The Pitfalls of ‘Evidence’

In what follows, I shall attack evidentialism. According to the classic formulation of Earl Conee and Richard Feldman (1985: 15), evidentialism is the doctrine that “the epistemic justification of a belief is determined by the quality of the believer’s evidence for the belief”. As I shall interpret it, this is equivalent to the thesis that the degree to which a believer is justified in believing a proposition p at a time t is wholly determined by the totality of the evidence that the believer has at t. Of course, this doctrine would be trivially true if all that was meant by the phrase ‘the evidence that the believer has at t’ was “whatever determines the degree to which the believer is justified in believing the propositions that she has attitudes towards”. What I shall attack is the doctrine that what determines the degree to which a believer S is justified in believing a proposition p at a time t consists of something that could, without any misuse of language, be called, in a normal everyday sense of the word, the “evidence” that S has at t.