURVIVING IN AN AMBIGUOUS WORLD
2.1
Living with Uncertainty
We often assume that seeing clearly means seeing truthfully. But what if evolution shaped perception not for accuracy, but for survival?
This chapter turns to a second central question in epistemology: How true is what we can say about reality?
Working within a critical realist framework, we draw on evolutionary theory to examine the relation between experience, cognition, and survival. If cognition evolved under selective pressure, what does that imply about its accuracy? How closely must perception correspond to the external world for an organism to survive?
The introductory video outlines the conceptual tension that guides this chapter and situates the theories we will examine.
What We Mean by Cognition
The word cognition dates back to the fifteenth century, where it referred to thinking and awareness. In contemporary psychology, the term is used in a broader sense. In this course, we use cognition to describe the mental processes through which organisms acquire knowledge and make sense of the world. This includes processes such as perception, attention, memory, learning, thinking, and language.
Author: Fabian Müller
References
Brunswik, E. (1956). Perception and the representative design of psychological experiments (2nd ed.). University of California Press.
Haselton, M. G., & Buss, D. M. (2000). Error management theory: A new perspective on biases in cross-sex mind reading. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 78(1), 81–91. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.78.1.81 {:target=“_blank”}
Johnson, D. D. P., Blumstein, D. T., Fowler, J. H., & Haselton, M. G. (2013). The evolution of error: Error management, cognitive constraints, and adaptive decision-making biases. Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 28(8), 474–481. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tree.2013.05.014
Hoffman, D. D., Singh, M., & Prakash, C. (2015). The interface theory of perception. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 22(6), 1480–1506. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-015-0890-8