Abstract

Here I pose a challenge to realism about knowledge, the view that facts about knowledge are non-trivially mind-independent, adapting an evolutionary debunking argument from metaethics. In brief: Our beliefs about knowledge are the products of innate knowledge-representing capacities with a deep and well documented evolutionary history, and, crucially, this history indicates that such capacities are indifferent to whether there are any mind-independent facts about knowledge. Instead, knowledge-representing capacities are likely just a byproduct of processing limitations on primate cognition. This presents an explanatory challenge for the knowledge realist—How is it, then, that we nonetheless happen to have many true beliefs about knowledge? I’ll argue that, without abandoning the non-naturalism that characterizes much of contemporary epistemology, realism struggles to provide a compelling answer. In contrast, evolutionary anti-realism, the view advocated for here, meets the explanatory challenge head-on. Facts about knowledge are grounded in facts about what our innate knowledge-representing capacities classify as knowledge, so it’s no surprise that we have many true beliefs about knowledge. While none of this shows that realism about knowledge is false, these considerations give us ceteris paribus reason to prefer an anti-realist approach.