Abstract
According to the evolutionary sceptic, the fact that our cognitive faculties evolved radically
undermines their reliability. A number of evolutionary epistemologists have sought to refute
this kind of scepticism. This paper accepts the success of these attempts, yet argues that
refuting the evolutionary sceptic is not enough to put any particular domain of beliefs –
notably scientific beliefs, which include belief in Darwinian evolution – on a firm footing.
The paper thus sets out to contribute to this positive justificatory project, underdeveloped in
the literature. In contrast to a “wholesale” approach, attempting to secure justification for all
of our beliefs on the grounds that our belief-forming mechanisms evolved to track truth, we
propose a “piecemeal” approach of assessing the reliability of particular belief-forming
mechanisms in particular domains. This stands in contrast to the more familiar attempt to
transfer warrant obtained for one domain (e.g. common sense beliefs) to another (e.g.
scientific beliefs) by showing how one is somehow an extension of the other. We offer a
naturalist reply to the charge of circularity by appealing to reliabilist work on the problem of
induction, notably Peter Lipton’s distinction between self-certifying and non-self-certifying
inductive arguments. We show how, for scientific beliefs, a non-self-certifying argument
might be made for the reliability of our cognitive faculties in that domain. We call this
strategy Humean Bootstrapping,..