Conviction, Certainty and Argument

The world is careless of our phenomenological convictions - it produces them without warranting them. We might imagine that we have some 'evolutionary guarantee' that the internal products of our sensory apparatus contribute to our survival, but this comforting mythology can't be grounded, itself, in our phenomenological convictions; and Darwinian evolution selects on the basis of publicly available behaviours and characteristics - not on the normative character of intentional states. It is indifferent between lucky misconception and 'true knowledge'.

We might argue that, over time, evolution would tend to weed out ignorance and misconception. There isn't any evidence for this beyond our own, present, existence. This existence, though, is the outcome of just one of many rolls of the evolutionary dice; and we know already that it is very probably temporary. Attributing intentional states to past 'evolutionary successes' in support of a phenomenological evolutionary epistemology would be circular and gratuitous.

It is absurd to say that our whole language game is reliable because it has 'survived' an evolutionary process which can only be given an intelligible account of if the game is reliable ...