Abstract

The main goal of my dissertation is to defend evidentialism from alleged counter-examples. The most powerful examples I discuss are the ones in which two people see the same thing, thus they seem to have the same evidence, but one is justified in believing a relevant proposition and the other is not. ;The way I reply to the objections is to provide an explanation of why they have different evidence though they seem to have the same evidence. The distinction between an F-type experience and a seeming-F-type experience plays a significant role in explaining why they may have different evidence. Simply speaking, an F-type experience is an experience Fs would yield under a normal condition. You can have an F-type experience without applying the concept 'F' to your appearance. But a seeming-F-type experience is an experience in which it seems that an F is there. So in order for you to have a seeming-F-type experience, you must apply the concept 'F' to your appearance based on your skill of recognizing Fs. So two people may have different evidence depending on whether they apply the relevant concept based on their recognitional skill, even if they have exactly the same F-type experience. ;Just pointing out that they have different evidence does not imply that they have different justificatory status. I need to explain why believing a proposition 'fits' one's evidence and does not 'fit' the other's evidence. I propose 'the identifiability condition' as an analysis of 'fitness' when the relevant evidence is perceptual