Switch to: References

Add citations

You must login to add citations.
  1. Naked statistical evidence and verdictive justice.Sherrilyn Roush - forthcoming - Analytic Philosophy.
    What is it for the verdict of a criminal trial to be just? It is widely agreed that a Guilty verdict is just only if the defendant did the relevant deed, and only if his rights were not violated in the process of apprehending, charging, and convicting him. I argue that more is required: he must be found Guilty because he is guilty, and not solely for other reasons. The conviction must be based on the guilt. I argue that many (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • The sensitivity of legal proof.Guido Melchior - 2024 - Synthese 203 (5):1-23.
    The proof paradox results from conflicting intuitions concerning different types of fallible evidence in a court of law. We accept fallible individual evidence but reject fallible statistical evidence even when the conditional probability that the defendant is guilty given the evidence is the same, a seeming inconsistency. This paper defends a solution to the proof paradox, building on a sensitivity account of checking and settling a question. The proposed sensitivity account of legal proof not only requires sensitivity simpliciter but sensitivity (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Certainty Beyond a Reasonable Doubt.Giovanni Tuzet - 2023 - Contemporary Pragmatism 20 (4):398-423.
    The paper argues for a pragmatist understanding of the reasonable doubt standard in law. It builds on the idea that our dispositions to act signal the epistemic states we are in. This helps clarify the notion of a reasonable doubt and the idea of being certain beyond it. More specifically, the paper points out three major standards of proof used in legal contexts and the rationale of their distinction. It articulates the received view according to which the reasonable doubt standard (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Just Probabilities.Chad Lee-Stronach - forthcoming - Noûs.
    I defend the thesis that legal standards of proof are reducible to thresholds of probability. Many have rejected this thesis because it seems to entail that defendants can be found liable solely on the basis of statistical evidence. I argue that this inference is invalid. I do so by developing a view, called Legal Causalism, that combines Thomson's (1986) causal analysis of evidence with recent work in formal theories of causal inference. On this view, legal standards of proof can be (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Statistical evidence and algorithmic decision-making.Sune Holm - 2023 - Synthese 202 (1):1-16.
    The use of algorithms to support prediction-based decision-making is becoming commonplace in a range of domains including health, criminal justice, education, social services, lending, and hiring. An assumption governing such decisions is that there is a property Y such that individual a should be allocated resource R by decision-maker D if a is Y. When there is uncertainty about whether a is Y, algorithms may provide valuable decision support by accurately predicting whether a is Y on the basis of known (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • On Relativizing the Sensitivity Condition to Belief-Formation Methods.Bin Zhao - 2024 - American Philosophical Quarterly 61 (2):165-175.
    According to the sensitivity account of knowledge, S knows that p only if S's belief in p is sensitive in the sense that S would not believe that p if p were false. It is widely accepted that the sensitivity condition should be relativized to belief-formation methods to avoid putative counterexamples. A remaining issue for the account is how belief-formation methods should be individuated. In this paper, I argue that while a coarse-grained individuation is still susceptible to counterexamples, a fine-grained (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • Meta-uncertainty and the proof paradoxes.Katie Steele & Mark Colyvan - 2023 - Philosophical Studies 180 (7):1927-1950.
    Various real and imagined criminal law cases rest on “naked statistical evidence”. That is, they rest more or less entirely on a probability for guilt/liability derived from a single statistical model. The intuition is that there is something missing in these cases, high as the probability for guilt/liability may be, such that the relevant standard for legal proof is not met. Here we contribute to the considerable debate about how this intuition is best explained and what it teaches us about (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • A Causal Safety Criterion for Knowledge.Jonathan Vandenburgh - forthcoming - Erkenntnis:1-21.
    Safety purports to explain why cases of accidentally true belief are not knowledge, addressing Gettier cases and cases of belief based on statistical evidence. However, problems arise for using safety as a condition on knowledge: safety is not necessary for knowledge and cannot always explain the Gettier cases and cases of statistical evidence it is meant to address. In this paper, I argue for a new modal condition designed to capture the non-accidental relationship between facts and evidence required for knowledge: (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Merely statistical evidence: when and why it justifies belief.Paul Silva - 2023 - Philosophical Studies 180 (9):2639-2664.
    It is one thing to hold that merely statistical evidence is _sometimes_ insufficient for rational belief, as in typical lottery and profiling cases. It is another thing to hold that merely statistical evidence is _always_ insufficient for rational belief. Indeed, there are cases where statistical evidence plainly does justify belief. This project develops a dispositional account of the normativity of statistical evidence, where the dispositions that ground justifying statistical evidence are connected to the goals (= proper function) of objects. There (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   7 citations  
  • Encroachment on Emotion.James Fritz - 2022 - Episteme 19 (4):515-533.
    This paper introduces a novel form of pragmatic encroachment: one that makes a difference to the status of emotion rather than the status of belief. I begin by isolating a distinctive standard in terms of which we can evaluate emotion – one sometimes called “subjective fittingness,” “epistemic justification,” or “warrant.” I then show how this standard for emotion could face a kind of pragmatic encroachment importantly similar to the more familiar encroachment on epistemic standards for belief. Encroachment on warranted emotion (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • Profiling and Proof: Are Statistics Safe?Georgi Gardiner - 2020 - Philosophy 95 (2):161-183.
    Many theorists hold that outright verdicts based on bare statistical evidence are unwarranted. Bare statistical evidence may support high credence, on these views, but does not support outright belief or legal verdicts of culpability. The vignettes that constitute the lottery paradox and the proof paradox are marshalled to support this claim. Some theorists argue, furthermore, that examples of profiling also indicate that bare statistical evidence is insufficient for warranting outright verdicts.I examine Pritchard's and Buchak's treatments of these three kinds of (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   12 citations  
  • In defence of the modal account of legal risk.Duncan Pritchard - 2022 - Synthese 200 (4):1-16.
    This paper offers an articulation and defence of the modal account of legal risk in light of a range of objections that have been proposed against this view in the recent literature. It is argued that these objections all trade on a failure to distinguish between the modal nature of risk more generally, and the application of this modal account to particular decision-making contexts, such as legal contexts, where one must rely on a restricted body of information. It is argued (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  • The Foundations of Criminal Law Epistemology.Lewis Ross - 2022 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 9.
    Legal epistemology has been an area of great philosophical growth since the turn of the century. But recently, a number of philosophers have argued the entire project is misguided, claiming that it relies on an illicit transposition of the norms of individual epistemology to the legal arena. This paper uses these objections as a foil to consider the foundations of legal epistemology, particularly as it applies to the criminal law. The aim is to clarify the fundamental commitments of legal epistemology (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • Probability of Guilt.Mario Günther - manuscript
    In legal proceedings, a fact-finder needs to decide whether a defendant is guilty or not based on probabilistic evidence. We defend the thesis that the defendant should be found guilty just in case it is rational for the fact-finder to believe that the defendant is guilty. We draw on Leitgeb’s stability theory for an appropriate notion of rational belief and show how our thesis solves the problem of statistical evidence. Finally, we defend our account of legal proof against challenges from (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Fairness in Machine Learning: Against False Positive Rate Equality as a Measure of Fairness.Robert Long - 2021 - Journal of Moral Philosophy 19 (1):49-78.
    As machine learning informs increasingly consequential decisions, different metrics have been proposed for measuring algorithmic bias or unfairness. Two popular “fairness measures” are calibration and equality of false positive rate. Each measure seems intuitively important, but notably, it is usually impossible to satisfy both measures. For this reason, a large literature in machine learning speaks of a “fairness tradeoff” between these two measures. This framing assumes that both measures are, in fact, capturing something important. To date, philosophers have seldom examined (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   7 citations  
  • n-1 Guilty Men.Clayton Littlejohn & Julien Dutant - forthcoming - In Simon Kirchin (ed.), The Future of Normativity. Oxford:
    We argue that there is nothing that can do the work that normative reasons are expected to do. A currently popular view is that in any given situation, a set of normative reasons (understood as a set of facts, typically about the agent’s situation) always determines the ways we prospectively should or should not respond. We discuss an example that we think shows no such collection of facts could have this normative significance. A radical response might be to dispense with (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Justification, excuse, and proof beyond reasonable doubt.Hock Lai Ho - 2021 - Philosophical Issues 31 (1):146-166.
    Philosophical Issues, Volume 31, Issue 1, Page 146-166, October 2021.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Opacity of Character: Virtue Ethics and the Legal Admissibility of Character Evidence.Jacob Smith & Georgi Gardiner - 2021 - Philosophical Issues 31 (1):334-354.
    Many jurisdictions prohibit or severely restrict the use of evidence about a defendant’s character to prove legal culpability. Situationists, who argue that conduct is largely determined by situational features rather than by character, can easily defend this prohibition. According to situationism, character evidence is misleading or paltry. -/- Proscriptions on character evidence seem harder to justify, however, on virtue ethical accounts. It appears that excluding character evidence either denies the centrality of character for explaining conduct—the situationist position—or omits probative evidence. (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Algorithms and the Individual in Criminal Law.Renée Jorgensen - 2022 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 52 (1):1-17.
    Law-enforcement agencies are increasingly able to leverage crime statistics to make risk predictions for particular individuals, employing a form of inference that some condemn as violating the right to be “treated as an individual.” I suggest that the right encodes agents’ entitlement to a fair distribution of the burdens and benefits of the rule of law. Rather than precluding statistical prediction, it requires that citizens be able to anticipate which variables will be used as predictors and act intentionally to avoid (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  • When statistical evidence is not specific enough.Marcello Di Bello - 2021 - Synthese 199 (5-6):12251-12269.
    Many philosophers have pointed out that statistical evidence, or at least some forms of it, lack desirable epistemic or non-epistemic properties, and that this should make us wary of litigations in which the case against the defendant rests in whole or in part on statistical evidence. Others have responded that such broad reservations about statistical evidence are overly restrictive since appellate courts have expressed nuanced views about statistical evidence. In an effort to clarify and reconcile, I put forward an interpretive (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • Does legal epistemology rest on a mistake? On fetishism, two‐tier system design, and conscientious fact‐finding.David Enoch, Talia Fisher & Levi Spectre - 2021 - Philosophical Issues 31 (1):85-103.
    Philosophical Issues, Volume 31, Issue 1, Page 85-103, October 2021.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations  
  • Justice in epistemic gaps: The ‘proof paradox’ revisited.Lewis Ross - 2021 - Philosophical Issues 31 (1):315-333.
    This paper defends the heretical view that, at least in some cases, we ought to assign legal liability based on purely statistical evidence. The argument draws on prominent civil law litigation concerning pharmaceutical negligence and asbestos-poisoning. The overall aim is to illustrate moral pitfalls that result from supposing that it is never appropriate to rely on bare statistics when settling a legal dispute.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  • Fitting anxiety and prudent anxiety.James Fritz - 2021 - Synthese 199 (3-4):8555-8578.
    Most agree that, in some special scenarios, prudence can speak against feeling a fitting emotion. Some go further, arguing that the tension between fittingness and prudence afflicts some emotions in a fairly general way. This paper goes even further: it argues that, when it comes to anxiety, the tension between fittingness and prudence is nearly inescapable. On any plausible theory, an enormous array of possible outcomes are both bad and epistemically uncertain in the right way to ground fitting anxiety. What’s (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   9 citations  
  • De Re Beliefs and Evidence in Legal Cases.Samuel J. Thomas - 2021 - Dissertation, Arizona State University
    For the past half-century, both jurisprudence and epistemology have been haunted by questions about why individual evidence (i.e., evidence which picks out a specific individual) can sufficiently justify a guilty or liable verdict while bare statistical evidence (i.e., statistical evidence which does not pick out a specific individual) does not sufficiently justify such a verdict. This thesis examines three popular justifications for such a disparity in verdicts – Judith Jarvis Thomson’s causal account, Enoch et al.’s sensitivity account, and Sarah Moss’ (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Profiling, Neutrality, and Social Equality.Lewis Ross - 2022 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 100 (4):808-824.
    I argue that traditional views on which beliefs are subject only to purely epistemic assessment can reject demographic profiling, even when based on seemingly robust evidence. This is because the moral failures involved in demographic profiling can be located in the decision not to suspend judgment, rather than supposing that beliefs themselves are a locus of moral evaluation. A key moral reason to suspend judgment when faced with adverse demographic evidence is to promote social equality—this explains why positive profiling is (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations  
  • Civil liability and the 50%+ standard of proof.Martin Smith - 2021 - International Journal of Evidence and Proof 25 (3):183-199.
    The standard of proof applied in civil trials is the preponderance of evidence, often said to be met when a proposition is shown to be more than 50% likely to be true. A number of theorists have argued that this 50%+ standard is too weak – there are circumstances in which a court should find that the defendant is not liable, even though the evidence presented makes it more than 50% likely that the plaintiff’s claim is true. In this paper, (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • Statistical resentment, or: what’s wrong with acting, blaming, and believing on the basis of statistics alone.David Enoch & Levi Spectre - 2021 - Synthese 199 (3-4):5687-5718.
    Statistical evidence—say, that 95% of your co-workers badmouth each other—can never render resenting your colleague appropriate, in the way that other evidence (say, the testimony of a reliable friend) can. The problem of statistical resentment is to explain why. We put the problem of statistical resentment in several wider contexts: The context of the problem of statistical evidence in legal theory; the epistemological context—with problems like the lottery paradox for knowledge, epistemic impurism and doxastic wrongdoing; and the context of a (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   10 citations  
  • More on Normic Support and the Criminal Standard of Proof.Martin Smith - 2021 - Mind 130 (519):943-960.
    In this paper I respond to Marcello Di Bello’s criticisms of the ‘normic account’ of the criminal standard of proof. In so doing, I further elaborate on what the normic account predicts about certain significant legal categories of evidence, including DNA and fingerprint evidence and eyewitness identifications.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations  
  • Teaching & Learning Guide for: The Relationship Between Belief and Credence.Elizabeth Jackson - 2020 - Philosophy Compass 15 (6):e12670.
    This guide accompanies the following article(s): Jackson, E., Philosophy Compass 15/6 (2020) pp. 1-13 10.1111/phc3.12668.x.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  • Relevance and risk: How the relevant alternatives framework models the epistemology of risk.Georgi Gardiner - 2020 - Synthese 199 (1-2):481-511.
    The epistemology of risk examines how risks bear on epistemic properties. A common framework for examining the epistemology of risk holds that strength of evidential support is best modelled as numerical probability given the available evidence. In this essay I develop and motivate a rival ‘relevant alternatives’ framework for theorising about the epistemology of risk. I describe three loci for thinking about the epistemology of risk. The first locus concerns consequences of relying on a belief for action, where those consequences (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   25 citations  
  • Belief, Credence and Statistical Evidence.Davide Fassio & Jie Gao - 2020 - Theoria 86 (4):500-527.
    According to the Rational Threshold View, a rational agent believes p if and only if her credence in p is equal to or greater than a certain threshold. One of the most serious challenges for this view is the problem of statistical evidence: statistical evidence is often not sufficient to make an outright belief rational, no matter how probable the target proposition is given such evidence. This indicates that rational belief is not as sensitive to statistical evidence as rational credence. (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  • Explaining the Justificatory Asymmetry between Statistical and Individualized Evidence.Renee Bolinger - 2021 - In Jon Robson & Zachary Hoskins (eds.), The Social Epistemology of Legal Trials. Routledge. pp. 60-76.
    In some cases, there appears to be an asymmetry in the evidential value of statistical and more individualized evidence. For example, while I may accept that Alex is guilty based on eyewitness testimony that is 80% likely to be accurate, it does not seem permissible to do so based on the fact that 80% of a group that Alex is a member of are guilty. In this paper I suggest that rather than reflecting a deep defect in statistical evidence, this (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   9 citations  
  • The Relationship Between Belief and Credence.Elizabeth G. Jackson - 2020 - Philosophy Compass 15 (6):1–13.
    Sometimes epistemologists theorize about belief, a tripartite attitude on which one can believe, withhold belief, or disbelieve a proposition. In other cases, epistemologists theorize about credence, a fine-grained attitude that represents one’s subjective probability or confidence level toward a proposition. How do these two attitudes relate to each other? This article explores the relationship between belief and credence in two categories: descriptive and normative. It then explains the broader significance of the belief-credence connection and concludes with general lessons from the (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   49 citations  
  • Recent work on the proof paradox.Lewis D. Ross - 2020 - Philosophy Compass 15 (6):e12667.
    Recent years have seen fresh impetus brought to debates about the proper role of statistical evidence in the law. Recent work largely centres on a set of puzzles known as the ‘proof paradox’. While these puzzles may initially seem academic, they have important ramifications for the law: raising key conceptual questions about legal proof, and practical questions about DNA evidence. This article introduces the proof paradox, why we should care about it, and new work attempting to resolve it.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   15 citations  
  • Statistical Evidence, Normalcy, and the Gatecrasher Paradox.Michael Blome-Tillmann - 2020 - Mind 129 (514):563-578.
    Martin Smith has recently proposed, in this journal, a novel and intriguing approach to puzzles and paradoxes in evidence law arising from the evidential standard of the Preponderance of the Evidence. According to Smith, the relation of normic support provides us with an elegant solution to those puzzles. In this paper I develop a counterexample to Smith’s approach and argue that normic support can neither account for our reluctance to base affirmative verdicts on bare statistical evidence nor resolve the pertinent (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations  
  • Can Pragmatists Be Moderate?Alex Worsnip - 2021 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 102 (3):531-558.
    In discussions of whether and how pragmatic considerations can make a difference to what one ought to believe, two sets of cases feature. The first set, which dominates the debate about pragmatic reasons for belief, is exemplified by cases of being financially bribed to believe (or withhold from believing) something. The second set, which dominates the debate about pragmatic encroachment on epistemic justification, is exemplified by cases where acting on a belief rashly risks some disastrous outcome if the belief turns (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   44 citations  
  • The disvalue of knowledge.David Papineau - 2019 - Synthese 198 (6):5311-5332.
    I argue that the concept of knowledge is a relic of a bygone age, erroneously supposed to do no harm. I illustrate this claim by showing how a concern with knowledge distorts the use of statistical evidence in criminal courts, and then generalize the point to show that this concern hampers our enterprises across the board and not only in legal contexts.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   28 citations  
  • Demographic statistics in defensive decisions.Renée Jorgensen Bolinger - 2019 - Synthese 198 (5):4833-4850.
    A popular informal argument suggests that statistics about the preponderance of criminal involvement among particular demographic groups partially justify others in making defensive mistakes against members of the group. One could worry that evidence-relative accounts of moral rights vindicate this argument. After constructing the strongest form of this objection, I offer several replies: most demographic statistics face an unmet challenge from reference class problems, even those that meet it fail to ground non-negligible conditional probabilities, even if they did, they introduce (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  • Against the Alleged Insufficiency of Statistical Evidence.Sam Fox Krauss - 2020 - Florida State University Law Review 47:801-825.
    Over almost a half-century, evidence law scholars and philosophers have contended with what have come to be called the “Proof Paradoxes.” In brief, the following sort of paradox arises: Factfinders in criminal and civil trials are charged with reaching a verdict if the evidence presented meets a particular standard of proof—beyond a reasonable doubt, in criminal cases, and preponderance of the evidence, in civil trials. It seems that purely statistical evidence can suffice for just such a level of certainty in (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations  
  • Profile Evidence, Fairness, and the Risks of Mistaken Convictions.Marcello Di Bello & Collin O’Neil - 2020 - Ethics 130 (2):147-178.
    Many oppose the use of profile evidence against defendants at trial, even when the statistical correlations are reliable and the jury is free from prejudice. The literature has struggled to justify this opposition. We argue that admitting profile evidence is objectionable because it violates what we call “equal protection”—that is, a right of innocent defendants not to be exposed to higher ex ante risks of mistaken conviction compared to other innocent defendants facing similar charges. We also show why admitting other (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   11 citations  
  • Modal Security.Justin Clarke-Doane & Dan Baras - 2019 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 102 (1):162-183.
    Modal Security is an increasingly discussed proposed necessary condition on undermining defeat. Modal Security says, roughly, that if evidence undermines (rather than rebuts) one’s belief, then one gets reason to doubt the belief's safety or sensitivity. The primary interest of the principle is that it seems to entail that influential epistemological arguments, including Evolutionary Debunking Arguments against moral realism and the Benacerraf-Field Challenge for mathematical realism, are unsound. The purpose of this paper is to critically examine Modal Security in detail. (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   24 citations  
  • The Specter of Normative Conflict: Does Fairness Require Inaccuracy?Rima Basu - 2020 - In Erin Beeghly & Alex Madva (eds.), An Introduction to Implicit Bias: Knowledge, Justice, and the Social Mind. New York, NY, USA: Routledge. pp. 191-210.
    A challenge we face in a world that has been shaped by, and continues to be shaped by, racist attitudes and institutions is that the evidence is often stacked in favor of racist beliefs. As a result, we may find ourselves facing the following conflict: what if the evidence we have supports something we morally shouldn’t believe? For example, it is morally wrong to assume, solely on the basis of someone’s skin color, that they’re a staff member. But, what if (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   10 citations  
  • Rehabilitating Statistical Evidence.Lewis Ross - 2019 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 102 (1):3-23.
    Recently, the practice of deciding legal cases on purely statistical evidence has been widely criticised. Many feel uncomfortable with finding someone guilty on the basis of bare probabilities, even though the chance of error might be stupendously small. This is an important issue: with the rise of DNA profiling, courts are increasingly faced with purely statistical evidence. A prominent line of argument—endorsed by Blome-Tillmann 2017; Smith 2018; and Littlejohn 2018—rejects the use of such evidence by appealing to epistemic norms that (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   27 citations  
  • Belief and Credence: A Defense of Dualism.Elizabeth Jackson - 2019 - Dissertation, University of Notre Dame
    Belief is a familiar attitude: taking something to be the case or regarding it as true. But we are more confident in some of our beliefs than in others. For this reason, many epistemologists appeal to a second attitude, called credence, similar to a degree of confidence. This raises the question: how do belief and credence relate to each other? On a belief-first view, beliefs are more fundamental and credences are a species of beliefs, e.g. beliefs about probabilities. On a (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Belief, Credence, and Evidence.Elizabeth Jackson - 2020 - Synthese 197 (11):5073-5092.
    I explore how rational belief and rational credence relate to evidence. I begin by looking at three cases where rational belief and credence seem to respond differently to evidence: cases of naked statistical evidence, lotteries, and hedged assertions. I consider an explanation for these cases, namely, that one ought not form beliefs on the basis of statistical evidence alone, and raise worries for this view. Then, I suggest another view that explains how belief and credence relate to evidence. My view (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   42 citations  
  • Belief in a Fallen World.Robert Pasnau - 2018 - Res Philosophica 95 (3):531-559.
    In an ideal epistemic world, our beliefs would correspond to our evidence, and our evidence would be bountiful. In the world we live in, however, if we wish to live meaningful lives, other epistemic strategies are necessary. Here I attempt to work out, systematically, the ways in which evidentialism fails us as a guide to belief. This is so preeminently for lives of a religious character, but the point applies more broadly.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  • The rational impermissibility of accepting (some) racial generalizations.Renée Jorgensen Bolinger - 2020 - Synthese 197 (6):2415-2431.
    I argue that inferences from highly probabilifying racial generalizations are not solely objectionable because acting on such inferences would be problematic, or they violate a moral norm, but because they violate a distinctively epistemic norm. They involve accepting a proposition when, given the costs of a mistake, one is not adequately justified in doing so. First I sketch an account of the nature of adequate justification—practical adequacy with respect to eliminating the ~p possibilities from one’s epistemic statespace. Second, I argue (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   91 citations  
  • Belief, Credence, and Faith.Elizabeth Jackson - 2019 - Religious Studies 55 (2):153-168.
    In this article, I argue that faith’s going beyond the evidence need not compromise faith’s epistemic rationality. First, I explain how some of the recent literature on belief and credence points to a distinction between what I call B-evidence and C-evidence. Then, I apply this distinction to rational faith. I argue that if faith is more sensitive to B-evidence than to C-evidence, faith can go beyond the evidence and still be epistemically rational.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   19 citations  
  • Overcoming Luck: Two Trends in Legal Philosophy.Jeffrey S. Helmreich - 2018 - Analysis 78 (2):335-347.
    © The Author 2018. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Analysis Trust. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: [email protected] article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model...Philosophy of law was until recently dominated by abstract investigation into the nature of law, a pursuit known as ‘general jurisprudence’. In this way, it resembled a branch of metaphysics or mid-twentieth century philosophy of mind, seeking to uncover the essential properties (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • Legal Burdens of Proof and Statistical Evidence.Georgi Gardiner - 2018 - In David Coady & James Chase (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Applied Epistemology. New York: Routledge.
    In order to perform certain actions – such as incarcerating a person or revoking parental rights – the state must establish certain facts to a particular standard of proof. These standards – such as preponderance of evidence and beyond reasonable doubt – are often interpreted as likelihoods or epistemic confidences. Many theorists construe them numerically; beyond reasonable doubt, for example, is often construed as 90 to 95% confidence in the guilt of the defendant. -/- A family of influential cases suggests (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   34 citations