Naturalistic philosophers rely on literature search and review in a number of ways and for different purposes. Yet this article shows how processes of literature search and review are likely to be affected by widespread and systematic biases. A solution to this problem is offered here. Whilst the tradition of systematic reviews of literature from scientific disciplines has been neglected in philosophy, systematic reviews are important tools that minimize bias in literature search and review and allow for greater reproducibility and (...) transparency. If naturalistic philosophers wish to reduce bias in their research, they should then supplement their traditional tools for literature search and review by including systematic methodologies. (shrink)

In this thesis, I will explore the epistemological evolutionary debunking arguments in meta-ethics. I will defend these arguments by accomplishing two tasks: I will offer the best way to understand the EDA and I will also respond to two strongest objections to the EDA. Firstly, in Part I of this thesis, I will offer my account of how the EDA should be best formulated. I will start from how evolution has significantly influenced our moral beliefs. I will then explain why, (...) due to their evolutionary origin, our moral beliefs are not tracking the moral truth reliably. Furthermore, I will argue that the fact that our moral beliefs are not tracking the moral truth also provides an undercutting and a higher-order defeater for those beliefs. As a result, I will conclude that the epistemic status of our moral beliefs is undermined because of these two kinds of defeaters. Secondly, in Part II of this thesis, I will turn my attention to the two strongest objections to the EDA – the Conceptual Truth Objection and the Third Factor Objection. I will first offer two responses to the Conceptual Truth Objection and, based on these two responses, I will argue that the Conceptual Truth Objection fails as a challenge to the EDA. I will then also argue that there currently doesn’t exist an acceptable version of the Third Factor Objection and it is also unlikely that such a version could be constructed in the future. I will finally conclude that both objections are problematic and they are thus unable to give us reason to doubt the EDA. (shrink)

Recently, evidentialists have argued that only they can explain transparency--the psychological phenomena wherein the question of doxastic deliberation of whether to believe p immediately gives way to the question of whether p--and thus that pragmatism about epistemic reasons is false. In this paper, we provide a defense of pragmatism. We depart from previous defenses of pragmatism which argue against the evidentialist explanation of transparency or the fact of transparency itself, by instead arguing that the pragmatist can provide a sound explanation (...) of transparency while maintaining her distinctive view of epistemic reasons. We do so by putting forth an evolutionary debunking explanation of doxastic deliberation. Since both the evidentialist and pragmatist have sound explanatory accounts of transparency, we argue that transparency should not be appealed to when trying to adjudicate the debate between evidentialists and pragmatists, but rather must be decided on other grounds. (shrink)

Scientific interest in religion often focusses on the “puzzle of belief”: how people develop and maintain religious beliefs despite a lack of evidence and the significant costs that those beliefs incur. A number of researchers have suggested that humans are predisposed towards supernatural thinking, with innate cognitive biases engendering, for example, the misattribution of intentional agency. Indeed, a number of studies have shown that nonbelievers often act “as if” they believe. For example, atheists are reluctant to sell the very souls (...) they deny having, or to angrily provoke the God they explicitly state does not exist. In our own recent work, participants who claimed not to believe in the afterlife nevertheless demonstrated a physiological fear response when informed that there was a ghost in the room. Such findings are often interpreted as evidence for an “implicit” belief in the supernatural that operates alongside (and even in contradiction to) an individual’s conscious (“explicit”) religious belief. In this article, we investigate these arguably tenuous constructs more deeply and suggest some possible empirical directions for further disentangling implicit and explicit reasoning. (shrink)

False beliefs and delusions are usually regarded negatively, especially in psychology and evolutionary biology. Recently, McKay and Dennett have argued that there are ungrounded beliefs which confer benefits on individuals even if they are false. I propose to expand this class of beliefs to include the belief that one has free will, and I will defend the claim that this belief is advantageous, even if it is false. One derives one’s belief in control from one’s experience of control, which is (...) generated by a set of cognitive systems termed “control systems.” While the control systems and the interpretive mechanism are useful in and of themselves, the belief in personal free will is adaptive because it directly leads to fitness-increasing behaviors. As such, we have good reason to regard the belief that one has free will as an adaptive, ungrounded belief. This paper will also suggest that further research on the possible distinction between belief in personal free will and belief in general free will may put us in a better position to understand recent, apparently contradictory data on individuals’ beliefs regarding free will and other related phenomena. (shrink)

In this thesis I propose a new way of understanding depressive illness as not exclusively harmful, but as related to particular, empirically evidenced, epistemic and pragmatic benefits for the subject, alongside the associated costs. For each of the benefits considered, I provide and concisely analyse the empirical evidence both in its favour and against it, suggest ways in which these benefits could apply in the circumstances presented, discuss some outstanding problems for that application as stated, and describe potential implications. The (...) issues discussed involve topics in cognitive psychology as well as in ethics, which I regard as complementary to the debate. I take the view that depression related phenomena such as low mood, low self-esteem, and mood-congruent delusions offer potential benefits to a subject under certain circumstances, but not under others. In discussing the hypotheses presented, I argue for a more complex view of depression, which includes its potential epistemic and pragmatic benefits as well as its costs and I propose possible directions for future research. (shrink)