Jacob Feldman: “On that narrow question, it seems to me that Hoffman et al.’s position cannot be disputed: evolution favors fitness, not truth, beauty, or anything else except insofar as it is correlated with fitness.
This is literally tautological in the context of Darwinian evolution, as it is essentially a restatement of what is meant by “fitness”—that which is favored by adaptive pressure. …”
Jacob Feldman, Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Science at Rutgers, focuses on Hoffman's “truth,” and it sure seems like he's agreeing with my layperson assessment that Hoffman's "truth" in ITP is a deception. I encourage you to see if you agree with my assessment of Feldman's short paper “Bayesian inference and “truth”: a comment on Hoffman, Singh, and Prakash,” the original comes in at 1800 words, and here I’ve trimmed it to 500 words worth of highlights that I hope encourage you to read Professor Heldman's entire paper.
Bayesian inference and “truth”: a comment on Hoffman, Singh, and Prakash
volume 22, pages 1523–1525 (2015), September 18, 2015
Abstract
Hoffman, Singh, and Prakash (in press) argue that veridicality is neither required nor achieved by the visual system, and propose a new framework in which the literal truth of perceptual inferences plays no role. In this brief comment, I concur with and advocate their basic position, though I go on to argue that Bayesian inference already embodies a similar epistemological stance.
That “vision usually provides us with a veridical representation of the world” is a cliche so hoary that we vision scientists hardly stop to think about whether it is actually true.
Hoffman et al. (in press) ask us to consider it a bit more carefully. Could such a truism actually be wrong?
It’s worse than wrong—it’s meaningless.
… Certainly, as Hoffman et al. would agree, the visual system does an exemplary job at resolving the ambiguity. But does it do so by giving us something true, or simply something useful? Or is this a distinction without a difference?
