Epistemologists often appeal to the idea that a normative theory must provide useful, usable, guidance to argue for one normative epistemology over another. I argue that this is a mistake. Guidance considerations have no role to play in theory choice in epistemology. I show how this has implications for debates about the possibility and scope of epistemic dilemmas, the legitimacy of idealisation in Bayesian epistemology, uniqueness versus permissivism, sharp versus mushy credences, and internalism versus externalism.

What ought you believe? According to a traditional view, it depends on your evidence: you ought to believe (only) what your evidence supports. Recently, however, some have claimed that what you ought to believe depends not on your evidence but simply on what is true: you ought to believe (only) the truth. In this paper, we present and defend two arguments against this latter view. We also explore some of the parallels between this debate in epistemology, and the debate in (...) ethics about whether how you ought to act depends on your epistemic position, or on all the facts. (shrink)

Evidentialism is an internalist view (or family of views) about epistemic justification saying that a subject s’s epistemic justification entirely depends on the evidence at her disposal. In order to distil a complete theory of epistemic justification from this general principle it is necessary to answer three main questions. What kind of entities constitute a subject’s evidence? What does it take for a piece of evidence E to support a proposition P? What does it take for a subject s to (...) possess E? In this entry I describe the main answers defended in the literature in response to these three questions, and critically discuss the main objections that have been raised against evidentialism, both at a general level and as targeting more specific variants of it. (shrink)