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Topic: Evidentialism

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Daniel Dennett

	Evidentialism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
		Evidentialism is a theory of justification according to which believing proposition p is justified for some agent S at time t iff S 's total evidence at t supports p; that, in short, the justified attitude toward a proposition, be it belief, disbelief, or suspension of judgment, is the one that fits the evidence.
		Coherentism: Justified beliefs are all evidentially supported by other beliefs, but an infinite set of beliefs is not generated, because the chains of evidential support among beliefs is allowed to move in a circle.
		Likewise, evidentialism will be rejected by more sophisticated versions of reliabilism, some of which will allow evidence an important but limited role, as opposed to the all-encompassing role assigned to it by evidentialism.
	en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Evidentialism (1220 words)

	Encyclopedia: Evidentialism (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-20)
		Evidentialism has several interrelated definitions, and is usually held to be the opposite of rationalism.
		Finally, evidentialism is also correct in saying that the meaning of facts arises from their own contexts--not just any interpretation of facts can be true, and some interpretations of them do violence to them in ways both subtle and gross.
		Thirdly, evidentialism can refer to the Enlightenment philosophical epistemology which seeks to undermine all religious beliefs on the purported basis that they are merely "beliefs" and in no way connected to "reason".
	www.societaschristiana.com /Encyclopedia/E/Evidentialism.html (727 words)

	The Epistemology of Religion
		Evidentialism implies that it is not justified to have a full religious belief unless there is conclusive evidence for it.
		Evidentialism implies that it is not justified to have a full religious belief (ie a religious belief held with full confidence) unless there is conclusive evidence for it.
		Evidentialism may then be argued for by noting how we implicitly rely upon evidentialist principles in many different areas of enquiry, or by noting which principles generalise various particular examples of justified and unjustified reasoning.
	plato.stanford.edu /entries/religion-epistemology (3810 words)

	Evidentialism [Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy] (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-20)
		Particular versions of evidentialism can diverge in virtue of their providing different claims about what sorts of things count as evidence, what it is for one to have evidence, and what it is for one’s evidence to support believing a proposition.
		Evidentialism is, therefore, consistent with both contextualist theories of justification and non-contextualist theories of justification.
		Evidentialism may be combined with foundationalism, coherentism, a “mixed” view such as Susan Haack’s foundherentism, or any other theory of the structure of justification.
	www.iep.utm.edu /e/evidenti.htm (8022 words)

	Reference.com/Encyclopedia/Evidentialism
		Evidentialism is a theory of justified belief according to which belief in the truth of a proposition is justified only when the believer's entire body of evidence tends to support that belief.
		Evidentialism's approach to justified belief is marked by its appeal to evidence.
		In a sense, evidentialism holds that belief is only as sound as the evidence upon which it is founded.
	www.reference.com /browse/wiki/Evidentialism (289 words)

	Our Passional Nature and Our Intellectual Obligations (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-20)
		One might interpret this passage as itself involving a criticism of evidentialism. The idea would be that James is claiming that because feelings of our duty are based on passions rather than evidence, evidentialism itself is based on a passion, specifically the fear of being duped.
		Since evidentialism is the view that its is wrong to form beliefs on the basis of anything other than evidence, and it is based on passion rather than evidence, evidentialism entails that it would be wrong to believe in evidentialism. Thus, according to this interpretation, James is claiming that evidentialism is self-undermining.
		Evidentialism is an unhealthy position not because it is incoherent, but because it blocks the fulfillment of important human needs such as friendship.
	www.american-philosophy.org /archives/2002_Conference/2002_papers/tp-34.htm (1111 words)

	Abbeys Bookshop - Evidentialism: Essays in Epistemology (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-20)
		Evidentialism is a view about the conditions under which a person is epistemically justified in having a particular doxastic attitude toward a proposition.
		Evidentialism holds that the justified attitudes are determined entirely by the person's evidence.
		Evidentialism is a version of epistemic internalism.Recent epistemology has included many attacks on internalism and has seen the development of numerous externalist theories.
	www.abbeys.com.au /items/27/37/15 (295 words)

	priijic samarzija (L&PS - Vol. 1 - No. 1 - 2003) (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-20)
		Evidentialism is a certain backward-looking approach to trust because it is assumed that trust should be primarily governed by backward-looking assessment of evidence.
		However, contrary to humean backward-looking evidentialism I shall try to stress the importance of Reidian forward-looking justification that is closely tied to the usefulness of trust in cooperation.
		Consequently, it seems that humean reductive evidentialism has two serious problems: the first is that trust can not be grounded on required evidence because of the poverty of such evidential basis and the second is one of circularity.
	www.univ.trieste.it /~dipfilo/episteme/L&PS_Vol1No1/prijic-samarzija_L&PS_Vol1No1.htm (5374 words)

	Church History and Objectivity Part 2 (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-20)
		Evidentialism: A perennial problem with the general category of "Roman Catholic apologetics", as any reflective Protestant who has done serious work in this area can attest, is that it simply is not aware of its own basic methodology or the existence of other methodologies.
		Nevertheless, evidentialism as a "pure" apologetic methodology is missing a key piece of the puzzle of how human beings know things, and it is to that piece that we now turn.
		Evidentialism's chief mistake comes, ironically, directly from a distortion of its correct premise "There is a difference between 'fact' and 'interpretation' of fact".
	www.societaschristiana.com /History/Original/Objectivity2.html (7353 words)

	Prudential Arguments, Naturalized Epistemology, and the Will to Believe
		Evidentialism is the view that the strength to which we hold any proposition should be directly proportional to the evidence we have for its truth.
		As Hume famously put it "the wise man proportions his belief to the evidence." [5] Evidentialism thus rules out deciding what to believe based on what one takes to be the utility rather than the truth of the beliefs in question.
		Critics of evidentialism have argued, however, that it can be both morally and rationally permissible to adopt various beliefs purely for prudential reasons.
	www.yorku.ca /hjackman/papers/wtb.html (10103 words)

	Philosophy Department, University College, Cork (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-20)
		They are so-called because they presuppose that a form of evidentialism is true.
		Evidentialism is, roughly, the doctrine that our beliefs need to be based on sufficient evidence: a form of evidentialism is a version of this doctrine.
		Many people seem to think (a) that this form of evidentialism is a constraint on rationality, (b) that it appeals to a doxastic conception of evidence, (c) that it appeals to a probabilistic conception of sufficient evidence, and (d) that it appeals to an inferential conception of evidential basis.
	www.ucc.ie /acad/phil/davepaper.htm (156 words)

	The Puritanboard - » Apologetical Methods » The sinfulness of unbiblical apologetics
		In light of that, Evidentialism might more logically be called Empiricism, since it is really incidental that it is the apologetic with "evidence" in its name, since they all use certain kinds of evidence.
		With regard to the issue of Classical and Evidential apologetics being sinful, one of the main reasons myself and others (such as Paul and Craig) find them to be so is because they inherently debase God from His rightful position as the final authority and source that can appeal to nothing else.
		And the proofs are there (Evidentialism proper); the concepts are there (Classicalism proper); and mostly the basis for all knowledge is the single line of presuppositions within which everything, even the things the unbeliever and irreligious take for granted, is all there (Presuppositionalism proper).
	www.puritanboard.com /forum/viewthread.php?tid=9522 (8915 words)

	Notes on Plantinga: Deontologism in Epistemology
		It is unfortunate that Plantinga failed to keep these distinct concepts of justification apart, for then he would have recognized the erroneous nature of his claim that Descartes and Locke are remote ancestors of the “deontological” view of epistemic justification.
		Evidentialism in epistemology appears to be the view that evidence is that state of affairs which confers the property of rightness on a claim about how things are.
		We’ve seen that reliabilism has undermined the notion of evidential justification for a belief, so that what’s left is a sort of idea that we’re fully warranted in our beliefs if we’ve gotten them through a properly functioning, well-planned, environmentally appropriate process that’s at least aimed at high truth-ratios.
	vernerable.tripod.com /notes_on_plantinga.htm (4051 words)

	CHAPTER 6
		I emphasize that strong evidentialism in no way compromises the stance of foundationalism which terminates justification in immediately justified beliefs, for the mediate justification of any higher-order belief may be thought of as resting on reasons which themselves terminate in immediately justified beliefs at the lower-level.
		When spelled out in terms of conditional evidential probability, the Alstonian account does not conditionalize solely on the evidence for h (and which S is aware of).
		The evidential force of the evidence for h given certain inductive standards determines "adequacy." Typically the internalist spells this out in terms of evidential probability.
	academics.smcvt.edu /philosophy/faculty/Sudduth/ch6_main.htm (7668 words)

	Jonathan Adler - Belief's Own Ethics - Reviewed by Earl Conee, University of Rochester - Philosophical Reviews - ...
		29) According to Adlerâs evidentialism, it is impossible for one to be fully aware of a belief while one regards oneself as having inadequate epistemic reason to believe the proposition.
		Adler contends that his evidentialism can be derived from the concept of belief.
		The penultimate conclusion is strong enough to warrant the version of Adlerâs evidentialism that is initially cited above: it is impossible to be fully aware of a belief while regarding oneself as having inadequate epistemic reason to believe the proposition.
	ndpr.nd.edu /review.cfm?id=1083 (2045 words)

	Alston Paper
		One way to show that one of these is compatible with evidentialism would be to find a theory that is compatible with one of the two and which also entails something in the neighbourhood of an evidentialist requirement.
		Although traditional evidentialism has sought to satisfy the goal of reflective rationality by the general demand for adequate reasons for belief, I have argued that this demand is appropriately imposed for higher-level beliefs to the effect that one is justified or rational in some putative belief that p.
		That it is an epistemically adequate form of evidentialism I take to follow from its satisfying the cognitive goal of reflective rationality so much a part of the evidentialist tradition.
	www.homestead.com /philofreligion/files/Alstonpaper.html (7929 words)

	Frontline Ministries - Defending the Faith: An Introduction to the Presuppositional Method
		Evidentialism (also called Classical apologetics) is the method of Catholics, Arminians, and many inconsistent Calvinists.
		Evidentialism is thought of as a form of pre-evangelism; an intellectual preparation that precedes the actual gospel presentation.
		While evidentialism seeks to walk side-by-side with the unbeliever intellectually, presuppositionalism attacks the unbelieving worldview with a head-on collision.
	www.frontlinemin.org /defendfaith.asp (3948 words)

	Professor Michael Sudduth
		Evidentialism refers to a particular concept of epistemic justification according to which a belief's justification is a matter of the nature and degree of the evidence one has for the belief.
		Conee and Feldman think that this objection to evidentialism emerges as the result of a confusion between evaluation of belief and evaluation of the believer.
		It looks like Conee and Feldman's attempt to make evidential justification normative cannot avoid the implication that people are to blame when their beliefs fail to be justified.
	www.homestead.com /mscourses/files/philosophy357handout6.htm (1857 words)

	Amazon.ca: Return to Reason: A Critique of Enlightenment Evidentialism, and a Defense of Reason and Belief in God: Books (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-20)
		Clark maintains that "evidentialism" has been misapplied to theistic arguments, arguing that one does not base inter-personal relationships on objective evidence (at least not entirely), and thus it should be with man's relation to god.
		These mathematical (thus evidential) considerations do however carve a gaping hole in the beliefs of most 'Enlightened evidentialists.' The mathematician (information theory) Hubert Yockey notes that all college undergraduate textbooks present the primeval soup paradigm of spontaneous abiogenesis as an established fact although it cannot be evidentially supported either by biochemistry or by mathematics.
		That evidential investigation is important to scientific truth seeking cannot ameliorate this approach to all potential truths.
	www.amazon.ca /exec/obidos/ASIN/080280456X (2076 words)

	Evidentialism (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-20)
		Evidentialism has the wrong result: it implies that he’s justified.
		Evidentialism implies that she remains justified in believing her theory (assume she was justified to begin with).
		But evidentialism is neutral on whether she should look at the message.
	www.ling.rochester.edu /~feldman/philosophy243/06-evidentialism.html (1150 words)

	Weblog of a Christian Philosopher: What Is Cognitive/Epistemic Honesty? (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-20)
		According to Evidentialism, unless we can come up with the goods on Christian belief, then we are guilty of some kind of internal dishonesty if we believe.
		Well my position on that is that a belief is prima facie reasonable, if an average person with an average set of beliefs, not having come to them in special circumstances, can apply and hold a new belief without violating any standards held for the set of average normal beliefs.
		Evidentialism is so popular precisely for this reason, that it highlights the standard so important to many of our beliefs.
	joveiaphilosopher.blogspot.com /2005/08/what-is-cognitiveepistemic-honesty.html (1045 words)

	The Role of the Arguments for the Existence of God (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-20)
		This warning is a bit more erudite than the others, so I will take some time to unpack it (if you do not care about this, you can skip this point and move straight to the proper roles of the arguments).
		Evidentialism is a philosophical position in epistemology (the study of knowledge) that requires all beliefs to be grounded in evidence.
		Furthermore, it is impractical to impose evidentialism in day-to-day life.
	apologetics.johndepoe.com /proofs.html (1628 words)

	Abebooks Search Results - Evidentialism
		Evidentialism is a theory of knowledge whose essence is the traditional idea that the justification of factual knowledge is entirely a matter of evidence.
		(330 pages) Evidentialism is a theory of knowledge whose essence is the traditional idea that the justification of factual knowledge is entirely a matter of evidence.
		In this work Jonathan Adler offers a strengthened version of evidentialism, arguing that the ethics of belief should be rooted in the concept of belief - that evidentialism is belief's own ethics.
	www.abebooks.co.uk /search/sortby/3/kn/Evidentialism (1614 words)

	Oliphint_Diss_Ch_2 (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-20)
		It will not follow that coherence is not a source of warrant, only that it is not the source of warrant. Coherentism, according to Plantinga, is false. Its primary fallacy, it seems, is its tentative relationship with experience. As an exclusively doxastic relation, coherentism will not suffice.
		Plantinga distinguishes, in a footnote, between Alston's requirement of the evidence being a reliable indicator, as well as a basis, for justification, both of which Feldman and Conee omit. Plantinga lumps the two positions together, however, and claims that his criticism applies equally to both.
		[12] Feldman and Conee, "Evidentialism," 15. Plantinga understands Feldman's and Conee's term "justified" to be equivalent to his term "warrant," both meaning "that quantity, whatever exactly it is, enough of which is sufficient to distinguish knowledge from mere true belief". See Plantinga, WPF, 186.
	mywebpages.comcast.net /oliphint/Writings/DissCH2.htm (4626 words)

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