To wake up one morning with a functional blue tentacle in place of my arm is an event of extremely low a priori probability. Hence we should expect that the explanation, should we find one, will be detailed enough to explain every aspect of the event. That is, we will immediately know we have found the right explanation when we encounter it.
The typical thing explained by evolutionary psychology, on the other hand, has a rather high a priori probability. For example, it might explain why one sex is generally better at some task than the other sex. The a priori probability is something like 50%. And plausible explanations are easy to come up with. The difficulty here is in choosing among all of the plausible candidate explanations.
Have we had an article that compared/contrasted evolutionary psychology with explaining the blue tentacle?
I don’t think the two have much in common.
To wake up one morning with a functional blue tentacle in place of my arm is an event of extremely low a priori probability. Hence we should expect that the explanation, should we find one, will be detailed enough to explain every aspect of the event. That is, we will immediately know we have found the right explanation when we encounter it.
The typical thing explained by evolutionary psychology, on the other hand, has a rather high a priori probability. For example, it might explain why one sex is generally better at some task than the other sex. The a priori probability is something like 50%. And plausible explanations are easy to come up with. The difficulty here is in choosing among all of the plausible candidate explanations.