Bernard Molyneux presents some new arguments against descriptive evidentialism about intuitions. Descriptive evidentialism is the thesis that philosophers use intuitions as evidence. Molyneux's arguments are that: the propositions that intuition putatively supports are treated as having a degree and kind of certainty and justification that they could not have got from being intuited; intuitions influence us in ways we cannot explain by supposing we treat them as evidence; and certain strong intuitions that persuade us of their (...) contents are treated as inadmissible in the context of justification. This article presents a partial defence of descriptive evidentialism against these new arguments. (shrink)

There are three chief aims of the paper. First, it presents in short the beginning of the analytic philosophy of religion, its development, issues, and methods. Second, it puts forward a hypothesis that in the last five decades analytic philosophy of religion has been dominated by the epistemological paradigm, i.e. in most cases, any problem in question has been studied as part of the general problem of rationality of religious belief. That situation is changing slowly towards achieving more balance between (...) the issues of epistemology of religion and those concerned with philosophical theology. Third, the paper provides criteria for the classification of the different ways to understand the rationality of religious belief: the rationalistic and evidentialist approach, the natural theology approach, the Wittgensteinian fideism and Reformed epistemology approaches. A brief description of each of those four positions in epistemology of religion is included. (shrink)

According to the traditional Bayesian view of credence, its structure is that of precise probability, its objects are descriptive propositions about the empirical world, and its dynamics are given by conditionalization. Each of the three essays that make up this thesis deals with a different variation on this traditional picture. The first variation replaces precise probability with sets of probabilities. The resulting imprecise Bayesianism is sometimes motivated on the grounds that our beliefs should not be more precise than the (...) evidence calls for. One known problem for this evidentially motivated imprecise view is that in certain cases, our imprecise credence in a particular proposition will remain the same no matter how much evidence we receive. In the first essay I argue that the problem is much more general than has been appreciated so far, and that it’s difficult to avoid without compromising the initial evidentialist motivation. The second variation replaces descriptive claims with moral claims as the objects of credence. I consider three standard arguments for probabilism with respect to descriptive uncertainty—representation theorem arguments, Dutch book arguments, and accuracy arguments—in order to examine whether such arguments can also be used to establish probabilism with respect to moral uncertainty. In the second essay, I argue that by and large they can, with some caveats. First, I don’t examine whether these arguments can be given sound non-cognitivist readings, and any conclusions therefore only hold conditional on cognitivism. Second, decision-theoretic representation theorems are found to be less convincing in the moral case, because there they implausibly commit us to thinking that intertheoretic comparisons of value are always possible. Third and finally, certain considerations may lead one to think that imprecise probabilism provides a more plausible model of moral epistemology. The third variation considers whether, in addition to conditionalization, agents may also change their minds by becoming aware of propositions they had not previously entertained, and therefore not previously assigned any probability. More specifically, I argue that if we wish to make room for reflective equilibrium in a probabilistic moral epistemology, we must allow for awareness growth. In the third essay, I sketch the outline of such a Bayesian account of reflective equilibrium. Given that this account gives a central place to awareness growth, and that the rationality constraints on belief change by awareness growth are much weaker than those on belief change by conditionalization, it follows that the rationality constraints on the credences of agents who are seeking reflective equilibrium are correspondingly weaker. (shrink)

At the core of evidentialism lies a very plausible claim: rational thinkers follow their evidence. While this seems to be a very intuitive, almost trivial, claim, providing a full and complete evidentialist theory is complicated. In this entry, I begin with elucidating what kind of theory evidentialists aim to provide us with. I will show that, in order to provide a complete evidentialist theory, we have to provide a lot of details on what evidence is and how it relates (...) to the proposition it’s evidence for, as well as the agent possessing such evidence. I then consider objections arising for the most popular answers one can give to such questions. I conclude by considering old and new challenges that arise for evidentialism, regardless of the specific version one endorses. (shrink)

Moral encroachment holds that the epistemic justification of a belief can be affected by moral factors. If the belief might wrong a person or group more evidence is required to justify the belief. Moral encroachment thereby opposes evidentialism, and kindred views, which holds that epistemic justification is determined solely by factors pertaining to evidence and truth. In this essay I explain how beliefs such as ‘that woman is probably an administrative assistant’—based on the evidence that most women employees at (...) the firm are administrative assistants—motivate moral encroachment. I then describe weaknesses of moral encroachment. Finally I explain how we can countenance the moral properties of such beliefs without endorsing moral encroachment, and I argue that the moral status of such beliefs cannot be evaluated independently from the understanding in which they are embedded. (shrink)

Deontological evidentialism is the claim that we ought to form and maintain our beliefs in accordance with our evidence. In this paper, I criticize two arguments in its defense. I begin by discussing Berit Broogard’s use of the distinction between narrow-scope and wide-scope requirements against W.K. Clifford’s moral defense of. I then use this very distinction against a defense of inspired by Stephen Grimm’s more recent claims about the moral source of epistemic normativity. I use this distinction once again (...) to argue that Hilary Kornblith’s criticism of Richard Feldman’s defense of is incomplete. Finally, I argue that Feldman’s defense is insensitive to the relation between normative requirements and privileged values: values that have normative authority over us. (shrink)

Deontological evidentialism is the claim that S ought to form or maintain S’s beliefs in accordance with S’s evidence. A promising argument for this view turns on the premise that consideration c is a normative reason for S to form or maintain a belief that p only if c is evidence that p is true. In this paper, I discuss the surprising relation between a recently influential argument for this key premise and the principle that ought implies can. I (...) argue that anyone who antecedently accepts or rejects this principle already has a reason to resist either this argument’s premises or its role in support of deontological evidentialism. (shrink)

Evidentialism is the thesis that all reasons to believe p are evidence for p. Pragmatists hold that pragmatic considerations – incentives for believing – can also be reasons to believe. Nishi Shah, Thomas Kelly and others have argued for evidentialism on the grounds that incentives for belief fail a ‘reasoning constraint’ on reasons: roughly, reasons must be considerations we can reason from, but we cannot reason from incentives to belief. In the first half of the paper, I show (...) that this argument fails: the claim that we cannot reason from incentives is either false or does not combine with the reasoning constraint to support evidentialism. However, the failure of this argument suggests an alternative route to evidentialism. Roughly, reasons must be premises of good reasoning, but it is not good reasoning to reason from incentives to belief. The second half of the paper develops and defends this argument for evidentialism. (shrink)

This is the introduction to Moretti, Luca and Nikolaj Pedersen (eds), Non-Evidentialist Epistemology. Brill. Contributors: N. Ashton, A. Coliva, J. Kim, K. McCain, A. Meylan, L. Moretti, S. Moruzzi, J. Ohlorst, N. Pedersen, T. Piazza, L. Zanetti.

Susanna Rinard has recently offered a new argument for pragmatism and against evidentialism. According to Rinard, evidentialists must hold that the rationality of belief is determined in a way that is different from how the rationality of other states is determined. She argues that we should instead endorse a view she calls Equal Treatment, according to which the rationality of all states is determined in the same way. In this paper, I show that Rinard’s claims are mistaken, and that (...) evidentialism is more theoretically virtuous than its opponents sometimes give it credit for. Not only does evidentialism not make an exception for belief, but it fits naturally into a unified, explanatorily powerful account of the rationality of intentional mental states. According to such an account, the rationality of all intentional mental states, including belief, is determined by the right kind of reasons for those states. Since the right kind of reasons for belief just are evidential considerations, this unified account entails evidentialism. I conclude, contra Rinard, that evidentialism can be situated within a general account of rationality that is at least as theoretically virtuous as pragmatism, if not more so. (shrink)

Evidentialism and Reliabilism are two of the main contemporary theories of epistemic justification. Some authors have thought that the theories are not incompatible with each other, and that a hybrid theory which incorporates elements of both should be taken into account. More recently, other authors have argued that the resulting theory is well- placed to deal with fine-grained doxastic attitudes (credences). In this paper I review the reasons for adopting this kind of hybrid theory, paying attention to the case (...) of credences and the notion of probability involved in their treatment. I argue that the notion of probability in question can only be an epistemic (or evidential) kind of probability. I conclude that the resulting theory will be incompatible with Reliabilism in one important respect: it cannot deliver on the reductivist promise of Reliabilism. I also argue that attention to the justification of basic beliefs reveals limitations in the Evidentialist framework as well. The theory that results from the right combination of Evidentialism and Reliabilism, therefore, is neither Evidentialist nor Reliabilist. (shrink)

Kevin McCain’s Evidentialism and Epistemic Justification is the most thorough defense of evidentialism to date. In this work, McCain proposes insightful new theses to fill in underdeveloped parts of evidentialism. One of these new theses is an explanationist account of evidential fit that appeals to dispositional properties. We argue that this explanationist account faces counterexamples, and that, more generally, explanationists should not understand evidential fit in terms of dispositional properties.

I argue that the following theses are both popular among evidentialists but also jointly inconsistent with evidentialism: 1) Time-Slice Mentalism: one’s justificational properties at t are grounded only by one’s mental properties at t; 2) Experience Ultimacy: all ultimate evidence is experiential; and 3) Sleep Justification: we have justified beliefs while we have dreamless, nonexperiential sleep. Although I intend for this paper to be a polemic against evidentialists, it can also be viewed as an opportunity for them to clarify (...) their views. Furthermore, the paper is not only relevant to evidentialists. For example, the arguments of this paper could give Time-Slice Mentalists a reason to deny evidentialism. (shrink)

A popular evidentialist argument against pragmatism is based on reason internalism: the view that a normative reason for one to φ must be able to guide one in normative deliberation whether to φ. In the case of belief, this argument maintains that, when deliberating whether to believe p, one must deliberate whether p is true. Since pragmatic considerations cannot weigh in our deliberation whether p, the argument concludes that pragmatism is false. I argue that evidentialists fail to recognize that the (...) question whether to φ is essentially the question whether one should φ. Furthermore, the question of whether one should believe p can be answered on pragmatic grounds. The internalist argument turns out to favor pragmatism. (shrink)

In this paper I introduce an objection to normative evidentialism about reasons for belief. The objection arises from difficulties that evidentialism has with explaining our reasons for belief in unstable belief contexts with a single fixed point. I consider what other kinds of reasons for belief are relevant in such cases.

When a belief is self-fulfilling, having it guarantees its truth. When a belief is self-defeating, having it guarantees its falsity. These are the cases of “self-impacting” beliefs to be examined below. Scenarios of self-defeating beliefs can yield apparently dilemmatic situations in which we seem to lack sufficient reason to have any belief whatsoever. Scenarios of self-fulfilling beliefs can yield apparently dilemmatic situations in which we seem to lack reason to have any one belief over another. Both scenarios have been used (...) independently to challenge Evidentialism, on which what we may rationally believe is all and only what fits our current evidence. Here we tie the two scenarios together and explore what a knowledge-sensitive evidentialist approach to one implies for the other. (shrink)

Dormandy argues that stubborn counterevidence provides a reason for Evidentialists to form negative beliefs about God. Focusing on ‘horrendous evils’ as a kind of stubborn counterevidence, I discuss two possible interpretations of Dormandy’s account (a stronger and a weaker view). Against the stronger view, I consider the case of a Committed Theistic Evidentialist, that is, an evidentialist who possesses a defeater belief against horrendous evils. I argue that it would be improbable that she would form negative beliefs about God on (...) the basis of horrendous evils alone. I consider the response of a Committed Theistic Evidentialist towards horrendous evils, arguing that for her, ‘honesty’, which results in a psychological struggle, is an excellent-making property of her faith. (shrink)

According to evidentialism, a belief is propositionally justified just in case it fits one’s evidence. A fully developed evidentialist theory of justification will require an account of the evidential fit relation. Some evidentialists have embraced an explanationist account of this relation. Some of these accounts, such as Kevin McCain’s, place an awareness requirement on evidential fit. That is, they claim that a proposition, p, fits a subject’s evidence, e, only if the subject is aware of the explanatory connection between (...) p and e. I argue by way of example that this version of explanationism fails. As a result, I suggest a friendly revision of explanationism that excludes an awareness condition. Finally, I field some objections to my version of explanationism. (shrink)

Evidentialism has shown itself to be an important research program in contemporary epistemology, with evidentialists giving theories of virtually every important topic in epistemology. Nevertheless, at the heart of evidentialism is a handful of concepts, namely evidence, evidence possession, and evidential fit. If evidentialists cannot give us a plausible account of these concepts, then their research program, with all its various theories, will be in serious trouble. In this paper, I argue that evidentialists has yet to give a (...) plausible account of evidence possession and the prospects for doing so are dim. (shrink)

I formulate a resilient paradox about epistemic rationality, discuss and reject various solutions, and sketch a way out. The paradox exemplifies a tension between a wide range of views of epistemic justification, on the one hand, and enkratic requirements on rationality, on the other. According to the enkratic requirements, certain mismatched doxastic states are irrational, such as believing p, while believing that it is irrational for one to believe p. I focus on an evidentialist view of justification on which a (...) doxastic state regarding a proposition p is epistemically rational or justified just in case it tracks the degree to which one’s evidence supports p. If it is possible to have certain kinds of misleading evidence, then evidentialism and the enkratic requirements come into conflict. Yet, both have been defended as platitudinous. After discussing and rejecting three solutions, I sketch an account that rejects the enkratic requirements, while nevertheless explaining our sense that epistemic akrasia is a distinct kind of epistemic failure. Central to the account is distinguishing between two evaluative perspectives, one having to do with the relevant kind of success, the other having to do with manifesting good dispositions. The problem with akratic subjects, I argue, is that they manifest dispositions to fail to correctly respond to a special class of conclusive and conspicuous reasons. (shrink)

Evidentialists say that a necessary condition of sound epistemic reasoning is that our beliefs reflect only our evidence. This thesis arguably conflicts with standard Bayesianism, due to the importance of prior probabilities in the latter. Some evidentialists have responded by modelling belief-states using imprecise probabilities (Joyce 2005). However, Roger White (2010) and Aron Vallinder (2018) argue that this Imprecise Bayesianism is incompatible with evidentialism due to “inertia”, where Imprecise Bayesian agents become stuck in a state of ambivalence towards hypotheses. (...) Additionally, escapes from inertia apparently only create further conflicts with evidentialism. This dilemma gives a reason for evidentialist imprecise probabilists to look for alternatives without inertia. I shall argue that Henry E. Kyburg’s approach offers an evidentialist-friendly imprecise probability theory without inertia, and that its relevant anti-inertia features are independently justified. I also connect the traditional epistemological debates concerning the “ethics of belief” more systematically with formal epistemology than has been hitherto done. (shrink)

This paper is a defense of moral evidentialism, the view that we have a moral obligation to form the doxastic attitude that is best supported by our evidence. I will argue that two popular arguments against moral evidentialism are weak. I will also argue that our commitments to the moral evaluation of actions require us to take doxastic obligations seriously.

I argue that evidentialist ethics of belief requires believing in every promise, because any promise always has sufficient evidence. In order to combine evidentialism with ethics of belief, I distinguish two belief-like propositional attitudes. The first is categorical belief, which I call “opinion,” the second is quantitative belief, which I call “credence.” I accept doxastic voluntarism about opinions, and doxastic involuntarism about credences. Opinion has two values—affirmative and negative—and the subject has control over which one to choose. Credence can (...) have any value between 0 and 1; it is formed solely on the basis of the available evidence, and the subject has no control over it. The requirement of evidentialist ethics of belief is that one should have opinion that p when his credence that p is between 0.5 and 1, and opinion that ¬p when the credence is below 0.5. My main argument has two premises. The first premise is that if one accepts a promise, then his credence that “the promise will be fulfilled” is higher than 0.5. The second premise claims that nothing can decrease that credence. The main explanation for the second premise is that any potential evidence against the fulfillment of the promise turns out to be evidence against its validity, not the evidence against the propositional content of the credence. The final conclusion is that if an evidentialist accepts a promise, then he should always have the opinion that “the promise will be fulfilled,” i.e., always believe in the promise. (shrink)

This article aims to highlight the extent to which Kant’s account of belief draws on the views of his contemporaries. Situating the non-evidentialist features of Crusius’s account of belief within his broader account, I argue that they include antecedents to both Kant’s distinction between pragmatic and moral belief and his conception of a postulate of pure practical reason. While moving us closer to Kant’s arguments for the first postulate, however, both Crusius’s and Meier’s arguments for the immortality of the soul (...) fail to anticipate the most important aspect of their Kantian counterparts. Developing the non-evidentialist features of Basedow’s account of belief, I distinguish it from its Pascalian and Jamesian relatives and argue that it is the clearest antecedent to Kant’s arguments for the first and second postulates. Finally, I consider the development of Kant’s account of belief after the first Critique in light of the foregoing, and discuss the broader implications of my analysis. (shrink)

Should religious believers proportion their religious beliefs to their evidence? They should: Religious faith is better, ceteris paribus, when the beliefs accompanying it are evidence-proportioned. I offer two philosophical arguments and a biblical argument. The philosophical arguments conclude that love and trust, two attitudes belonging to faith, are better, ceteris paribus, when accompanied by evidence-proportioned belief, and that so too is the faith in question. The biblical argument concludes that beliefs associated with faith, portrayed in the Hebrew Bible and the (...) New Testament, are typically, and normatively, exhorted on the basis of evidence. I hope to convince religious believers and nonbelievers alike that religious beliefs should be evidence-proportioned. (shrink)

Given the sheer vastness of the totality of contemporary human knowledge and our individual epistemic finitude it is commonplace for those of us who lack knowledge with respect to some proposition(s) to appeal to experts (those who do have knowledge with respect to that proposition(s)) as an epistemic resource. Of course, much ink has been spilled on this issue and so concern here will be very narrowly focused on testimony in the context of epistemological views that incorporate evidentialism and (...) internalism, and which are either reductivist or non-reductivist in nature. Also, as the main question about testimony addressed here is whether or not testimony can provide any basic justification at all, attention will be narrowly focused on the simple case where one is presented with testimony that something is the case from only one source and on one occasion. It turns out that there are some seriously odd epistemic features of such appeals to expertise that arise both for those who intend to accept internalism, evidentialism and reductivism about justification by testimony and for those who intend to accept internalism, evidentialism and non-reductivism about justification by testimony. (shrink)

Suppose that an altruistic agent who is uncertain between evidential and causal decision theory finds herself in a situation where these theories give conflicting verdicts. We argue that even if she has significantly higher credence in CDT, she should nevertheless act in accordance with EDT. First, we claim that the appropriate response to normative uncertainty is to hedge one's bets. That is, if the stakes are much higher on one theory than another, and the credences you assign to each of (...) these theories are not very different, then it is appropriate to choose the option that performs best on the high-stakes theory. Second, we show that, given the assumption of altruism, the existence of correlated decision makers will increase the stakes for EDT but leave the stakes for CDT unaffected. Together these two claims imply that whenever there are sufficiently many correlated agents, the appropriate response is to act in accordance with EDT. (shrink)

Knowledge-first evidentialism combines the view that it is rational to believe what is supported by one's evidence with the view that one's evidence is what one knows. While there is much to be said for the view, it is widely perceived to fail in the face of cases of reasonable error—particularly extreme ones like new Evil Demon scenarios (Wedgwood, 2002). One reply has been to say that even in such cases what one knows supports the target rational belief (Lord, (...) 201x, this volume). I spell out two versions of the strategy. The direct one uses what one knows as the input to principles of rationality such as conditionalization, dominance avoidance, etc. I argue that it fails in hybrid cases that are Good with respect to one belief and Bad with respect to another. The indirect strategy uses what one knows to determine a body of supported propositions that is in turn the input to principles of rationality. I sketch a simple formal implementation of the indirect strategy and show that it avoids the difficulty. I conclude that the indirect strategy offers the most promising way for knowledge-first evidentialists to deal with the New Evil Demon problem. (shrink)

Evidentialists and Pragmatists about reasons for belief have long been in dialectical stalemate. However, recent times have seen a new wave of Evidentialists who claim to provide arguments for their view which should be persuasive even to someone initially inclined toward Pragmatism. This paper reveals a central flaw in this New Evidentialist project: their arguments rely on overly demanding necessary conditions for a consideration to count as a genuine reason. In particular, their conditions rule out the possibility of pragmatic reasons (...) for action. Since the existence of genuine pragmatic reasons for action is common ground between the Evidentialist and the Pragmatist, this problem for the New Evidentialist arguments is fatal. The upshot is that the deadlock between these two positions is restored: neither side can claim to be in possession of an argument that could convince the other. As it happens, I myself favor Pragmatism about reasons for belief, and although I don't claim to be able to convince a committed Evidentialist, I do make a prima facie case for Pragmatism by describing particular scenarios in which it seems to be true. I then go on to develop my own preferred version of the view: Robust Pragmatism, according to which a consideration never constitutes a reason for believing a proposition purely in virtue of being evidence for it. (shrink)

Epistemic defeat is standardly understood in either evidentialist or responsibilist terms. The seminal treatment of defeat is an evidentialist one, due to John Pollock, who famously distinguishes between undercutting and rebutting defeaters. More recently, an orthogonal distinction due to Jennifer Lackey has become widely endorsed, between so-called doxastic (or psychological) and normative defeaters. We think that neither doxastic nor normative defeaters, as Lackey understands them, exist. Both of Lackey’s categories of defeat derive from implausible assumptions about epistemic responsibility. Although Pollock’s (...) evidentialist view is superior, the evidentialism per se can be purged from it, leaving a general structure of defeat that can be incorporated in a reliabilist theory that is neither evidentialist nor responsibilist in any way. (shrink)

One leading account of justification comes from the evidentialist tradition. According to evidentialists, whether a doxastic attitude is justified depends on whether that attitude is supported by the believer’s evidence. This chapter assesses the prospects for evidentialism, focusing on the question of whether evidentialists can provide a satisfactory account of their key notions – evidence possession and evidential support – without helping themselves to the notion of justification.

In his “A new argument for evidentialism” (Shah, Philos Q 56(225): 481–498, 2006 ), Nishi Shah argues that the best explanation of a feature of deliberation whether to believe that p which he calls transparency entails that only evidence can be reason to believe that p. I show that his argument fails because a crucial lemma that his argument appeals to cannot be supported without assuming evidentialism to be true in the first place.

A new wave of evidentialist theorizing concedes that evidentialism may be extensionally incorrect as an account of all-things-considered rational belief. Nevertheless, these _newer evidentialists_ maintain that there is an importantly distinct type of epistemic rationality about which evidentialism may be the correct account. I argue that natural ways of developing the newer evidentialist position face opposite problems. One version, due to Christensen (Philos Phenomenol Res 103:501–517, 2021), may correctly describe what rationality requires, but does not entail the existence (...) of a distinctively epistemic type of rationality. Another version, due to Maguire and Woods (Philos Rev 129:211–249, 2020), characterizes a normative concept that is both distinct and epistemic, but struggles to explain why this concept should be classified as a type of rationality. I conclude that the newer evidentialist strategy of extensional compromise may be less favorable to evidentialism than previously supposed. (shrink)

We pose two arguments for the view that sentences containing definite descriptions semantically express multiple propositions: a general proposition as Russell suggested, and a singular proposition featuring the individual who uniquely satisfies the description at the world-time of utterance. One argument mirrors David Kaplan's arguments that indexicals express singular propositions through a context-sensitive character. The second argument mirrors Kent Bach's and Stephen Neale's arguments for pluralist views about terms putatively triggering conventional implicatures, appositive, and nonrestrictive relative clauses. After presenting these (...) arguments, we show that rival explanations (appeals to implicature, referential use, presupposition, etc.) do not offer equally compelling explanations of the data, and defend the methodology employed in the arguments against some criticisms. (shrink)

Evidentialism as its leading proponents describe it has two distinct senses, these being evidentialism as a conceptual analysis of epistemic justification, and as a prescriptive ethics of belief—an account of what one ‘ought to believe’ under different epistemic circumstances. These two senses of evidentialism are related, but in the work of leading evidentialist philosophers, in ways that I think are deeply problematic. Although focusing on Richard Feldman’s ethics of belief, this chapter is critical of evidentialism in (...) both senses. However, I share with authors like Feldman and Earl Conee, that epistemology has important prescriptive functions, and that a sound, civic ethics of belief is of more than merely philosophic importance. One reason why an ethics of belief might be important to problems of practice is the need we have for tools to more effectively mediate the renewed round of ‘culture wars’ we are experiencing in Anglo-American cultures. I mean especially that grand cultural clash between science and religion, reason and faith, secularist atheism and religious fundamentalism, etc. Let us start with the genealogical question of why there is such a grand cultural debate in the first place, and why the debate especially as played out in public and popular forums and even in the courtrooms seems so volatile and so often to confusedly drag everything—beliefs, values, passions, etc., with it. These are questions that I think Sigmund Freud’s classic Civilization and its Discontents can help us understand. Freud was a major voice in criticism of the stern and often hypocritical Victorian morality, a voice pointing out the price of its sometimes high-handed, guiltinducing curtailments of the satisfactions sought by the individual. But for Freud while there are real differences in the moral demands that different societies or traditions place upon people, there is something inevitable about the conflict itself, for “replacement of the power of the individual by the power of a community constitutes the decisive step of civilization... (shrink)

William James has traditionally been seen as a critic of evidentialism, with his claim that “Our passional nature not only lawfully may, but must, decide an option between propositions, whenever it is a genuine option that cannot by its nature be decided on intellectual grounds” being understood as saying that in certain cases we have the right to believe beyond what is certified by the evidence. However, there is an alternate, “expansive”, reading of James (defended most recently by Cheryl (...) Misak, Robert Talisse, and Scott Aikin) that portrays him not as criticizing evidentialism itself, but only as trying to expand our conception what we should count as evidence. There are two main strategies for defending this ‘expansive’ reading. The first approach relies on showing that the logic of James’s argument itself relies on highlighting a new type of evidence rather than rather than undermining the need for our beliefs to be grounded in evidence, while the second approach appeals to aspects of James’s biography to show that he always intended something closer to the expansive reading. It is argued here that neither approach is persuasive, and that the anti-evidentialist reading of James remains the most probable. (shrink)

Metacognition is the monitoring and controlling of cognitive processes. I examine the role of metacognition in ‘ordinary retrieval cases’, cases in which it is intuitive that via recollection the subject has a justified belief. Drawing on psychological research on metacognition, I argue that evidentialism has a unique, accurate prediction in each ordinary retrieval case: the subject has evidence for the proposition she justifiedly believes. But, I argue, process reliabilism has no unique, accurate predictions in these cases. I conclude that (...) ordinary retrieval cases better support evidentialism than process reliabilism. This conclusion challenges several common assumptions. One is that non-evidentialism alone allows for a naturalized epistemology, i.e., an epistemology that is fully in accordance with scientific research and methodology. Another is that process reliabilism fares much better than evidentialism in the epistemology of memory. (shrink)

In contemporary debates in religious epistemology, theistic philosophers provide differing responses to the evidentialist argument against religious beliefs. Plantinga’s strategy is to argue that evidence is not needed to justify religious beliefs while Swinburne’s strategy is to argue that religious beliefs can be justified by evidence. However, in Aquinas’ account of religious epistemology, he seems to employ both strategies. In his account of religious knowledge by faith, he argues that evidence is unnecessary for religious beliefs. But in his account of (...) religious knowledge by science, he argues that there is evidence for religious beliefs. In this paper, I argue that there is no real dichotomy between Plantinga’s and Swinburne’s responses to the evidentialist argument. From a Thomistic perspective, Reformed Epistemology and Natural Theology are different but compatible responses to Evidentialism. (shrink)

While Aaron Zimmerman’s Belief is rightly subtitled “A Pragmatic Picture”, it concerns a set of topics about which Pragmatists themselves are not always in agreement. Indeed, while there has been a noticeable push back against evidentialism in contemporary analytic epistemology, the view can at times seem ascendant within the literature on pragmatism itself. In particular, Peirceians tend to presuppose something closer to evidentialism when they accuse Jamesians of taking pragmatism in an unproductive and irrationalist direction. This split goes (...) back at least as far as Peirce’s reaction to James’s “The Will to believe” which Peirce “scorned” as the view that “Oh, I could not believe so-and-so, because I should be wretched if I did.” Pragmatists of the more Peircian bent have shared this scorn for the suggestion that our beliefs could be justified for pragmatic reasons, but Zimmerman’s book gives us reason to think that we should take a Jamesian rather the Peircian approach to these issues. (shrink)

Scott Aikin’s Evidentialism and the Will to Believe is the first book-length discussion of W.K. Clifford’s 1877 “The Ethics of Belief ” and William James’s 1896 “The Will to Believe.” Except for twenty pages, the book splits evenly between a detailed discussion of the two essays. A good book demands some good criticism, and I am hoping that the comments I make are read in that light. Evidentialism and the Will to Believe appears in the Bloomsbury Research in (...) Analytic Philosophy series. Presumably because the book was written for this series, the discussion of historical context is kept to a minimum, and references to other writings of Clifford and James, and to the secondary literature, are scant. (shrink)

This paper is a book review of Scott Aikin's (2014) Evidentialism and the Will to Believe. Beyond a brief summary of the text, the review focuses on the book's pedagogical merits. I conclude that the book would be worth adopting for graduate and upper-level undergraduate courses that cover the ethics of belief in detail, though the hardcover edition of the book is rather pricey.

First aim of this paper is to show that Evidentialism, when paired with a Psychologistic ontology of evidence, is unable to account for ordinary cases of inferential justification. As many epistemologists have maintained, however, when it is paired with a Propositionalist ontology of evidence, Evidentialism is unable to explain in a satisfactory way ordinary cases of perceptual justification. So, the Evidentialist is faced with a dilemma. Second aim of this paper is to give an argument in favour of (...) Propositionalism about evidence, and so to motivate the conclusion that perceptual justification must be accounted for in non-evidentialist terms. By this I do not mean to defend a strongly Non-Evidentialist epistemology, according to which there are doxastic attitudes which are unsupported by any justifier. More modestly, I aim to motivate the weakly Non-Evidentialist epistemology according to which a subject’s perceptual beliefs may be justified by non-evidential justifiers. I conclude the paper by explaining why I believe that Pryor's dogmatism supplies a model for the way in which an internalist who is persuaded by my argument might want to detail her weakly Non-Evidentialist account of perceptual justification. (shrink)

Scientists and philosophers frequently speak about levels of description, levels of explanation, and ontological levels. In this paper, I propose a unified framework for modelling levels. I give a general definition of a system of levels and show that it can accommodate descriptive, explanatory, and ontological notions of levels. I further illustrate the usefulness of this framework by applying it to some salient philosophical questions: (1) Is there a linear hierarchy of levels, with a fundamental level at the bottom? (...) And what does the answer to this question imply for physicalism, the thesis that everything supervenes on the physical? (2) Are there emergent properties? (3) Are higher-level descriptions reducible to lower-level ones? (4) Can the relationship between normative and non-normative domains be viewed as one involving levels? Although I use the terminology of “levels”, the proposed framework can also represent “scales”, “domains”, or “subject matters”, where these are not linearly but only partially ordered by relations of supervenience or inclusion. (shrink)

This study examines the concept of “description” and its theoretical foundations. The literature about it is surprisingly limited, and its usage is vague, sometimes even conflicting. Description should be considered in relation to other processes, such as representation, data capturing, and categorizing, which raises the question about what it means to describe something. Description is often used for any type of predication but may better be limited to predications based on observations. Research aims to establish criteria for making optimal descriptions; (...) however, the problems involved in describing something have seldom been addressed. Specific ideals are often followed without examine their fruitfulness. This study provides evidence that description cannot be a neutral, objective activity; rather, it is a theory-laden and interest-based activity. In information science, description occurs in processes such as document description, descriptive metadata assignment, and information resource description. In this field, description has equally been used in conflicting ways that mostly do not evince a recognition of the value- and theory-laden nature of descriptions. It is argued that descriptive activities in information science should always be based on consciously explicit considerations of the goals that descriptions are meant to serve. (shrink)

This paper challenges the first Gettier counterexample to the tripartite account of knowledge. Noting that 'the man who will get the job' is a description and invoking Donnellan's distinction between their 'referential' and 'attributive' uses, I argue that Smith does not actually believe that the man who will get the job has ten coins in his pocket. Smith's ignorance about who will get the job shows that the belief cannot be understood referentially, his ignorance of the coins in his pocket (...) shows that it cannot be understood attributively. An explanation for why Smith appeared to have justified true belief is given by distinguishing between 'belief' and 'belief in truth'. Smith believes the sentence 'the man who will get the job has ten coins in his pocket' to be true (he mistakenly believes that Jones will get the job, of whom he knows that he has ten coins in his pocket) (hence his 'belief'), the sentence is true (hence 'truth'), and he has sufficient reason to assent to it (hence his 'justification'). But he does not believe the proposition expressed. Hence he does not know it either. (shrink)

We propose a nonmonotonic Description Logic of typicality able to account for the phenomenon of the combination of prototypical concepts. The proposed logic relies on the logic of typicality ALC + TR, whose semantics is based on the notion of rational closure, as well as on the distributed semantics of probabilistic Description Logics, and is equipped with a cognitive heuristic used by humans for concept composition. We first extend the logic of typicality ALC + TR by typicality inclusions of the (...) form p :: T(C) v D, whose intuitive meaning is that “we believe with degree p about the fact that typical Cs are Ds”. As in the distributed semantics, we define different scenarios containing only some typicality inclusions, each one having a suitable probability. We then exploit such scenarios in order to ascribe typical properties to a concept C obtained as the combination of two prototypical concepts. We also show that reasoning in the proposed Description Logic is EXPTIME-complete as for the underlying standard Description Logic ALC. (shrink)

We propose a nonmonotonic Description Logic of typicality able to account for the phenomenon of combining prototypical concepts, an open problem in the fields of AI and cognitive modelling. Our logic extends the logic of typicality ALC + TR, based on the notion of rational closure, by inclusions p :: T(C) v D (“we have probability p that typical Cs are Ds”), coming from the distributed semantics of probabilistic Description Logics. Additionally, it embeds a set of cognitive heuristics for concept (...) combination. We show that the complexity of reasoning in our logic is EXPTIME-complete as in ALC. (shrink)

This paper shows that strict evidentialism about normative reasons for belief is inconsistent with taking truth to be the source of normative reasons for belief. It does so by showing that there are circumstances in which one can know what truth requires one to believe, yet still lack evidence for the contents of that belief.