Abstract
According to Williamson, your evidence consists of all and only what you know (E = K). According to his critics, it doesn’t. While E = K calls for revision, the revisions it calls for are minor. E = K gets this much right. Only true propositions can constitute evidence and anything you know non-inferentially is part of your evidence. In this paper, I defend these two theses about evidence and its possession from Williamson’s critics who think we should break more radically from E = K.
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Notes
Williamson (2000: 185).
On one version of E = B, our evidence will consist of those propositions that are the contents of non-factive experiential states. On another, our evidence will consist of those propositions we justifiably believe, say, on the basis of non-factive experiential states.
Obviously, not every non-factive mental state determines what evidence you have. It doesn’t seem that two subjects that differ in their desires thereby differ in what evidence they have. If you are so inclined, you can tack on some sort of reliability condition and say that only non-factive mental states produced by processes that reliably lead to truth provide evidence.
Kelly (2008: 943).
Silins (2005: 376).
Silins (2005: 381).
E = K does not imply that E = K can be known from the armchair. E = K does not imply that E = K can be known. I do not think that anyone thinks that the way to deal with Silins’ objection is to say that E = K isn’t known or isn’t known from the armchair.
Let’s say that S’s justification for believing p is strong empirical justification if it is impossible to have that very justification from the armchair alone. S’s justification for believing p is weak empirical justification if that very justification could have been had from the armchair alone but depends constitutively upon the subject’s experiences.
To see this, remember that on AA, if p is part of your evidence, you are in a position to know that this is so from the armchair. Assume that you can know from the armchair whether you need strong empirical justification to have something in your evidence, the problem discussed above with E = K would arise anew. Combine (i) the claim that you can know from armchair that p is part of your evidence, (ii) that you can know from the armchair that you could not have p as part of your evidence unless you had strong empirical justification for believing p, and you get the unfortunate result that you can know things from the armchair that cannot be known from the armchair (e.g., that you have strong empirical justification for believing p).
Maher (1996) defends the view that our evidence includes what we know on the basis of observation and so I imagine he would be sympathetic to IKSE. Weatherson has expressed sympathy for a view in the neighborhood of this one, a view on which your evidence is what you know as the output of a Fodorian module. I don’t know if this view has appeared in print.
An anonymous referee raised this worry.
In the course of criticizing an account of evidence on which evidence is non-factive, Williamson notes that it is not clear how someone working with a non-factive conception of evidence could rule out the possibility of having bodies of evidence that include logically inconsistent propositions. For example, suppose you think there can be false, non-inferentially justified beliefs and you are tempted to identify a subject’s evidence with the propositions that subject is non-inferentially justified in believing. Many have the intuition that it is possible to justifiably believe inconsistent propositions (provided that you do not appreciate that they are inconsistent), so it seems you would have to allow for the possibility that someone could have a body of evidence that includes two or more propositions that are inconsistent with one another. Williamson observes, “there are grave difficulties in making sense of the evidential probabilities on inconsistent evidence, since conditional probabilities are usually taken to be undefined when conditioned on something inconsistent. In particular, any proposition has a probability 1 conditional on itself and any contradiction has probability 0 on anything … but these constraints cannot both be met for probabilities conditional on a contradiction” (2009: 310). We can add this to the list of reasons to think evidence is factive. I mention this here because it is clear textual evidence that Williamson takes evidence to be the thing that determines the evidential probabilities of what we believe. So, we should be able to rely on our intuitive sense of whether certain hypotheses are consistent with someone’s evidence to determine what the elements of someone’s body of evidence is. If, as is plausible, we think that we can know p on inductive grounds when the evidential probability of p on such grounds is less than 1, there is a problem for KSE.
To foreshadow just a bit, once we distinguish between the propositions that constitute evidence and the propositions that constitute derivative reasons for belief, we then have to say that if only justified beliefs provide reasons that justify further beliefs, not every justified belief will be a belief whose content is part of a believer’s stockpile of evidence.
Fantl and McGrath (2009: 98).
Williamson (2007b) defends the justification requirement for knowledge on these sorts of grounds.
You cannot combine ESM with IKSE if you also insist that evidence consists only of true propositions. If the truth of a proposition were required for that proposition to constitutive evidence, then we could not combine IKSE, ESM, and LF. According to LF, it is possible for someone to know an e-proposition non-inferentially. According to IKSE, if someone knows an e-proposition non-inferentially, this proposition is part of the subject’s evidence. However, according to ESM, this proposition can be part of this subject’s evidence only if it is part of any subject’s body of evidence who happens to be a non-factive mental duplicate of our first subject. Among the possible non-factive mental duplicates of our subject are subjects that believe the very same e-proposition our first subject does when that proposition is false.
Williamson (2009: 311). This assumes, of course, that the truth of a belief is not a necessary condition for the justification of that belief.
Williamson (2007a: 209).
I owe the objection to an anonymous referee.
Thanks to an anonymous referee for raising this possibility.
Strictly speaking, it does not follow from the (alleged) fact that ‘S knows p is part of S’s evidence’ entails p that ‘S’s evidence includes p’ entails p. It could be that p can be evidence even if ~p, but p can only be known to be included in a body of evidence by someone who knows p is true. I cannot imagine any credible explanation as to why this would be. If p need not be true to be a piece of evidence, why would the falsity of p prevent you from knowing that p is part of someone’s evidence? If p is a piece of evidence that no one could know belongs to someone’s evidence, is p really a central, important case? Remember, a standard view about evidence is that if you have it, you are in a pretty good position to know that you do.
If talk of epistemic ‘should’ or ‘ought’ worries you, the points I am about to make could just as easily be made by focusing on claims about what is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ to believe.
Gettier (1963: 122).
Comesaña and Kantin (2010: 450).
Williamson (2000: 185).
Williamson (2007a: 192).
Pappas and Swain thought that it was plausible to maintain, “If an essential part of the reasoning from the evidence to the accepted proposition, h, proceeds through a false step, then acceptance of h is not justified” (1978: 15). Lowy (1978) saw that this principle is no obstacle to the construction of Gettier cases. She argued that Gettier was focused on believers who are justified in believing propositions rather beliefs that are justified. If, as she suggests, ascriptions of personal justification (‘S is justified in believing p’) do not entail ascriptions of doxastic justification (‘S’s belief that p is justified’), someone could hold that you cannot justifiably believe p if that belief is based on reasoning that proceeds through a false step but could have a person justified in believing things having reasoned from false beliefs. In this paper, I have not been careful to mark the distinction between personal and doxastic justification. In Littlejohn (2009), I argue that we ought to recognize this distinction and show that it is useful for reconciling externalism accounts of justified belief with intuitions that some say favor internalism. My own view is someone can be justified in believing false propositions but there cannot be false, justified beliefs. Again, see Lowy’s paper for an explanation as to how someone could say that there cannot be false, justified beliefs but can be Gettier cases.
See Feldman (1974).
Comesaña and Kantin (2010: 5).
For further objections to JE, see Neta (2008: 102).
That is to say, S can justifiably believe p even if the epistemic probability of p (i.e., the conditional probability of p on S’s evidence) is less than 1.
Comesaña and Kantin (2010: 8).
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Mike Almeida, Eric Barnes, Christopher Cloos, Juan Comesaña, Gabriele Contessa, Andrew Cullison, Brandon Fitelson, Jonathan Ichikawa, John Turri, Brian Weatherson, and Greg Wheeler for discussing these issues with me. I also want to express my gratitude to two referees for this journal for their extensive comments on earlier drafts of this paper.
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Littlejohn, C. Evidence and Knowledge. Erkenn 74, 241–262 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-010-9247-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-010-9247-x