What If Evolution Bred Reality Out of Us?

Re:What If Evolution Bred Reality Out of Us? by h4nkoslo on Tuesday September 06, 2016 @10:07PM (#12440577)

This is kind of trivially obvious, confirmed by every human sense having a different response curve than other animals, different species being able to deal with different abstractions (eg, certain dogs being able to recognize conditionals but not predicates) and so on.

I have to wonder if he's doing a Straussian thing and "really" talking about selected-for responses to certain obvious truths particularly relevant to evolutionary biologists.

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Re:What If Evolution Bred Reality Out of Us? by Darge on Tuesday September 06, 2016 @10:27PM (#12440635)

>certain dogs being able to recognize conditionals but not predicates

Could you elaborate on that, please? That sounds very interesting, but I couldn't find anything on my own.

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Re:What If Evolution Bred Reality Out of Us? by wahern on Wednesday September 07, 2016 @02:06AM (#12441238)

Try Googling for "Chrysippus' dog". That, at least, brings up hits like http://my.fit.edu/~aberdein/DogLogic.pdf. Just reading that paper made me realize that there were at least two dimensions in which the statement

  "different species being able to deal with different abstractions (eg, certain dogs being able to recognize conditionals but not predicates)"

could be be misinterpreted. Assuming you were looking (as was I) for experimental evidence supporting that specific statement, I'm guessing we'll both be disappointed. But maybe not!

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