Nietzsche knew this, and Stephen Stich made the point decades ago; now here's an evolutionary game theoretic explanation, which is nicely done.
UPDATE: Philosopher Jonathan Cohen (UC San Diego) writes:
just saw that you posted a link to Hoffman's latest repackaging of the no-selection-for-veridical-perception thing he has been circulating for years. I would have left a curmudgeonly comment but you (sensibly) left comments off the post.
but just to say: Hoffman's piece is seriously confused about some basic philosophical issues concerning the nature of representation and veridicality, and his confusions completely undermine his arguments -- including the evolutionary game theoretic argument, which just build them in.
so, for example, his attack on representation depends on construing that notion in an implausibly strong way (for A to represent B, it must be true that A=B) that, as far as I can tell, isn't defended by any serious proponent of a representational construal of perception.
another example: while the headline claim is that selection favors an interface strategy tuned to payoffs over a strategy that veridically represents resources, what the simulation actually shows is that one strategy involving veridical representation (of payoffs) beats another strategy involving veridical representation (of something that the game is constructed to make come apart from payoffs, viz., resources). that hardly shows that selection favors strategies that avoid veridical representation.
a number of people have tried to point out some of the problems, but Hoffman hasn't seemed to display a lot of uptake over the years. ah, well. (fwiw, my own short response to him from the Psychonomic Bulletin on the topic in 2015 makes some of what I think are the relevant criticisms in a reasonably readable format: https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13423-014-0782-3 .)
and now that that's off my chest I will descend from the soapbox....
I will open comments, if others want to weigh in pro- or con-. Submit your comment only once, it may take awhile to appear.
