Abstract
According to evidentialists about inferential justification, an agent’s evidence—and only
her evidence—determines which inferences she would be justified in making, whether
or not she in fact makes them. But there seem to be cases in which two agents would
be justified in making different inferences from a shared body of evidence, merely in
virtue of the different competences those agents possess. These sorts of cases suggest
that evidence does not have the pride of place afforded to it by evidentialists;
competence seems to play at least as important a role as evidence in explaining which
inferences an agent would be justified in making.
In this paper, I consider how two versions of evidentialism about inferential
justification might try to account for the role of competence in inference, and I present
problems specific to each version. I end by sketching and briefly defending an
alternative to these evidentialist views, “inferential dogmatism”. While dogmatic views
have gotten some attention in debates around non-inferential justification, they have
largely been ignored in debates around inferential justification and are to that extent
novel.