Policy-makers sometimes aim to improve well-being as a policy goal, but to do this they need some way to measure well-being. Instead of relying on potentially problematic theories of well-being to justify their choice of well-being measure, Daniel Hausman proposes that policy-makers can sometimes rely on preference-based measures as evidence for well-being. I claim that Hausman’s evidential account does not justify the use of any one measure more than it justifies the use of any other measure. This leaves (...) us at a loss as to which policy should be chosen in the non-trivial cases for which there is substantial disagreement between the different measures in their assessment of policy. (shrink)

Biased research occurs frequently in the sciences. In this paper, I will focus on one particular kind of biased research: research that is subject to sponsorship bias. I will address the following epistemological question: what precisely is epistemically wrong with biased research of this kind? I will defend the evidential account of epistemic wrongness: that is, research affected by sponsorship bias is epistemically wrong if and only if the researchers in question make false claims about the evidential (...) support of some hypothesis H by data E. I will argue that the evidential account captures the epistemic wrongness of three paradigmatic types of sponsorship bias. (shrink)

The value of varied evidence, I propose, lies in the fact that more varied evidence is less coherent on the assumption of the negation of the hypothesis under consideration than less varied evidence. I contrast my own analysis with several other Bayesian analyses of the value of evidential diversity and show how my account explains cases where it seems intuitively that evidential variety is valuable for confirmation.

Many if not all evidential languages have a mirative evidential: an indirect evidential that can, in some contexts, mark mirativity (the expression of speaker surprise) instead of indirect evidence. We address several questions posed by this systematic polysemy: What is the affinity between indirect evidence and speaker surprise? What conditions the two interpretations? And how do mirative evidentials relate to other mirative markers? We propose a unified analysis of mirative evidentials where indirect evidentiality and mirativity involve a (...) common epistemic component. A mirative interpretation requires a close temporal proximity between the speech event and the event of the speaker's learning the at-issue content. (shrink)

Some of the most interesting recent work in formal epistemology has focused on developing accuracy-based approaches to justifying Bayesian norms. These approaches are interesting not only because they offer new ways to justify these norms, but because they potentially offer a way to justify all of these norms by appeal to a single, attractive epistemic goal: having accurate beliefs. Recently, Easwaran & Fitelson (2012) have raised worries regarding whether such “all-accuracy” or “purely alethic” approaches can accommodate and justify evidential (...) Bayesian norms. In response, proponents of purely alethic approaches, such as Pettigrew (2013b) and Joyce (2016), have argued that scoring rule arguments provide us with compatible and purely alethic justifications for the traditional Bayesian norms, including evidential norms. In this paper I raise several challenges to this claim. First, I argue that many of the justifications these scoring rule arguments provide are not compatible. Second, I raise worries for the claim that these scoring rule arguments provide purely alethic justifications. Third, I turn to assess the more general question of whether purely alethic justifications for evidential norms are even possible, and argue that, without making some contentious assumptions, they are not. Fourth, I raise some further worries for the possibility of providing purely alethic justifications for content-sensitive evidential norms, like the Principal Principle. (shrink)

This paper outlines an account of conditionals, the evidential account, which rests on the idea that a conditional is true just in case its antecedent supports its consequent. As we will show, the evidential account exhibits some distinctive logical features that deserve careful consideration. On the one hand, it departs from the material reading of ‘if then’ exactly in the way we would like it to depart from that reading. On the other, it significantly differs (...) from the non-material accounts which hinge on the Ramsey Test, advocated by Adams, Stalnaker, Lewis, and others. (shrink)

This paper investigates the adequacy of evidential relevance relations proposed by Glymour and others. These accounts incorporate, as a necessary condition, what I call the Positive Instance Condition (PIC): the evidence statement and auxiliary assumptions entail a "positive instance" of the hypothesis. I argue that any account which incorporates PIC as a necessary condition while allowing "bootstrap testing" is doomed to fail. A nonbootstrapping evidential relevance relation of similar form is proposed, and it is argued that, in (...) addition to avoiding published counter examples, this new relation meets two general requirements which, if not met, would undermine the ability of any account that incorporates PIC to accord with our intuitions of evidential relevance. (shrink)

As a general rule, whenever a hearer is justified in forming the belief that p on the basis of a speaker’s testimony, she will also be justified in assuming that the speaker has formed her belief appropriately in light of a relevantly large and representative sample of the evidence that bears on p. In simpler terms, a justification for taking someone’s testimony entails a justification for trusting her assessment of the evidence. This introduces the possibility of what I will call (...) “evidential preemption.” Evidential preemption occurs when a speaker, in addition to offering testimony that p, also warns the hearer of the likelihood that she will subsequently be confronted with apparently contrary evidence: this is done, however, not so as to encourage the hearer to temper her confidence in p in anticipation of that evidence, but rather to suggest that the (apparently) contrary evidence is in fact misleading evidence or evidence that has already been taken into account. Either way, the speaker is signalling to the hearer that the subsequent disclosure of this evidence will not require her to significantly revise her belief that p. Such preemption can effectively inoculate an audience against future contrary evidence, and thereby creates an opening for a form of exploitative manipulation that I will call “epistemic grooming.” Nonetheless, I argue, not all uses of evidential preemption are nefarious; it can also serve as an important tool for guiding epistemically limited agents though complex evidential scenarios. (shrink)

Evidential Pluralism maintains that in order to establish a causal claim one normally needs to establish the existence of an appropriate conditional correlation and the existence of an appropriate mechanism complex, so when assessing a causal claim one ought to consider both association studies and mechanistic studies. Hitherto, Evidential Pluralism has been applied to medicine, leading to the EBM+ programme, which recommends that evidence-based medicine should systematically evaluate mechanistic studies alongside clinical studies. This paper argues that Evidential (...) Pluralism can also be fruitfully applied to the social sciences. In particular, Evidential Pluralism provides (i) a new approach to evidence-based policy; (ii) an account of the evidential relationships in more theoretical research; and (iii) new philosophical motivation for mixed methods research. The application of Evidential Pluralism to the social sciences is also defended against two objections. (shrink)

How is scientific data used to represent phenomena and as evidence for claims about phenomena? In this paper, I propose that a specific type of claims – evidential claims – is involved in data practices to define and restrict the representational and evidential content of a dataset. I present an account of data practices in the epidemiology of the exposome based on the notion of evidential claims, which helps unpack the approaches, assumptions and warrants that connect (...) different stages of research. I identify three different strategies to generate different types of evidential claims in this case. The macro strategy, which individuates the dataset that serves as the initial evidential space for research. The micro strategy, which is used to generate evidential claims about the microscopic and individual component of target phenomena. The association strategy, that uses evidence from the other strategies to identify a dataset as representation of the different levels and relations of exposure and disease. Differentiating between these strategies sheds light on the multi-faceted landscape of biomedical research on environment and health; and the roles of data and evidence in the process of inquiry. (shrink)

This clearly presented study examines the nature of religious experiences, and asks whether they can be used as evidence for religious beliefs. The author discusses important philosophical issues raised by religious experience, such as the role of models and metaphors in their description, and the way experiences in general are used as evidence for claims about the world. Using contemporary and classic sources from the world's religions, the author gives an account of different types of religious experience. She also (...) draws extensively on psychological, sociological, and philosophical literature to meet sceptical challenges, and concludes that, like most experiences, they are most effective as evidence within an argument which combines evidence from a wide range of sources. (shrink)

This paper develops the idea that valid arguments are equivalent to true conditionals by combining Kripke’s theory of truth with the evidential account of conditionals offered by Crupi and Iacona. As will be shown, in a first-order language that contains a naïve truth predicate and a suitable conditional, one can define a validity predicate in accordance with the thesis that the inference from a conjunction of premises to a conclusion is valid when the corresponding conditional is true. The (...) validity predicate so defined significantly increases our expressive resources and provides a coherent formal treatment of paradoxical arguments. (shrink)

This paper presents an information-based logic that is applied to the analysis of entailment, implicature and presupposition in natural language. The logic is very fine-grained and is able to make distinctions that are outside the scope of classical logic. It is independently motivated by certain properties of natural human reasoning, namely partiality, paraconsistency, relevance, and defeasibility: once these are accounted for, the data on implicature and presupposition comes quite naturally.The logic is based on the family of semantic spaces known as (...) bilattices, originally proposed by Ginsberg (1988), and used extensively by Fitting (1989, 1992). Specifically, the logic is based on a subset of bilattices that I call evidential bilattices, constructed as the Cartesian product of certain algebras with themselves. The specific details of the epistemic agent approach of the logical system is derived from the work of Belnap (1975, 1977), augmented by the use of evidential links for inferencing. An important property of the system is that it has been implemented using an extension of Fitting's work on bilattice logic programming (1989, 1991) to build a model-based inference engine for the augmented Belnap logic. This theorem prover is very efficient for a reasonably wide range of inferences. (shrink)

Through case studies in sociology, economics and legal studies, this book advances new philosophical foundations for the methods of the social sciences, providing an account of how to establish or evaluate causal claims, and offering a new way of thinking about evidence-based policy, basic social science research and mixed methods research.

We show in this paper that some expressions indicating source of evidence are part of propositional content and are best analyzed as special kind of epistemic modal. Our evidence comes from the Japanese evidential system. We consider six evidentials in Japanese, showing that they can be embedded in conditionals and under modals and that their properties with respect to modal subordination are similar to those of ordinary modals. We show that these facts are difficult for existing theories of evidentials, (...) which assign evidentials necessarily widest scope, to explain. We then provide an analysis using a logical system designed to account for evidential reasoning; this logic is the first developed system of probabilistic dynamic predicate logic. This analysis is shown to account for the data we provide that is problematic for other theories. (shrink)

This paper develops an analysis of a scalar implicature that is induced by the use of reportative evidentials such as the Cuzco Quechua enclitic = si and the German modal sollen. Reportatives, in addition to specifying the speaker’s source of information for a statement as a report by someone else, also usually convey that the speaker does not have direct evidence for the proposition expressed. While this type of implicature can be calculated using the same kind of Gricean reasoning that (...) underlies other scalar implicatures, it requires two departures from standard assumptions. First, evidential scalar implicatures differ from the more familiar scalar implicatures in that they do not turn on the notion of informativeness but on the notion of evidential strength. Second, the implicature arises on the illocutionary level of meaning. It is argued that a version of Grice’s maxim of quantity in terms of illocutionary strength can account for this evidential scalar implicature as well as for the more typical scalar implicatures. The account developed also proposes some revisions to the taxonomy of speech acts and suggests that the sincerity conditions of assertive speech acts contain an evidential sincerity condition in addition to the belief condition standardly assumed. (shrink)

Caroline Franks Davis provides a clear, sensitive, and carefully argued assessment of the value of religious experiences as evidence for religious beliefs. Much more than an 'argument from religious experience', the inquiry systematically addresses underlying philosophical issues such as the role of interpretation in experience, the function of models and metaphors in religious language, and the way perceptual experiences in general are used as evidence for claims about the world. The author examines several arguments from religious experience and, using contemporary (...) and classic sources from the world religions, gives an account of the different types of experience. To meet sceptical challenges to religious experience, she draws extenisvely on psychological and sociological as well as philosophical and religious literature, probing deeply into the questions whether religious experiences are merely a matter of interpretation, whether there is irreducible conflict among religious experiences, and whether psychological and other reductionist explanations of religious experience are satisfactory. She concludes that religious experiences, like most experiences, are most effective as evidence within a cumulative style of argument which combines evidence from a wide range of sources. (shrink)

This article is a study of the role and use of evidence in the evaluation of claims in the historical sciences. In order to do this, I develop a “snapshot” approach to Toulmin schemas. This framework is applied to the case of Archezoa, an initially supported then eventually rejected hypothesis in evolutionary biology. From this case study, I criticize Cleland’s “smoking gun” account of the methodology of the historical sciences. I argue that Toulmin schemas are conceptually precise tools that (...) allow for the building of enriched reconstructions of evidential reasoning. From the application of this framework, I discuss three ways in which the construction and use of facts in the historical sciences are theory-laden. Despite its inherent limits, TS are heuristically useful tools to identify epistemic moves that could be further investigated. It also sheds light on the positive roles of speculation in the historical sciences. Finally, I argue that it provides a context-specific and individuated understanding of hypothesis evaluation in the historical sciences. Overall, I think the application of Toulmin schemas to cases of evidential reasoning in the historical sciences is a promising descriptive and heuristic tool for philosophers of science. (shrink)

The concept of an evidential conditional If A then C that can be defined by the conjunction of A>C and ¬C>¬A, where > is a conditional of the kind introduced by Stalnaker and Lewis, has recently been studied in a series of papers by Vincenzo Crupi and Andrea Iacona. In this paper I argue that Crupi and Iacona’s central idea that contraposition captures the idea of evidential support cannot be maintained. I give examples showing that contraposition is neither (...) necessary nor sufficient for a conditional’s antecedent supporting its consequent. Crupi and Iacona’s alternative account of evidential conditionals that is based on a probabilistic measure of evidential support cannot add to the credentials of their modal account, because both the theoretical role of contraposition and the resulting logic are different in this account. (shrink)

The indispensability argument is a method for showing that abstract mathematical objects exist. Various versions of this argument have been proposed. Lately, commentators seem to have agreed that a holistic indispensability argument will not work, and that an explanatory indispensability argument is the best candidate. In this paper I argue that the dominant reasons for rejecting the holistic indispensability argument are mistaken. This is largely due to an overestimation of the consequences that follow from evidential holism. Nevertheless, the holistic (...) indispensability argument should be rejected, but for a different reason —in order that an indispensability argument relying on holism can work, it must invoke an unmotivated version of evidential holism. Such an argument will be unsound. Correcting the argument with a proper construal of evidential holism means that it can no longer deliver mathematical Platonism as a conclusion: such an argument for Platonism will be invalid. I then show how the reasons for rejecting the holistic indispensability argument importantly constrain what kind of account of explanation will be permissible in explanatory versions. (shrink)

Evidence is often taken to be “normative” for doxastic agents. What accounts for the normativity of evidence? According to the view that I’ll call “evidential minimalism”, there is a close connection between strong evidence for the truth of p and a normative reason to believe p: evidence is either itself a normative reason for belief, or evidence gives rise to such a reason when certain other minimal conditions are met. In this paper, I argue against evidential minimalism. I (...) will argue that there are cases where: (i) an individual S possesses strong evidence E for the truth of p at time t, (ii) all other minimal conditions for the normativity of E are met at t, (iii) S doesn’t believe p at t, yet (iv) S isn’t open to any form of criticism on account of (i)-(iii) at t. I will then formulate a plausible linking claim connecting openness to criticism and the existence of normative reasons for belief. The minimalist can either accept or reject this linking claim. I will argue that, either way, the minimalist view falters. (shrink)

In this article, I argue that in typical cases of singular thought, a thinker stands in an evidential relation to the object of thought suitable for providing knowledge of the object's existence. Furthermore, a thinker may generate representations that purport to refer to particular objects in response to appropriate, though defeasible, evidence of the existence of such an object. I motivate these constraints by considering a number of examples introduced by Robin Jeshion in support of a view she calls (...) ‘cognitivism’ (Jeshion, 2010b). Although I agree with Jeshion that acquaintance is not required for all cases of singular thought, I argue that her account doesn't go far enough in rejecting semantic instrumentalism, the view that we can generate singular thoughts arbitrarily, by manipulating the mechanisms of direct reference. (shrink)

Evidentials and Modals offers an in-depth account of the meaning of grammatical elements representing evidentiality in connection to modality, focusing on theoretical/formal perspectives by eminent pioneers in the field and on recently discovered phenomena in Korean evidential markers by native scholars in particular. Evidentiality became a hot topic in semantics and pragmatics, trying to see what kind of evidential justification is provided by evidentials to support or be related to the 'at-issue' prejacent propositions. This book aims to (...) provide a deeper understanding of such evidentiality in discourse contexts in a broad range of languages such as American Indian, Korean and Japanese, Turkish and African languages over the world. In addition, an introduction to the concept of evidentiality and theoretical perspectives and recent issues is also provided. Contributors are Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald, Robert Botne, Kyung-Sook Chung, Martina Faller, Ezra Keshet, Iksoo Kwon, Chungmin Lee, Ji-Young Lee, Jungmee Lee, Dongsik Lim, Lisa Matthewson, William McClure, Elin McCready, Sarah E. Murray, Marisa Nagano, Jinho Park, Mary Shin Kim, Jaemog Song, Thomas Willett, and Kei Yoshimoto. (shrink)

Evidentialist views in epistemology, like that of Earl Conee and Richard Feldman, define epistemic justification at least partially in terms of evidential support. According to these views, a person is justified in believing a proposition p just when her evidence supports p. The subject of this dissertation is the evidential support relation at the heart of these views—viz., the relation which obtains between a person’s evidence e and a proposition p just when e supports p in the sense (...) required by these views. I engage three initially tempting accounts of this relation in terms of meta-attitudes, explanatory relations, and probabilistic relations, finding all three accounts wanting. I then propose a fourth, causal account. My thesis is that evidentialists like Conee and Feldman should find this causal account of the evidential support relation more attractive than the other three kinds of account. (shrink)

In this paper, I respond to Frank Hofmann’s reply to my (2022) argument against “evidential minimalism” (EM). According to defenders of EM, there is a close connection between evidence and normative reasons for belief: evidence is either itself, or (under certain “minimal” conditions) gives rise to, a normative reason for belief. In my (2022), I argued against EM by showing that there are cases where: (i) S possesses strong evidence E for the truth of p at time t, (ii) (...) all minimal conditions for the normativity of E are met at t, (iii) S doesn’t believe p at t, yet (iv) S isn’t criticizable on account of (i)-(iii) at t. I then appealed to a linking claim connecting criticizability with the existence of normative reasons for belief. Hofmann’s reply invokes a distinction between two different kinds of epistemic criticism: a strong and a weak form. I will argue that Hofmann’s distinction fails to save EM from my argument. (shrink)

In response to John Bishop's (2007) account of passionally caused believing, Dan-Johan Eklund (2014) argues that conscious non-evidential believing is (conceptually) impossible, that is, it's (conceptually) impossible consciously to believe that p whilst acknowledging that the relevant evidence doesn't support p's being true, for it conflicts with belief being a truth-oriented attitude, or so he argues. In this article, we present Eklund's case against Bishop's account of passionally caused believing, and we argue that it's unpersuasive, at least (...) to those who accept permissivism about evidence, that is, that it's possible for there to be more than one rational response to a given body of evidence. We do this through a novel application of a case of nurtured belief, that is, of a person holding a belief simply because she was caused to do so by her upbringing, and we use it to show exactly where Eklund's argument goes wrong. We conclude by drawing a general lesson drawn from this debate: if permissivism about evidence is true, then belief being truth-oriented is consistent with non-evidential believing being possible. (shrink)

We show in this paper that some expressions indicating source of evidence are part of propositional content and are best analyzed as special kind of epistemic modal. Our evidence comes from the Japanese evidential system. We consider six evidentials in Japanese, showing that they can be embedded in conditionals and under modals and that their properties with respect to modal subordination are similar to those of ordinary modals. We show that these facts are difficult for existing theories of evidentials, (...) which assign evidentials necessarily widest scope, to explain. We then provide an analysis using a logical system designed to account for evidential reasoning; this logic is the first developed system of probabilistic dynamic predicate logic. This analysis is shown to account for the data we provide that is problematic for other theories. (shrink)

What are conspiracy theories? And what, if anything, is epistemically wrong with them? I offer an account on which conspiracy theories are a unique way of holding a belief in a conspiracy. Specifically, I take conspiracy theories to be self-insulating beliefs in conspiracies. On this view, conspiracy theorists have their conspiratorial beliefs in a way that is immune to revision by counter-evidence. I argue that conspiracy theories are always irrational. Although conspiracy theories involve an expectation to encounter some seemingly (...) disconfirming evidence (allegedly planted by the conspirators), resistance to all counter- evidence cannot be justified on these grounds. (shrink)

According to influential accounts of scientific method, e.g., critical rationalism, scientific knowledge grows by repeatedly testing our best hypotheses. In comparison to rivaling accounts of scientific reasoning such as Bayesianism, these accounts are closer to crucial aspects of scientific practice. But despite the preeminence of hypothesis tests in statistical inference, their philosophical foundations are shaky. In particular, the interpretation of "insignificant results"---outcomes where the tested hypothesis has survived the test---poses a major epistemic challenge that is not sufficiently addressed by the (...) standard methodology for conducting such tests. In this paper, I argue that a quantitative explication of degree of corroboration can fill this important methodological and epistemological gap. First, I argue that this concept is distinct from the Bayesian notion of evidential support and that it plays an independent role in scientific reasoning. Second, I demonstrate that degree of corroboration cannot be suitably explicated in a probabilistic relevance framework, as proposed by Popper. Third, I derive two measures of corroboration that possess a large number of attractive properties, establish an insightful relation between corroboration and evidential support and are not committed to a Bayesian or a frequentist framework. In sum, the paper rethinks the foundations of inductive inference by providing a novel logic of hypothesis testing. (shrink)

This paper provides a systematic description and analysis of the non-predictive use of the Italian future. Several authors claim that, on this use, the Italian future is an evidential (Squartini 2001, Mari 2010, Eckardt and Beltrama 2019, Frana and Menéndez-Benito 2019 ). Others argue that the non-predictive future does not directly contribute an evidential signal (e.g., Giannakidou and Mari 2018, Farkas and Ippolito 2022 ). We side with the evidential camp. From an empirical standpoint, we present the (...) results of a battery of tests that show that the non-predictive future patterns with evidentials cross-linguistically. From a theoretical standpoint, we put forward an analysis that combines a slightly modified version of the proposal for evidentials in Davis et al. ( 2007 ) with Schlenker’s ( 2007 ) view of expressive content. On this account, the Italian evidential future (i) lowers the quality threshold required to perform a successful speech act (Davis et al. 2007 ) and (ii) triggers an evidential presupposition relativized to the speaker’s beliefs (modeled after Schlenker’s analysis of expressives). Our treatment of the evidential component as an expressive presupposition opens up a new perspective on the study of evidentiality and highlights the need for further detailed empirical studies exploring the extent to which this perspective is applicable cross-linguistically. (shrink)

We address Steel’s Programme to identify a ‘preferred’ universe of set theory and the best axioms extending ZFC by using his multiverse axioms MV and the ‘core hypothesis’. In the first part, we examine the evidential framework for MV, in particular the use of large cardinals and of ‘worlds’ obtained through forcing to ‘represent’ alternative extensions of ZFC. In the second part, we address the existence and the possible features of the core of MV_T (where T is ZFC+Large Cardinals). (...) In the last part, we discuss the hypothesis that the core is Ultimate-L, and examine whether and how, based on this fact, the Core Universist can justify V=Ultimate-L as the best (and ultimate) extension of ZFC. To this end, we take into account several strategies, and assess their prospects in the light of MV’s evidential framework. (shrink)

This contribution aims at providing an argumentative method to account for epistemic modality and evidentiality. I claim that these two linguistic categories can work as semantic components of defeasible argumentative schemes based on classification processes. This kind of approximate reasoning is, in fact, frequently indicated by appearance verbs which signal that the inferred standpoint is conceived by the speaker as uncertain due to the deceiving nature of perceptual data. Drawing from an analysis at the semantic-argumentative interface, the way in (...) which prototype theory sheds light on the processes of meaning construction underlying defeasible arguments from definition is also shown. (shrink)

Philosophers have traditionally held that claims about necessities and possibilities are to be evaluated by consulting our philosophical intuitions; that is, those peculiarly compelling deliverances about possibilities that arise from a serious and reflective attempt to conceive of counterexamples to these claims. But many contemporary philosophers, particularly naturalists, argue that intuitions of this sort are unreliable, citing examples of once-intuitive, but now abandoned, philosophical theses, as well as recent psychological studies that seem to establish the general fallibility of intuition.In the (...) first two sections of this paper, I evaluate these arguments, and also the counter-arguments of contemporary defenders of tradition. In the next two sections, I sketch an alternative account of the role of philosophical intuitions that incorporates elements of traditionalism and naturalism - and defend it against other such views. In the final section, however, I discuss intuitions about conscious experience, and acknowledge that my view may not extend comfortably to this case. This may seem unfortunate, since so much contemporary discussion of the epistemology of modality seems motivated by worries about the mind-body problem, and informed by the position one wishes to endorse. But, as I argue, if conscious experience is indeed an exception to the view I suggest in this paper, it is an exception that proves - and can illuminate - the rule. (shrink)

This chapter starts with a definition of theism, and distinguishes two ways in which empirical evidence might be relevant to its truth. Seven evidential objections to theism are spelled out. They rely on many different empirical facts, such as so‐called divine hiddenness, features of our universe, biological evolution, the occurrence of gratuitous natural evil, and the elimination of religious explanations during scientific progress. Finally, it is argued that a purely secular explanation of all religious beliefs in human cultures is (...) vastly superior to religious accounts. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that we can give a plausible account of how to compare pragmatic and evidential normative reasons for belief. The account I offer is given in the form of a ‘defeasing function’. This function allows for a sophisticated comparison of the two types of reasons without assigning complex features to the logical structures of either type of reason.

In this study, we are addressing the call for further research (Aikhenvald 2015) into how languages, in our case Modern Greek, mark the unexpected. Our first research question is: Can we identify a class of mirative evidential markers in Modern Greek? The expected answer is that we can, if we take account of frequency rates in a variety of sources in the real world, namely plays, corpora and tags in social media. The second research question is: Do these (...) markers convey propositional or non-propositional meaning? Our findings suggest that the Greek data involves predominantly non-propositional types of meaning since mirativity is not delivered by the semantic content of the utterance (e.g., Ooo! Tí vlépoun ta mátia mou? “Oh! What do I see?”, Ma ti les tóra? “But what are you saying now?”, Ba ba ti akoúo? “Well, well, what do I hear?” Mi mou pis! ‘Don’t tell me!’). (shrink)

This paper focuses on the Korean suffix -te, which has been variously analyzed as a marker of tense, aspect, tense–aspect, mood, mood–tense, or evidentiality. I argue against all of these approaches and propose instead that -te is a spatial deictic past tense, which triggers an evidential environment. It refers to a certain past time when the speaker either observed an event or some evidence of the event within his (her) perceptual field. Thus, the denotation of -te is ‘overlap’, not (...) between the speaker's perceptual field and the event itself, but between the speaker's perceptual field and the evidence of the event at the past reference time. To account for this denotation, propose an ‘evidence trace’ function as well as a ‘speaker's perceptual trace’ function (cf. M. Faller, J Semantics 21:45–85, 2004). My analysis shows that suffixes like -ess (which is traditionally analyzed as a perfect) play two roles, as an indirect evidential and a perfect, depending on whether they appear with the spatial deictic tense -te or with a simple deictic tense. I argue that in Korean two distinct tense systems—the regular tense–aspect system and the spatial deictic tense–evidential system—exist in parallel. Thus the proposed analysis allows evidentials to be subsumed under the formal theory of tense, aspect, and mood. (shrink)

We put forth an account for when to believe causal and evidential conditionals. The basic idea is to embed a causal model in an agent’s belief state. For the evaluation of conditionals seems to be relative to beliefs about both particular facts and causal relations. Unlike other attempts using causal models, we show that ours can account rather well not only for various causal but also evidential conditionals.

Linguistic forms with dedicated evidential meanings have been described for a number of Australian languages (eg. Donaldson 1980, Laughren 1982, Wilkins 1989) but there has been little written on how these are used in social interaction. This paper examines evidential strategies in ordinary Garrwa conversations, by taking into account what we know more generally about the status of knowledge and epistemic authority in Aboriginal societies, and applying this understanding to account for the ways knowledge is managed (...) in `ordinary' interactions. (shrink)

The first volume to offer a thorough and systematic account of evidentiality and the expression of information source, Illustrated with extensive data from a range of typologically diverse languages, Introductory chapter offers practical advice for fieldworkers investigating evidentially, Interdisciplinary in nature with insights from typology, semantics, pragmatics, language description, anthropology, cognitive psychology, and psycholinguistics Book jacket.

Sometimes a belief that p promotes having true beliefs, whether or not p is true. This gives reasons to believe that p, but most epistemologists would deny that it gives epistemic reasons, or that these reasons can epistemically justify the belief that p. Call these reasons to believe “truth promoting non-evidential reasons for belief.” This paper argues that three common views in epistemology, taken together, entail that reasons of this sort can epistemically justify beliefs. These three claims are: epistemic (...) oughts are normative, epistemic oughts have a source, and the source of epistemic oughts is an end that has true belief as a necessary component. These claims would be hard for many epistemologists to deny, but accepting them, and thus accepting that truth promoting non-evidential reasons can justify beliefs, has significant consequences for epistemology. The paper considers accounts of epistemic oughts that endorse these claims but might seem to avoid the consequence that truth promoting non-evidential reasons generate real epistemic oughts, and shows that none do. (shrink)

This paper develops the idea that valid arguments are equivalent to true conditionals by combining Kripke’s theory of truth with the evidential account of conditionals offered by Crupi and Iacona. As will be shown, in a first-order language that contains a naïve truth predicate and a suitable conditional, one can define a validity predicate in accordance with the thesis that the inference from a conjunction of premises to a conclusion is valid when the corresponding conditional is true. The (...) validity predicate so defined significantly increases our expressive resources and provides a coherent formal treatment of paradoxical arguments. (shrink)

Glymour's "bootstrap" account of confirmation is designed to provide an analysis of evidential relevance, which has been a serious problem for hypothetico-deductivism. As set out in Theory and Evidence, however, the "bootstrap" condition allows confirmation in clear cases of evidential irrelevance. The difficulties with Glymour's account seem to be due to a basic feature which it shares with hypothetico-deductive accounts, and which may explain why neither can give a satisfactory analysis of evidential relevance.

Terence Horgan defends the thirder position on the Sleeping Beauty problem, claiming that Beauty can, upon awakening during the experiment, engage in “synchronic Bayesian updating” on her knowledge that she is awake now in order to justify a 1/3 credence in heads. In a previous paper, I objected that epistemic probabilities are equivalent to rational degrees of belief given a possible epistemic situation and so the probability of Beauty’s indexical knowledge that she is awake now is necessarily 1, precluding such (...) updating. In response, Horgan maintains that the probability claims in his argument are to be taken, not as claims about possible rational degrees of belief, but rather as claims about “quantitative degrees of evidential support.” This paper argues that the most plausible account of quantitative degree of support, when conjoined with any of the three major accounts of indexical thought in such a way as to plausibly constrain rational credence, contradicts essential elements of Horgan’s argument. (shrink)

Linguistic intuitive judgements are the de facto data source of choice within generative linguistics. But why we are justified in relying on intuitive judgements as evidence for grammars? In the philosophy of linguistics, this question has been hotly debated. I argue that the three most prominent views of that debate all have their problems. Devitt’s Modest Explanation accounts for the wrong kind of intuitive judgements. The Voice of Competence view and Rey’s account both lack independent evidence. I introduce and (...) defend a novel proposal that accounts for the evidential role of linguistic intuitive judgements and avoids these shortcomings. On this account, linguistic intuitive judgements are reports of the speaker’s immediate experience of trying to comprehend the sentence. This experience is due to the speaker’s linguistic competence, at least in part, and so the justification for the evidential use of linguistic intuitions ultimately comes from the speaker’s competence. However, the account does not rely on any special input from the speaker’s competence being available as the basis for linguistic intuitive judgements. (shrink)

The Variety of Evidence Thesis (VET) says that (ceteris paribus) the more diverse (or varied) of two bodies of evidence is the more confirmatory of a hypothesis H. Two recent types of Bayesian explication of VET account for the intuitive force of VET by defining variety as some function of the probabilities of the propositions which collectively constitute a body of evidence. I show that these two accounts of VET are not tracking a meaningful property of bodies of evidence, (...) but rather are tracking artifacts of how those bodies of evidence are described. According to each account, whether a body of evidence is more varied than another depends on how the bodies are split into parts. Furthermore, for each type of account there exists a way to redescribe the total evidence such that any two totalities are equally varied. ‡I would like to thank Elliott Sober for comments on multiple drafts of this paper, and Malcolm Forster, John Koolage, and Joel Velasco for comments on a verbal delivery. †To contact the author, please write to: Department of Philosophy, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 5185 Helen C. White Hall, 600 North Park Street, Madison, WI 53706; e-mail: [email protected]. (shrink)

We address Steel’s Programme to identify a ‘preferred’ universe of set theory and the best axioms extending $\mathsf {ZFC}$ by using his multiverse axioms $\mathsf {MV}$ and the ‘core hypothesis’. In the first part, we examine the evidential framework for $\mathsf {MV}$, in particular the use of large cardinals and of ‘worlds’ obtained through forcing to ‘represent’ alternative extensions of $\mathsf {ZFC}$. In the second part, we address the existence and the possible features of the core of $\mathsf {MV}_T$ (...) (where T is $\mathsf {ZFC}$ +Large Cardinals). In the last part, we discuss the hypothesis that the core is Ultimate-L, and examine whether and how, based on this fact, the Core Universist can justify V=Ultimate-L as the best (and ultimate) extension of $\mathsf {ZFC}$. To this end, we take into account several strategies, and assess their prospects in the light of $\mathsf {MV}$ ’s evidential framework. (shrink)

William Roche and Elliott Sober argue that explanatoriness is evidentially irrelevant. This conclusion is surprising since it conflicts with a plausible assumption—the fact that a hypothesis best explains a given set of data is evidence that the hypothesis is true. We argue that Roche and Sober's screening-off argument fails to account for a key aspect of evidential strength: the weight of a body of evidence. The weight of a body of evidence affects the resiliency of probabilities in the (...) light of new evidence. Thus, Roche and Sober are mistaken. Explanatoriness is evidentially relevant. (shrink)