IMO, this “adaptive organism response” approach leads us beyond the “regime of truth” altogether.
The logocentric tendency in philosophy tends to understand belief as “thought stuff” that can be “put into words.” Then this “thought stuff” can “correspond or not” to “objective reality stuff.”
But, following pragmatism, I suggest that we understand belief as primarily non-verbal conduct. Instead of thought stuff in the pineal gland, belief is the “specificity” of the organism’s movement as vulnerable flesh in the world. Animals “crawl and leap” their belief.
The “corresponding of thought-stuff or not” is — in my view — significantly “alienated” from our embodied situation in the world. I worry about “bad thought beliefs” only because I worry about my hand being bitten off by a shark. I see Hume as having tried to point out “the brute autonomic empiricism” of our flesh. We cannot “ground” induction in “euclidean” terms. We go about our merry philosophical way, for the most part, without even noticing the fundamental “deductive groundlessness” of the basic sub-neck beliefs that we enact constantly. The search for a “proof” of this or that “system” via “pure mind-stuff logic” is therefore — seems to me — absurd.
So I would phrase your point above this way : animals move toward “value feeling” and away from “disvalue feeling.” We can explain this plausibly in terms of an evolved “below-the-neck-ware” that “guides” the animal — probabilistically, imperfectly — toward the successful transmission of its genes.
This “below-the-neck-ware” has never heard of “objective reality.” But it is immersed in pre-metaphysical natural-empirical reality. It “responds” to its umvelt. Animals with more developed nervous systems “navigate” the “temporal depth” of the world at an individual level. Of course insects like cicadas can do this in a “hard-wired” way at the species level.
Humans stand out, in my view, through the uncanny richness of their sign-system, which allows of course for the accumulation of technology on the planet that remakes the typical human environment entirely. Given the “glory” of this sign system, there’s a tendency to set the human above other animals not only in terms of complexity but in terms of a “pure leap” into a “pure conceptuality.” We might think of another ape species arranging sticks in a chain of shapes, to “prove” itself out of its situation.
For instance, I see mathematical platonism as a relatively “naked” expression of this theological urge. I then connect the use of “truth-as-mirroring” in non-empirical contexts to the tacit projection of an ideal ( sacred ) “POV.” In other words, “objective reality” is “umvelt for a panopiticonic God.” In mundane contexts, it’s a “reasonable” phrase— referring to perceptual situations that are imperfectly but sufficiently decidable in principle at least, but in metaphysics it leads to confusion. A “trans-empirical truth-making what-not” is taken for granted. If we stick to the “animal common sense” that the empirical world is the perceptual world, then the communal world as experienced world is world-for-animal. But we need not and should not “therefore” read “experience” as something other than environment-itself-from-POV. For instance, we don’t want to invent a “mind-stuff picture” between the animal and its environment. “Deep” belief is already body-stuff.
