Evidentialism for Everyone
Universality Thesis (UT): Nothing in externalism entails the negation of evidentialism.
Nota Bene: This is not a *demographic* thesis about what intersections of logical space are more populated than others. Rather, it is a thesis about the *topology* of logical space, regardless of who may or may not live there.
There is a misleading statement on the back of Earl and Rich's _Evidentialism_ book. It states: "Evidentiaism is a version of epistemic internalism." This is a natural statement in the context since it is on the back of a book authored by evidentialists who are internalists. However, it is not correct tout court.
That is, UT is true. An equivalent statement of it is:
UT: Possibly, there is an externalist evidentialist.
The quick way to prove this possibility is to ostend its actuality: Timothy Williamson.
On p. 146 of _Knowledge and Its Limits_ he notes that "Rational thinkers respect their evidence." A natural reading of this is the original definition of evidentialism:
EJ Doxastic attitude D toward proposition p is epistemically justified for S at t if and only if having D toward p fits the evidence S has at t.
Yet Williamson has an externalist theory of knowledge. He asserts the formula "E=K", i.e. one's evidence is identical to one's knowledge. Since knowledge is not restricted to the contents of one's own mind, and knowledge is evidence, evidence is external to the mind. This is a denial of the internalist supervenience thesis:
M If any two possible individuals are exactly alike mentally, then they are alike justificationally, e.g., the same beliefs are justified for them to the same extent.
Williamson glibly remarks of classical internalists:
This shouldn't be in the least surprising: evidentialism was originally meant to be a platitude: that anyone ever denies it is merely the result of misunderstanding.
But wait...there's more!
We also have perfectly general reasons to see that externalism and evidentialism are compatible. If we wanted to try and substantiate the misleading claim on the back of the Evidentialism book that ""Evidentiaism is a version of epistemic internalism." we'd have to show that.
EJ Doxastic attitude D toward proposition p is epistemically justified for S at t if and only if having D toward p fits the evidence S has at t.
conceptually entails
M If any two possible individuals are exactly alike mentally, then they are alike justificationally, e.g., the same beliefs are justified for them to the same extent.
On the face of it, it looks bleak. The connecting premise would have to be an internalist theory of evidence itself, that is:
(EI) Necessarily, evidence consists in mental states.
Whereas I think that's the best way to think of evidence, the denial of (EI) is not incoherent. One could hold, for example, a theory of evidence that endorses the common sense legal view that evidence consists in things like finger prints and broken glass. You could also hold a plausible mixed view that evidence consists in mental states that were readily accessible as well as information that is "at one's fingerprints" in the sense that it would be about as easy for the subject to look up the information, in a nearby book, say, as to remember it (I actually think this mixed view is *quite* plausible).
The coherence of externalist theories of evidence ensures the possibility of an externalist evidentialism and so UT is vindicated.
Nota Bene: This is not a *demographic* thesis about what intersections of logical space are more populated than others. Rather, it is a thesis about the *topology* of logical space, regardless of who may or may not live there.
There is a misleading statement on the back of Earl and Rich's _Evidentialism_ book. It states: "Evidentiaism is a version of epistemic internalism." This is a natural statement in the context since it is on the back of a book authored by evidentialists who are internalists. However, it is not correct tout court.
That is, UT is true. An equivalent statement of it is:
UT: Possibly, there is an externalist evidentialist.
The quick way to prove this possibility is to ostend its actuality: Timothy Williamson.
On p. 146 of _Knowledge and Its Limits_ he notes that "Rational thinkers respect their evidence." A natural reading of this is the original definition of evidentialism:
EJ Doxastic attitude D toward proposition p is epistemically justified for S at t if and only if having D toward p fits the evidence S has at t.
Yet Williamson has an externalist theory of knowledge. He asserts the formula "E=K", i.e. one's evidence is identical to one's knowledge. Since knowledge is not restricted to the contents of one's own mind, and knowledge is evidence, evidence is external to the mind. This is a denial of the internalist supervenience thesis:
M If any two possible individuals are exactly alike mentally, then they are alike justificationally, e.g., the same beliefs are justified for them to the same extent.
Williamson glibly remarks of classical internalists:
they interiorize evidence: it becomes one's present experience, one's present degrees of belif, or the like. Those attempts are quaint relics of Cartesian epistemology....If one's evidence were restricted to the contents of one's own mind, it could not play the role that it actually does in science.So we have the best kind of argument of the possibility of externalist evidentialism: an actual example.
This shouldn't be in the least surprising: evidentialism was originally meant to be a platitude: that anyone ever denies it is merely the result of misunderstanding.
But wait...there's more!
We also have perfectly general reasons to see that externalism and evidentialism are compatible. If we wanted to try and substantiate the misleading claim on the back of the Evidentialism book that ""Evidentiaism is a version of epistemic internalism." we'd have to show that.
EJ Doxastic attitude D toward proposition p is epistemically justified for S at t if and only if having D toward p fits the evidence S has at t.
conceptually entails
M If any two possible individuals are exactly alike mentally, then they are alike justificationally, e.g., the same beliefs are justified for them to the same extent.
On the face of it, it looks bleak. The connecting premise would have to be an internalist theory of evidence itself, that is:
(EI) Necessarily, evidence consists in mental states.
Whereas I think that's the best way to think of evidence, the denial of (EI) is not incoherent. One could hold, for example, a theory of evidence that endorses the common sense legal view that evidence consists in things like finger prints and broken glass. You could also hold a plausible mixed view that evidence consists in mental states that were readily accessible as well as information that is "at one's fingerprints" in the sense that it would be about as easy for the subject to look up the information, in a nearby book, say, as to remember it (I actually think this mixed view is *quite* plausible).
The coherence of externalist theories of evidence ensures the possibility of an externalist evidentialism and so UT is vindicated.
posted by Trent_Dougherty at
12:24 AM
5 Comment(s):
To be clear: I did *not* intend the only which you insert in brackets. If I intended anything mroe than what I said it would be "especially".
I tried to make it clear my point was with the lay of the logical landscape not with demographics--I think I said that several times explicitly.
Let me affirm here that I meant what I said.
Let me add, though, that I don't think that there is not an implicature from "x is an evidentialist" to "x is a pragmatist" among the cognoscenti.
I think it should be assumed that anyone is an evidentialist: it's platitudinous.
What's true is that most externalists that I'm aware of just don't *care* much about evidence as compared to their externalist thingies.
*Of course* one's beliefs should fit the evidence, it's just that--say they--there's more important stuff going on epistemically.
Also, there are at least three internalisms as I said yesterday: There are evidentialisms corresponding to strong and weak supervenience theses: whcih yesterday I called "Strong Evidentialism" and "Weak Evidentialism" respectively.
Then I said I liked to call the EJ version "Really Weak Evidentialism" or "Early Evidentialism" or "Core Evidentialism."
I prefer the latter b/c even if naturlism goes the way of logical positivism and we no longer hope/believe/expect normative properties to supervene on non-normative properties, then we'd still want our beliefs to fit the evidence.
PS - That's a much better picture, though more strange. :P
By
Trent_Dougherty, at 10/12/2006 12:07 PM
John,
1. The general conception of evidence is a sign or mark of truth which supports a belief, provides it with positive epistemic status.
This could be a doxastic state like a belief, a content of a doxastic state like a proposition, a non-doxastic state like being appeared to redly, an mixed state like my being caused by a red thing to host red qualia, or an extramental fact like there being blood on the knife.
2. As I read him, Plantinga, for example, just doesn't seem to think justification is a very important concept.
"I'm assuming the fact of one's cognitive faculties functioning properly is not entailed by one's evidence being appropriately fit for belief."
I see it otherwise. I think a natural definition of evidential fit, if one is already interested in proper function, is that E fits H just in case were S's truth-directed faculties functioning properly in there (macro and micro) environments (etc.) then S would believe that H.
In the end, though, I'm less interested in what the P. man *would* say, than what he *could* say, since I'm more interested in logical-conceptual relationships than in demographics here.
3. I don't know who he has in mind. People, like DeRose, *do* question it, but they *shouldn't*. Rich and Earl have both said many times it's meant to be platitudinous and their defense is usually of the form: "you've confused epistemic justification with something else (doxastic justification, personal justification, epistemic responsibility, deontological justification), you've misinterpreted the project."
4. The weak supervenience thesis for evidentialism is that justification weakly supervenes on evidence. So not two individuals in the same world or set of nomologically possible worlds can differ in respects of justification without differing in respects of evidence (as opposed to strong supervenience where the thesis holds of any two individuals in any two worlds).
The weak supervenience thesis for mentalist internalism is that no two individuals in the same world--or set of nomologically possible worlds perhaps--can differ in respects of justification without differing in mental respects.
The extention to access internalism is straightforward.
As I say I think original EJ is the core content, but the supervenience formulation is more straightforward.
By
Trent_Dougherty, at 10/12/2006 11:26 PM
John, now on to Plantinga himself:
I gave you my take on what the lowest common denominator of "evidence" is (which is backed up by Hacking 1975). For another view, one that actually is explicitly externalist and implicitly proper functionalist see the quote from Reid in note 11, p. 186 of WPF.
The last section of Chapter 10 of WPF is P's consideration of Evidentialism. He explicitly endorses it (though the endorsement is someone obscured by his frustrating habit of treating justification theories as if they were theories of warrant):
After a circuitous several paragraphs where he gradually widens the notion of evidence, he finally arrives at the Prime Epistemological Doctrine: phenomenal conservatism. Plantinga, p. 192-193.
"It does not follow that this kind of evidence (merely phenomenal evidence) is not really evidence. And if we do take it to be evidence, then no doubt it will be true that in a well-formed noetic structure, belief is always on the basis of evidence. Indeed, how could it be otherwise....So the evidentialist is right: where there is warrant, there is evidence."
Of course, he goes on to reject it as a theory of warrant, which it was, of course, never intended to be. In fact it is not *perfectly* clear that P actually does accept PC, but his treatment of the a priori makes me think he really does.
Whether he does or not, though, it is clearly consistent with proper functionalism that would would accept PC.
By
Trent_Dougherty, at 10/12/2006 11:28 PM
John, I'll give a detailed reply during class, but your last statement sounds *exactly* right to me!! :-)~
By
Trent_Dougherty, at 10/13/2006 9:17 AM
John,
1) We probably agree about *what's true* about what "matters" in a core sense of justification, and you are obviously correct about the internalist about evidence/justification not counting the knife in the drawer is evidence. We are also in agreement that many externalist theories of evidence seem really counter-intuitive and even "pointless" in the framework of epistemology from c.1600-1963. It's just that externalists don't care. They tend to be interested in a sort of paradigm shift.
I forgot to mention that Weatherson blogged about this a bit this summer, arguing for an externalist theory of evidence: I looked for it on his blog but couldn't find it (his blog was attacked at the beginning of the semester) my metablogging is here. Duncan Pritchard notes several other externalist theories of evidence (he mentions Williamson who's ommission was merely an oversight, but the other two (McDowell and Neta) were new to me).
A mixed view is pretty plausible though if you already find mentalism more plausible than access internalism. Some of my evidence--memory evidence say--is no easier to access than this open book right here in front of me. So some days I'm not an internalist.
2) You ask:
"How is it that for an externalist about justification the external elements which matter to justification but which are *not* permitted conceptually as part of what evidence (broadly understood to allow internalist and externalist theories of evidence) – since they after all claim that evidence is not all that matters for justification – can be characterized such that their characterization does not overlap with the external element that *can be* covered under the notion of evidence itself?"
Um, what? :-)~ Seriously, that's tough to parse, I'm not at all sure what the question is. Here's my interp: Let YES = {x: x is external to the mind & x matters to justification & x is an item of evidence} Let NO = {x: x is external to the mind & x matters to justification & x is NOT an item of evidence} You *seem-to-me* to be asking how we know the intersection of YES and NO is not the null set. But that can't be right because the definitions of the sets give you that.
Are you asking what lines can possibly be drawn between external factors relevant to justification which count as evidence and those that (are relevant and) don't (count as evidence)? In infinitely many ways I suppose, but why would they want to? What's the big picture here? Perhaps this will help (it's kind of a shot in the dark).
Let T be S's theory. T consists in a theory of evidence E and a theory of justification J. E defines evidence as the contents of the books in one's bedroom. So S is an externalist about evidence. J defines justification as coherence with basic beliefs. So here we have an externalist non-evidentialist. It's kind of a wired theory, but coherent.
3) The first part confuses me. Then you ask "wouldn’t Plantinga say his theory is not an evidentialist theory, but an alternative to it?"
Not on my reading of the quote above. He doesn't *just* say that warrant (and therefore knowledge) entails evidence.
4) I'm not much more interested in psychology than demographics, but I think EJ is (and should be) platitudenous tout court. The fact that it loses obviousness on externalist theories of knowledge is evidence against externalism, not an argument against the platitudenousness of EJ.
Finally, I continue to agree that externalists are very confused.
By
Trent_Dougherty, at 10/13/2006 1:58 PM
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