Evolutionary Pressures on Belief Capacities

A compelling, natural, and well-worn thought is that beliefs are adaptive when they are true, and thus evolutionary pressures on our belief capacities are pressures towards accurate representation. It is well recognised that this can’t be the whole story. The idea that pressures on belief capacities are exhausted by appeal to accuracy fast loses credibility when we consider the ubiquity of false belief, especially those which do not seem to be failed attempts at accurate representation. In what follows I begin by making more explicit what is so appealing about the idea that beliefs are directed at accurate representation. I turn then to considering evolutionary pressures that lead capacities for belief formation away from truth, thus necessitating a more complex picture of the evolution of such capacities.