The New Gospel

Even in the wild, it isn’t just perception and operant conditioning that have survival value.  The capacity to generalize from experience and to allow these generalizations, or general expectations, to be confirmed or disconfirmed by subsequent experience is also adaptive.  So is a basic disposition to maintain logical consistency in belief, by modifying beliefs when inconsistencies arise.  A further, very important step would be the capacity to correct individual appearances not only by reference to other conflicting appearances of one’s own but also by reference to how things appear to other perceivers.  That requires recognition of other minds, an ability with obvious adaptive potential.  The reach of these capacities can be greatly extended and deliberately exercised with the help of language, which also permits knowledge to be collectively created, accumulated, and transmitted.  With language we can hold in our minds and share with others alternative possibilities, and decide among them on the basis of their consistency or inconsistency with further observations.  Complex scientific theories that entail empirical predictions are therefore extensions of the highly adaptive capacity to learn from experience—our own and that of others.