Earl Conee - Evidentialism: Essays in Epistemology

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in this volume Earl Conee and Richard Feldman 2004
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Introduction

The essays included in this volume develop and defend evidentialism. As we understand it, evidentialism is a view about the conditions under which a person is epistemically justified in having some doxastic attitude toward a proposition. It holds that this sort of epistemic fact is determined entirely by the person's evidence. In its fundamental form, then, evidentialism is a supervenience thesis according to which facts about whether or not a person is justified in believing a proposition supervene on facts describing the evidence that the person has. It will be useful in this Introduction to distinguish the version of evidentialism we defend here from some other theses that might be confused with it and that may even sometimes go by the same name. It will also be useful to clarify the role we take justification to play in an epistemological theory. We will also provide brief summaries of the papers included in the volume.

1. Expressions of a generally evidentialist outlook can be found in the writings of many philosophers. Indeed, the two of us saw evidentialism as sufficiently obvious to be in little need of defense. When we noticed to our amazement that prominent contemporary epistemologists were defending theories that seemed incompatible with evidentialism, this prompted us to write our first paper explicitly on this topic, "Evidentialism" (Chapter in this volume). We have been defending it ever since. We remain mildly amazed.