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From Impossibility to Evidentialism?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 August 2021

Alex Worsnip
Alex Worsnip*
Affiliation:
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, USA
*
Email: aworsnip@unc.edu
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Abstract

It's often said that it is impossible to respond to non-evidential considerations in belief-formation, at least not directly and consciously. Many philosophers think that this provides grounds for accepting a normative thesis: typically, some kind of evidentialism about reasons for belief, or what one ought to believe. Some also think it supports thinking that evidentialist norms are constitutive of belief. There are a variety of ways in which one might try to support such theses by appeal to the impossibility-claim. In this paper, I put pressure on these various attempts by raising a simple yet overlooked problem for them. In brief, the problem is that it isn't true that one cannot (directly and consciously) respond, in belief-formation to considerations that don't actually constitute (good) evidence for the proposition under consideration; what is true, at most, is that one cannot (directly and consciously) respond, in belief-formation to considerations that one oneself takes to be evidentially irrelevant to that proposition. While this point is obvious once stated, its significance hasn't been appreciated, or so I'll argue. Once we take full account of it, the standard arguments from the impossibility-claim to evidentialism don't go through.

Keywords

Evidentialismethics of beliefmotivating reasonsevidenceought implies canThomas KellyNishi ShahJonathan Adler
Type
Article
Information
Episteme , Volume 18 , Special Issue 3: Episteme Conference Special Issue , September 2021 , pp. 384 - 406
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

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