Online research in philosophy

The Requirement of Total Evidence (RTE) asks an agent to make her confidence in a belief proportional to the support it receives from her total evidence. This paper examines (RTE) as a norm of epistemic rationality and argues that it is problematic. Looking at the work of Peter Achinstein (2001) on the notion of evidence it becomes clear that (RTE) endorses a view of the constitution of evidence that is neither necessary nor sufficient for something to count as evidence. To overcome this and other deficiencies associated with (RTE) a move is made to an objective view of evidence. This move aligns epistemic rationality with scientific rationality in seeking to capture veridical evidence. It also leads to a new norm of epistemic rationality--the Proper Subset Evidence Requirement (PSER).

In his paper "The Design Argument," Elliott Sober predicts that "human beings will eventually build organisms from nonliving materials."[1] In that case, we could obtain clear evidence that certain organisms resulted from intelligent design whereas earlier we might have thought they were due to a Darwinian process. I consider a similar possibility in chapter 6 of No Free Lunch.

In my comments on Prof. Sterba’s paper, I argue that evidence about the educational value of racial preferences reveals not that these policies produce good educational outcomes, but that schools use racial preferences regardless of whether they produce desirable outcomes. I further argue that in the absence of objective evidence about the value of racial preferences, proponents of these policies tend to rely on personal anecdotes. Often, these anecdotes reveal complex institutional and personal motives having little to do with the objective value of racial diversity.

The author argues that the atheist does not commit the so called “philosophy fallacy” but rather simply answers the theist’s arguments. The principle that the absence of evidence is the evidence of absence, although very sound, is nevertheless context-dependent and cannot be accepted without further qualifications. Also, any systematic study of religiousness should explore its links to emotions (prophets often invite people to open their hearts, not their minds or reasons) and its role in the constitution of identity (people often claim that they are Catholics, they are Moslems, etc).

In this note, I consider various precisifications of the slogan ‘evidence of evidence is evidence’. I provide counter-examples to each of these precisifications (assuming an epistemic probabilistic relevance notion of ‘evidential support’).

I defend the first premise of William Rowe’s well-known arguments from evil against influential criticisms due to William Alston. I next suggest that the central inference in Rowe’s arguments is best understood to move from the claim that we have an absence of evidence of a satisfactory theodicy to the claim that we have evidence of absence of such a theodicy. I endorse the view which holds that this move succeeds only if it is reasonable to believe that (roughly) if there were such a theodicy, we would probably know it. After conceding that there may be modest prima facie support for this latter claim via the Principle of Credulity, I consider and reject four more ambitious arguments in its favour. I conclude that this necessary condition on Rowe’s crucial inference has not been shown to be satisfied.

Evidence is an objective matter. This is the prevailing view within science, and confirmation theory should aim to capture the objective nature of scientific evidence. Modeling an objective evidence relation in a probabilistic framework faces two challenges: the probabilities must have the right epistemic foundation, and they must be specifiable given the hypotheses and data under consideration. Here I will explore how Sober's (2008, 2009) approach to confirmation handles these challenges of foundation and specification. In particular, I will argue that the specification problem proves especially difficult, and undermines the law of likelihood as an adequate representation of the objective nature of scientific evidence.

I defend the first premise of William Rowe’s well-known arguments from evil against influential criticisms due to William Alston. I next suggest that the central inference in Rowe’s arguments is best understood to move from the claim that we have an absence of evidence of a satisfactory theodicy to the claim that we have evidence of absence of such a theodicy. I endorse the view which holds that this move succeeds only if it is reasonable to believe that (roughly) if there were such a theodicy, we would probably know it. After conceding that there may be modest prima facie support for this latter claim via the Principle of Credulity, I consider and reject four more ambitious arguments in its favour. I conclude that this necessary condition on Rowe’s crucial inference has not been shown to be satisfied.

“Absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence” is a slogan that is popular among scientists and nonscientists alike. This article assesses its truth by using a probabilistic tool, the Law of Likelihood. Qualitative questions (“Is E evidence about H ?”) and quantitative questions (“How much evidence does E provide about H ?”) are both considered. The article discusses the example of fossil intermediates. If finding a fossil that is phenotypically intermediate between two extant species provides evidence that those species have a common ancestor, does failing to find such a fossil constitute evidence that there was no common ancestor? Or should the failure merely be chalked up to the imperfection of the fossil record? The transitivity of the evidence relation in simple causal chains provides a broader context, which leads to discussion of the fine-tuning argument, the anthropic principle, and observation selection effects.