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Evolution does not select for veridical perception

Brian Leiter

Nietzsche knew this, and Stephen Stich made the point decades ago; now here's an evolutionary game theoretic explanation, which is nicely done.

UPDATE:  Philosopher Jonathan Cohen (UC San Diego) writes:

just saw that you posted a link to Hoffman's latest repackaging of the no-selection-for-veridical-perception thing he has been circulating for years. I would have left a curmudgeonly comment but you (sensibly) left comments off the post.

but just to say: Hoffman's piece is seriously confused about some basic philosophical issues concerning the nature of representation and veridicality, and his confusions completely undermine his arguments — including the evolutionary game theoretic argument, which just build them in. 

so, for example, his attack on representation depends on construing that notion in an implausibly strong way (for A to represent B, it must be true that A=B) that, as far as I can tell, isn't defended by any serious proponent of a representational construal of perception.

another example: while the headline claim is that selection favors an interface  strategy tuned to payoffs over a strategy that veridically represents resources, what the simulation actually shows is that one strategy involving veridical representation (of payoffs) beats another strategy involving veridical representation (of something that the game is constructed to make come apart from payoffs, viz., resources). that hardly shows that selection favors strategies that avoid veridical representation.

a number of people have tried to point out some of the problems, but Hoffman hasn't seemed to display a lot of uptake over the years. ah, well. (fwiw, my own short response to him from the Psychonomic Bulletin on the topic in 2015 makes some of what I think are the relevant criticisms in a reasonably readable format: https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13423-014-0782-3 .)

and now that that's off my chest I will descend from the soapbox….

I will open comments, if others want to weigh in pro- or con-.   Submit your comment only once, it may take awhile to appear.

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9 responses to “Evolution does not select for veridical perception”

  1. Mohan Matthen

    I agree with Jonathan Cohen. Hoffman's work, which goes back to the early eighties, is about the tricks that the visual system uses to reconstruct the real world. For example, he memorably and very convincingly showed how concave discontinuities in a two-dimensional projection reliably indicate a three-dimensional occlusion, i.e., one 3d object standing in front of, and partially hiding, another. But instead of putting the point in the way I just have, he suggests that the visual system literally creates the three-dimensional objects, and that evolution "hides the truth from our eyes." (Crazy! What truth does it hide? That there are only two-dimensional objects?) Hoffman is a clever psychonomist (if that's a word) but a lousy philosopher. He has an ontology of the proximal: the eye "creates" anything that goes beyond the two-dimensional pattern on the retina.

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  2. David Hilbert

    I'll just reinforce one of Jonathan's points. At most, Hoffman's work shows that what is veridically represented may not be what it is typically taken to be. Perhaps perception represents Gibsonian affordances or complex construction out of simple physical properties. So the startling conclusion isn't justified by the argument even if the astoundingly simplistic and unmotivated claims about representation are granted.

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  3. Ned Block

    I agree with Mohan and Jonathan about Hoffman's views. On the original topic of whether evolution might to some extent select for non-veridical perception, many philosophers have given hypothetical examples. Chris Peacocke's 1993 "Externalist Explanation" gives a much discussed example of a prey animal whose perceptual system registers a 30 foot distance to a predator as 20 feet with a consequent survival benefit. However, Adrienne Prettyman's 2019 paper in Philosophical Psychology sketches a number of REAL cases in which human spatial vision involves systematic inaccuracies that benefit us by enhancing discrimination abilities.

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  4. Mohan Matthen

    Chris Stephens has a great piece on better-safe-than-sorry scenarios. (“When is it Selectively Advantageous to Have True Beliefs? Sandwiching the Better-Safe-than-Sorry Argument,” Philosophical Studies 105/2, (2001): 161-189.) The bottom line, as I remember it, is that examples like Peacocke's (cited by Ned Block in comment 3) work fine if the appearance of closeness if it's a special purpose perceptual appearance restricted to possible predation events. (Something like startle.) But if it's a general-purpose perception of distance, then it wouldn't work so well—it wouldn't be great, for instance, if everything (including food) looked closer by than it really is. The advantage of exaggerating predator proximity would be counter-balanced by the disadvantage of over-estimating the ease of getting provisioned.

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  5. Post-Doc

    “I am questioning nothing that any scientist says on weekdays in his working tone of voice. But I certainly am questioning most of what a very few of them say in an edifying voice on Sundays.” Gilbert Ryle, Dilemmas (1954), p.74

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  6. Eric

    Am I wrong to say that Hoffman’s position is basically Kant, but now with a evolutionary foundation?

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  7. Mohan Matthen

    I don't think it's Kant, because Kant doesn't believe in lies with payoff. It's basically sceptical about anything beyond the immediate evidence. Even if you treat a dark shadow on your screen as a steering wheel (in Grand Theft Auto), it's still not a steering wheel . . . just a visual construct. So also the real steering wheel when you are actually driving. That's the "argument, I think.

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  8. Eric

    Well yes, Kant didn’t have an evolutionary game theoretic account of payoffs – he relied on a transcendental argument instead. Still, the underlying description of reality Hoffman describes, where all perceptual experiences, like a steering wheel, and including spacetime itself, are purely mental constructs that we all share due to our common facilities (now with a Darwinian basis), and have little or nothing to do with the world as it really is, sounds a lot to me like Kant’s metaphysics and the noumenal/phenomenal distinction.

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  9. Mohan Matthen

    A very charitable take! I see what you are getting at (but would Hoffman?).

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