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Evidence
Edited by Christopher Michael Cloos (University of California, Santa Barbara)
About this topic
| Summary | The notion of evidence features importantly in epistemology and philosophy of science. There are three primary questions that a theory of evidence must address. The constitution question asks: What is the nature of evidence? A major divide in answers to the constitution question is between those who think that all evidence is propositional and those who think that some evidence is non-propositional. The possession question asks: When does someone possess a piece of information as evidence? Restrictive views of evidence possession hold that one has as evidence only information that one is consciously entertaining. More inclusive views of evidence possession hold that one’s evidence includes non-occurrent information, such as stored memories. Lastly, a theory of evidence must address the positive support question. In philosophy of science and formal epistemology the positive support question is: When is a hypothesis confirmed by evidence? In contemporary epistemology the positive support question is: When is a belief justified by evidence? |
| Introductions | Encyclopedia entries on evidence include DiFate 2007 and Kelly 2006. Additional overviews of evidence include Conee & Feldman 2008 and Kelly 2008. |
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Related
Subcategories
Evidence and Knowledge (478)
Evidentialism* (401)
Perceptual Evidence* (191)
Underdetermination of Theory by Data* (449 | 4)
Epistemic Permissivism* (121)
Evidence-Based Medicine* (75)
Evidence and Proof in Law* (470)
Evidence, Misc (395)
History/traditions: Evidence
- Husserl: Evidence (40)
Contents
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- Two or Three Strands to the Concept of Ignorance.Thomas Raleigh - forthcoming - Erkenntnis.This article discusses two under-explored strands to the concept of ignorance. Firstly, how ignorance relates to a subject’s degrees of belief; secondly how ignorance relates to a subject’s evidence. I also consider a third alleged strand to the concept of ignorance, which is that ignorance requires some kind of normative failure. I argue that this is false; ignorance does not essentially require any such failure. I finish with some reflections on the extent to which conceptual analysis and linguistic intuitions about (...)
- The New Evil Demon Problem and the Nature of Evidence.Thomas Kelly - 2025 - In Juan Comesaña & Matthew McGrath, Knowledge and rationality: essays in honor of Stewart Cohen. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. pp. 18-42.This chapter explores the challenge that the New Evil Demon Problem poses for so-called “externalist” theories of evidence. It argues that the best view of evidence is a liberalized form of externalism. According to that view, paradigmatic evidence in the sciences and elsewhere includes publicly known facts about the external world, evidence that we would not have in a hypothetical scenario in which we are the victims of radical deception. On the other hand, our evidence is not limited to our (...)
- Moral encroachment and group-to-individual inferences.Martin Smith - forthcoming - Philosophical Studies.The paper is concerned with a special class of inferences, in which we draw conclusions about individual people based on evidence about the groups to which they belong. One thing that is notable about these inferences is that they are often subject to a kind of moral criticism. By judging people in this way, it is claimed, we demean or diminish them, and fail to properly respect them as individuals. And yet, if these inferences are epistemically sound – as they (...)
- Are Credences Thoughts about Probability? A Reply to the Inscrutable Evidence Argument.Benjamin Lennertz - 2025 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 12 (48):1259-1279.The Inscrutable Evidence Argument targets the thesis that credences are thoughts about evidential probabilities (CTEP). It does so using cases where one knows one’s evidence speaks either strongly in favor of or strongly against a proposition, but one doesn’t know which; in such cases, it seems possible to have a middling credence in that proposition even though one doesn’t think the probability of the proposition is near 50%—contra CTEP. In this paper, I defend CTEP by conceiving of the thoughts involved (...)
- Astrobiology and the Transformation of Scientific Epistemology.Kristina Šekrst - forthcoming - In Steven J. Dick, Astronomy and Philosophy: Conceptual and Methodological Foundations and Challenges. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Astrobiology occupies an unusual position within the philosophy of science. Confronted with the n = 1 problem – having only a single example of life to study – it attempts to investigate life beyond Earth while relying entirely on Earth’s biosphere as its reference point, a constraint that creates unique epistemic challenges. Unlike traditional sciences with clear predictive frameworks, astrobiology operates as what we might call a transient science: a discipline functioning without foundational certainties, relying predominantly on abductive reasoning, and (...)
- Memories as Data: The Case of Radical Reuse.Sara Aronowitz - forthcoming - Philosophical Psychology.Evidence, in ordinary English, denotes a kind of object: something you could put in a box, or at least on a hard-drive. But recent epistemologists prefer to think of evidence as part of a thinker’s mental state, her knowledge, beliefs, or the way things appear to her. This paper argues in favor of the objectual view, by showing that in the case of memory, the very feature thought to be a weakness of this conception is in fact a strength: roughly, (...)
- Epistemic standards and minimally responsive beliefs.Federico Bongiorno - 2025 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 111 (1):260-279.It is widely held that beliefs respond to evidence. However, it is not easy to make precise exactly in which sense beliefs are so responsive. In this paper, I develop and defend a novel minimalist account of evidence-responsiveness. I argue that in order for an attitude A to count as minimally responsive to the evidence, e, the attitude holder must follow at least one epistemic standard which appropriately explains her holding A given e. The account given here allows that attitudes (...)
- Should You Defer to Individual Experts?Devin Lane - 2025 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 111 (1):216-234.Should you defer to individual experts? That is, when a single expert—rather than a group of experts or a expert consensus—testifies that p, should you believe that p? In this paper, I argue that the answer to this question is, generally speaking, “no.” My argument is based on the notion of a complexity‐based defeater. Some questions are complex in a sense that makes inquirers less reliable at answering them. Expert testimony tends to be about such questions. Expert testimony thus tends (...)
- Resistant beliefs, responsive believers.Carolina Flores - 2025 - Journal of Philosophy 122 (4):133-159.Beliefs can be resistant to evidence. Nonetheless, the orthodox view in epistemology analyzes beliefs as evidence-responsive attitudes. I address this tension by deploying analytical tools on capacities and masking to show that the cognitive science of evidence-resistance supports rather than undermines the orthodox view. In doing so, I argue for the claim that belief requires the capacity for evidence-responsiveness. More precisely, if a subject believes that p, then they have the capacity to rationally respond to evidence bearing on p. Because (...)
- Aquinas, Evidence, and Perception.Caleb Estep - 2025 - Logos and Episteme 16 (2):157-168.Perceptual experiences are commonly regarded as evidence. For example, when one has an experience of a tree, this is typically viewed as evidence for the belief that there is a tree. However, there is more than one view about the nature of perceptual experiences, and it is not clear that every view of perception is equally adequate to the task of accounting for experience’s evidential role. In this paper I will do two things. First, I argue that neither a sense-data (...)
- Rational Hypothesis.Michele Palmira - 2023 - Philosophical Topics 51 (2):197-219.There are scenarios in which letting one’s own views on the question whether p direct one’s inquiry into that question brings about individual and collective epistemic benefits. However, these scenarios are also such that one’s evidence doesn’t support believing one’s own views. So, how to vindicate the epistemic benefits of directing one’s inquiry in such an asymmetric way, without asking one to hold a seemingly irrational doxastic attitude? To answer this question, the paper understands asymmetric inquiry direction in terms of (...)
- Rational Inconsistency Against Non-skeptical Infallibilism.Nate Lauffer - 2025 - Acta Analytica 2025:1-16.Recent epistemological literature features compelling and novel arguments for thinking that an agent can rationally believe each member of a set of propositions while knowing that one of the members is false. Perhaps more provocatively, these proponents of "Rational Inconsistency," as it were, claim that it’s also possible to know each true member of the set while knowing that one of the members is false. Call this "Knowledgeable Inconsistency." In this article, I explain why, if Knowledgeable Inconsistency is true, then, (...)
- In Defense of Evidential Minimalism: Varieties of Criticizability.Frank Hofmann - 2024 - Episteme 21 (4):1405-1410.This paper will critically engage with Daniel Buckley's argument against “evidential minimalism” (EM), i.e., the claim that necessarily, bits of evidence (are or) provide epistemic reasons for belief. Buckley argues that in some cases, a subject has strong evidence that p (and fulfills further minimal conditions), does not believe p, but nevertheless is not epistemically criticizable and has no epistemic reason to believe p. I will defend EM by pointing out that Buckley's argument trades on an ambiguity between a strong (...)
- Logical epistemology, social evidence, and the a priori.Matteo Baggio - 2025 - Synthese 209 (205):1-28.The ongoing debate in logical epistemology, particularly influenced by neo-Quinean perspectives such as logical anti-exceptionalism, has greatly advanced our understanding of logical knowledge. Recently, Martin and Hjortland introduced a refined taxonomy of logical anti-exceptionalism, distinguishing between two key approaches: methodological anti-exceptionalism and Quine’s evidential naturalism, which they term “evidential anti-exceptionalism”. This article critically examines their taxonomy, with a particular focus on their preferred account of methodological anti-exceptionalism, known as logical predictivism. Martin and Hjortland argue that methodological anti-exceptionalist accounts can preserve (...)
- Reconsidering normative defeat.Nate Lauffer - 2025 - Synthese 205 (5):1-15.According to the Doctrine of Normative Defeat (‘the DND’), you may lose justification to believe that p if you fail to possess negatively relevant evidence that you ought to possess. This paper presents an objection to the DND as it’s standardly developed: it carries with it an absurd implication regarding how one’s knowledge can be restored once one’s associated epistemic justification is presumed to be normatively defeated. I defend the force of this objection before closing with a note about what (...)
- Unfinished Business. Rational Attitudes in Reasoning.Julia Staffel - 2025 - Oxford: Oxford University Press.Explaining how people reason is central to understanding ourselves as human beings. Complex deliberations that take unexpected turns are central to many good detective stories, but they are also ubiquitous in everyday life and academic research. While philosophers have studied both ends of complex deliberations – learning new information and reaching justified conclusions – little has been said about our states of mind when we’re in the middle of thought. Yet, this stage of intellectual limbo is where we often produce (...)
- Psychiatric Diagnostic Reasoning.Adrian Kind - 2025 - Philosophy Compass 20 (4):e70032.How do psychiatrists arrive at their diagnostic conclusions? Though several philosophers of psychiatry have proposed how to understand psychiatric diagnostic reasoning over the last decade, this essential question of the epistemology of psychiatric practice has received little attention. This article introduces the reader to this topic, its importance, and the major theoretical positions presented in the debate, while also pointing to future relevant research in this area of philosophy of psychiatry.
- On the Accuracy and Aptness of Suspension.Sven Bernecker & Luis Rosa - forthcoming - Philosophical Studies:1-9.This paper challenges Sosa’s account of the epistemic propriety of suspension of judgment. We take the reader on a test drive through some common problem cases in epistemology, to see how the account of suspension deals with them. Section 1 outlines Sosa’s account of accurate and apt suspension. Sections 2 and 3 focus on the skeptical scenario to argue that Sosa makes it too easy for suspension to be accurate and apt. Section 4 applies Sosa’s account of accurate and apt (...)
- Effective integration and models of information: lessons from integrative structure modeling.Agnes Bolinska & Andrej Sali - 2025 - Synthese 205 (2):1-25.Integrative structure modeling is a method for using information from multiple sources to compute structural models of biomolecular systems. It proceeds via four steps: (i) defining the model representation, which determines the variables whose values will be computed; (ii) constructing a function for scoring alternative models according to how well they accommodate input information; (iii) searching a space of candidate models for acceptable models; and (iv) analyzing acceptable models to evaluate their fit with input information. These steps are iterated until (...)
- Dark Matter: Explanatory Unification and Historical Continuity.Simon Allzén - manuscriptIn recent years, the hope to confirm the existence of dark matter by experimentally detecting it has diminished significantly. After more than 30 years of experimental searches, many of the most promising candidates have since been ruled out, leaving the epistemic and scientific condition of dark matter in a state of suspension. In efforts to improve the epistemic justification for the dark-matter hypothesis, physicists have turned to philosophical arguments and historical narratives. In this paper, I explicate two such strategies -- (...)
- The zetetic significance of unpossessed evidence.Michele Palmira - 2025 - In Aaron B. Creller & Jonathan Matheson, Inquiry: Philosophical Perspectives. New York, NY: Routledge.The presence of easily accessible yet unpossessed evidence seems to matter epistemically. In this chapter I offer an inquiry-theoretic explanation of this datum. I argue that agents in the target cases fail to be competent inquirers and gather the relevant easily accessible evidence. This offers a deflationary explanation of the initial datum. I then show how to inflate this explanation to vindicate the thought that unpossessed evidence has defeating power over the justificatory status of one’s beliefs. The inflationary explanation rests (...)
- The No Defeater Clause: Evidentialism, Responsibilism, and Higher-Order Evidence.Simon Graf - 2025 - Episteme:1-25.Rational or epistemically justified beliefs are often said to be defeasible. That is, beliefs that have some otherwise justification conferring property can lose their epistemic status because they are defeated by some evidence possessed by the believer or due to some external facts about the believer’s epistemic environment. Accordingly, many have argued that we need to add a so-called no defeater clause to any theory of epistemic justification. In this paper, I will survey various possible evidentialist as well as responsibilitst (...)
- Error Statistics Using the Akaike and Bayesian Information Criteria.Henrique Cheng & Beckett Sterner - forthcoming - Erkenntnis.Many biologists, especially in ecology and evolution, analyze their data by estimating fits to a set of candidate models and selecting the best model according to the Akaike Information Criterion (AIC) or the Bayesian Information Criteria (BIC). When the candidate models represent alternative hypotheses, biologists may want to limit the chance of a false positive to a specified level. Existing model selection methodology, however, allows for only indirect control over error rates by setting a threshold for the difference in AIC (...)
- On the Synthesis of Historical Linguistics and Cognate Disciplines.Frank Cabrera - 2025 - In Aviezer Tucker & David Cernín, The Bloomsbury Handbook of Big History: The Philosophy of the Historical Sciences. Bloomsbury Academic.The empirical and theoretical resources of different disciplines are often combined to shed light on questions that concern the deep history of humanity, such as the geographic origin of people groups, patterns of migration, and the diffusion of culture. In this article, I discuss three ways in which other disciplines, such as biology and archaeology, are integrated with historical linguistics to enhance our understanding of the past. First, other disciplines provide background knowledge that helps to constrain and assess competing historical (...)Remove from this listExport citationBookmark
- Permissivism About Religious Belief.Elizabeth Jackson - manuscriptIn this chapter, I argue that theistic belief is permissive belief. This is not a universal claim about persons or normative domains, but the claim that, for many common bodies of evidence, epistemic rationality is permissive about whether God exists. Marks of a permissive belief are rational disagreement over time, rational disagreement over persons, and powerful evidence on both sides. I argue that theistic belief fits all these criteria. I also show how considerations from divine hiddenness support permissivism about theism. (...)
- Resistance to Evidence, by Mona Simion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024. Pp. xiv + 214. (Review). [REVIEW]Carolina Flores - forthcoming - Mind.
- One-factor versus two-factor theory of delusion: Replies to Sullivan-Bissett and Noordhof.Chenwei Nie - 2024 - Neuroethics 18 (1):1-5.I would like to thank Sullivan-Bissett and Noordhof for their stimulating comments on my 2023 paper in Neuroethics. In this reply, I will (1) articulate some deeper disagreements that may underpin our disagreement on the nature of delusion, (2) clarify their misrepresentation of my previous arguments as a defence of the two-factor theory in particular, and (3) finally conduct a comparison between the Maherian one-factor theory and the two-factor theory, showing that the two-factor theory is better supported by evidence.
- Explaining Phenomenal Explanationism: A Précis of Appearance & Explanation.McCain Kevin & Luca Moretti - 2024 - Asian Journal of Philosophy 3 (2):article number 85.In this article, we offer a précis of Appearance & Explanation: Phenomenal Explanationism in Epistemology. We explain the central features of our theory of epistemic justification, Phenomenal Explanationism (PE). Further, we describe how PE applies to justification of various kinds and how it solves problems that plague its closest rival, Phenomenal Conservatism (PC).
- Automatic Conformity to Hermeneutic Charity.Morteza Shahram - manuscriptExistential reason belief is a tacit premise in reasoning in any instance of substantial decision making where sentential reason alone cannot indicate the rational choice. The outcome of the decisions that implicate such existential reasons are to essentially constitute either utility or knowledge of some sort or both. The binding underwrites some aspect of mental content that is by design charitably interpretable.---Knowledge or utility if reason consist of desire and belief.
- Higher‐order evidence and the duty to double‐check.Michele Palmira - 2024 - Noûs 58 (3):799-824.The paper proposes an account of the rational response to higher‐order evidence whose key claim is that whenever we acquire such evidence we ought to engage in the inquiring activity of double‐checking. Combined with a principle that establishes a connection between rational inquiry and rational belief retention, the account offers a novel explanation of the alleged impermissibility of retaining one's belief in the face of higher‐order evidence. It is argued that this explanation is superior to the main competitor view which (...)
- Center indifference and skepticism.David Builes - 2024 - Noûs 58 (3):778-798.Many philosophers have been attracted to a restricted version of the principle of indifference in the case of self‐locating belief. Roughly speaking, this principle states that, within any given possible world, one should be indifferent between different hypotheses concerning who one is within that possible world, so long as those hypotheses are compatible with one's evidence. My first goal is to defend a more precise version of this principle. After responding to several existing criticisms of such a principle, I argue (...)
- Verschwörungstheorien und skeptische Hypothesen: immun gegen Gegenbelege?Romy Jaster & Geert Keil - 2024 - Zeitschrift für Philosophische Forschung 78 (3):408-431.Verschwörungstheorien (VTn) sind in der erkenntnistheoretischen Literatur wiederholt mit skeptischen Hypothesen verglichen worden: Beide entzögen sich der empirischen Überprüfung, indem sie sich gegen Gegenbelege immunisierten. Im Falle von VTn bestehe die Immunisierung darin, dass vermeintliche Gegenbelege ungeprüft auf Vertuschungs- oder Täuschungshandlungen der Verschwörer zurückgeführt würden. Eine genauere Rekonstruktion der Täuschungsthese und ein genauerer Blick auf die Immunisierungsthese fördern aber eine Reihe von Disanalogien zutage: Im Unterschied zu skeptischen Hypothesen behaupten VTn das eigene Szenario als real und schreiben die Täuschung nur (...)
- Classification, Disease and Evidence: New Essays in the Philosophy of Medicine.Philippe Huneman, Gérard Lambert & Marc Silberstein (eds.) - 2015 - Dordrecht:This anthology of essays presents a sample of studies from recent philosophy of medicine addressing issues which attempt to answer very general (interdependent) questions: (a) what is a disease and what is health? (b) How do we (causally) explain diseases? (c) And how do we distinguish diseases, id est define classes of diseases and recognize that an instance X of disease belongs to a given class B? (d) How do we assess and choose cure/ therapy? The book is divided into (...)
- Explanationism, Circularity and Non-Evaluative Grounding.Miloud Belkoniene - 2024 - Grazer Philosophische Studien 101 (1):28-46.The present article examines two important challenges raised by Steup for explanationist accounts of evidential fit. The first challenge targets the notion of available explanation which is key to any explanationist account of evidential fit. According to Steup, any plausible construal of the notion of available explanation already presupposes the notion of evidential fit. In response to that challenge, an alternative conception of what it takes for an explanation to be available to a subject is offered and shown to be (...)
- From Science to Christianity: Hypothesis Testing, Theory, Model, Experiment and Practice.Robert W. P. Luk - manuscriptThis manuscript is about how to start from relying on science to be more certain about Christianity. This is because science is so pervasive in our everyday life that we expect that it works almost every time. However, when it comes to Christianity, we need to have faith because most of the time God does not appear to respond to us. Therefore, we feel uncertain about beliefs in Christianity. Instead of being uncertain, this manuscript tries to find a way so (...)
- Inquiry beyond knowledge.Bob Beddor - 2023 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 109 (1):330-356.Why engage in inquiry? According to many philosophers, the goal of inquiring into some question is to come to know its answer. While this view holds considerable appeal, this paper argues that it stands in tension with another highly attractive thesis: knowledge does not require absolute certainty. Forced to choose between these two theses, I argue that we should reject the idea that inquiry aims at knowledge. I go on to develop an alternative view, according to which inquiry aims at (...)
- On the Nature and Relationship of Individual and Collective Justification.Simon Graf - 2024 - Dissertation, University of LeedsThis thesis is an investigation into the nature of epistemic justification. It brings together themes from traditional, individual-centred epistemology, and collective, group-centred epistemology. The first half of the thesis is concerned with the question of whether rationality is epistemically permissive; that is, whether one body of evidence can rationalise more than one doxastic attitude. In chapter 1, I argue that permissive cases are best understood as epistemic standard conflicts. Doing so provides us with a novel understanding of the arbitrariness objection (...)
- Hume and the Unity of Reasons.Eva Schmidt - 2024 - In Scott Stapleford & Verena Wagner, Hume and contemporary epistemology. New York, NY:Current debates about reasons and reasoning often draw comparisons between epistemic and practical reasons and reasoning and presuppose substantial unity between the practical and epistemic domains. This stance seems to conflict with a stark Humean contrast between the two domains: With respect to practical reasons and reasoning, Hume highlights the role of impressions, especially the passions, in motivating and rationalizing action, while apparently downplaying the potential relevance of beliefs, reason, or reasons. With respect to epistemic reasons and theoretical reasoning, he (...)$42.74 new (collection) View on Amazon.comRemove from this list Direct download (2 more)Export citationBookmark
- Persistent evidential discordance.Samuli Reijula & Sofia Blanco Sequeiros - forthcoming - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science.Successful replication is a hallmark of scientific truth. Discordant evidence refers to the situation where findings from different studies of the same phenomenon do not agree. Although evidential discordance can spur scientific discovery, it also gives scientists a reason to rationally disagree and thereby compromises the formation of scientific consensus. Discordance indicates that facts about the phenomenon of interest remain unsettled and that a finding may not be reliably replicable. We single out persistent evidential discordance as a particularly difficult problem (...)
- Permissivist Evidentialism.Elizabeth Jackson - 2026 - In Scott Stapleford, Kevin McCain & Matthias Steup, Evidentialism at 40: New Arguments, New Angles. pp. 24–40.Many evidentialists are impermissivists. But there’s no in-principle reason for this. In this paper, I examine and motivate permissivist evidentialism. Not only are permissivism and evidentialism compatible but there are unique benefits that arise for this combination of views. In particular, permissivist evidentialism respects the importance of evidence while capturing its limitations and provides a plausible and attractive explanation of the relationship between the epistemic and non-epistemic. Permissivist evidentialism is thus an attractive option in logical space that hasn’t received enough (...)
- Introspection and evidence.Alex Byrne - 2023 - In Maria Lasonen-Aarnio & Clayton Littlejohn, The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Evidence. New York, NY: pp. 318-28.$78.54 used (collection) View on Amazon.comRemove from this list Direct downloadExport citationBookmark
- Bayesian norms and non-ideal agents.Julia Staffel - 2023 - In Maria Lasonen-Aarnio & Clayton Littlejohn, The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Evidence. New York, NY:Bayesian epistemology provides a popular and powerful framework for modeling rational norms on credences, including how rational agents should respond to evidence. The framework is built on the assumption that ideally rational agents have credences, or degrees of belief, that are representable by numbers that obey the axioms of probability. From there, further constraints are proposed regarding which credence assignments are rationally permissible, and how rational agents’ credences should change upon learning new evidence. While the details are hotly disputed, all (...)$78.54 used (collection) View on Amazon.comRemove from this list Direct downloadExport citationBookmark
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- Rethinking Evidence-Based Management.Erik Weber, Ann Wyverkens & Bert Leuridan - 2024 - Philosophy of Management 23 (1):59-84.Evidence-based management (EBMgt) is a relatively recent approach to management, developed by Denise Rousseau in a series of articles and in a book that she co-authored with Eric Barends (Barends & Rousseau 2018). It is based on the idea that good-quality management decisions require both critical thinking and use of the best available evidence. In this paper we want to contribute to the scholarship on evidence-based management by showing how its central concept – evidence – can and should be defined (...)
- The Epistemic Role of Vividness.Joshua Myers - 2025 - Analysis 85 (1):100-110.The vividness of mental imagery is epistemically relevant. Intuitively, vivid and intense memories are epistemically better than weak and hazy memories, and using a clear and precise mental image in the service of spatial reasoning is epistemically better than using a blurry and imprecise mental image. But how is vividness epistemically relevant? I argue that vividness is higher-order evidence about one’s epistemic state, rather than first-order evidence about the world. More specifically, the vividness of a mental image is higher-order evidence (...)
- What Logical Evidence Could not be.Matteo Baggio - 2023 - Philosophia 51:2559–2587.By playing a crucial role in settling open issues in the philosophical debate about logical consequence, logical evidence has become the holy grail of inquirers investigating the domain of logic. However, despite its indispensable role in this endeavor, logical evidence has retained an aura of mystery. Indeed, there seems to be a great disharmony in conceiving the correct nature and scope of logical evidence among philosophers. In this paper, I examine four widespread conceptions of logical evidence to argue that all (...)
- Capturing the conspiracist’s imagination.Daniel Munro - 2023 - Philosophical Studies 180 (12):3353-3381.Some incredibly far-fetched conspiracy theories circulate online these days. For most of us, clear evidence would be required before we’d believe these extraordinary theories. Yet, conspiracists often cite evidence that seems transparently very weak. This is puzzling, since conspiracists often aren’t irrational people who are incapable of rationally processing evidence. I argue that existing accounts of conspiracist belief formation don’t fully address this puzzle. Then, drawing on both philosophical and empirical considerations, I propose a new explanation that appeals to the (...)
- How should we ascribe the third stance?Luis Rosa - 2025 - In Verena Wagner & Zinke Alexandra, Suspension in epistemology and beyond. New York, NY: Routledge.Epistemologists often describe subjects as being capable of adopting a third kind of categorical doxastic stance regarding whether something is the case, besides belief and disbelief. They deploy a variety of idioms in order to ascribe that stance. In this paper, I flesh out the properties that the third kind of categorical stance is supposed to have and start searching for the best ways to ascribe it. The idioms ‘suspends judgment about whether’ and ‘is agnostic about whether’, among others, are (...)
- Fragments: Poems and Narratives.Edward Francisco - 2022 - Morrisville, NC:Fragments is a verse and narrative work of phenomenological and existential ontology focusing on mind-world unity and mind-world dislocation in the experience of self through time. Pivotal experiential and historical moments -- moments when normative guardrails and unreflective models of the world may be compromised -- are approached as fundamental markers of how we transact with evolving versions of ourselves and world.
- Hasty Generalizations Are Pervasive in Experimental Philosophy: A Systematic Analysis.Uwe Peters & Olivier Lemeire - 2023 - Philosophy of Science.Scientists may sometimes generalize from their samples to broader populations when they have not yet sufficiently supported this generalization. Do such hasty generalizations also occur in experimental philosophy? To check, we analyzed 171 experimental philosophy studies published between 2017 and 2023. We found that most studies tested only Western populations but generalized beyond them without justification. There was also no evidence that studies with broader conclusions had larger, more diverse samples, but they nonetheless had higher citation impact. Our analyses reveal (...)
- Absence of evidence against belief as credence 1.Andrew del Rio - 2022 - Analysis 83 (1):31-39.On one view of the traditional doxastic attitudes, belief is credence 1, disbelief is credence 0 and suspension is any precise credence between 0 and 1. In ‘Rational agnosticism and degrees of belief’ (2013) Jane Friedman argues, against this view, that there are cases where a credence of 0 is required but where suspension is permitted. If this were so, belief, disbelief and suspension could not be identified or reduced to the aforementioned credences. I argue that Friedman relies on two (...)
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