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Evidence
Edited by Christopher Michael Cloos (University of California, Santa Barbara)
About this topic
| Summary | The notion of evidence features importantly in epistemology and philosophy of science. There are three primary questions that a theory of evidence must address. The constitution question asks: What is the nature of evidence? A major divide in answers to the constitution question is between those who think that all evidence is propositional and those who think that some evidence is non-propositional. The possession question asks: When does someone possess a piece of information as evidence? Restrictive views of evidence possession hold that one has as evidence only information that one is consciously entertaining. More inclusive views of evidence possession hold that one’s evidence includes non-occurrent information, such as stored memories. Lastly, a theory of evidence must address the positive support question. In philosophy of science and formal epistemology the positive support question is: When is a hypothesis confirmed by evidence? In contemporary epistemology the positive support question is: When is a belief justified by evidence? |
| Introductions | Encyclopedia entries on evidence include DiFate 2007 and Kelly 2006. Additional overviews of evidence include Conee & Feldman 2008 and Kelly 2008. |
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Related
Subcategories
Evidence and Knowledge (512)
Evidentialism* (461)
Perceptual Evidence* (225)
Underdetermination of Theory by Data* (469 | 14)
Epistemic Permissivism* (141)
Evidence-Based Medicine* (83)
Evidence and Proof in Law* (471)
Evidence, Misc (402)
History/traditions: Evidence
- Husserl: Evidence (39)
Contents
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- Emotions as Evidence of Evidence.Avraham Max Kenan - forthcoming - Erkenntnis.Two main and related epistemological questions feature in the philosophy of emotions: can emotions justify evaluative beliefs, and if they can, what explains their justificatory role? In this paper I join the effort to answer both questions. I acknowledge the skepticism regarding emotions providing us with evidence and frame the skepticism as a result of two features of emotions: (a) that they have input states and (b) that they are rationally evaluable. However, I argue that this skepticism can be addressed (...)
- Attention and evidence.David Thorstad - forthcoming - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.In traditional models, agents have ample reason to gather cost-free evidence. Rational agents expect evidence gathering to weakly improve the quality of their decisions and the accuracy of their credences. These results are linked to more general principles of reflection and the value of knowledge taken to characterize genuine learning experiences. For attentionally-limited agents, I show that matters are more complex. Rational attentionally-limited agents still cannot expect to make worse decisions or hold less accurate credences as a result of gathering (...)
- Memories as Data: The Case of Radical Reuse.Sara Aronowitz - 2026 - Philosophical Psychology.Evidence, in ordinary English, denotes a kind of object: something you could put in a box, or at least on a hard-drive. But recent epistemologists prefer to think of evidence as part of a thinker’s mental state, her knowledge, beliefs, or the way things appear to her. This paper argues in favor of the objectual view, by showing that in the case of memory, the very feature thought to be a weakness of this conception is in fact a strength: roughly, (...)
- Regime Compression and Scientific Discovery: How Bounded Inquiry Turns Accumulated Constraint into New Explanatory Structure.Devin Bostick - manuscriptThis paper develops an epistemic architecture of scientific discovery as regime compression under accumulated constraint. It argues that bounded inquiry accumulates constraints inside explanatory regimes, and that many major discoveries occur when a new regime preserves those constraints at lower representational cost. Paradigms are interpreted as regimes, anomalies as regime strain, and theory change as admissible compression. The paper does not claim that all discovery is compression, nor does it define compression as an information-theoretic metric. Instead, it treats compression and (...)
- The Misplaced Variable.Benjamin James - 2026 - Internet Archive.The common account of how a symbol system fails names a defect of content. A belief is false; a report is biased; a feed is thick with misinformation; and the remedy, on this account, is better content, truer claims, cleaner sources, or sharper correction. The picture is so familiar that it is rarely stated outright, yet it organizes almost everything done about minds that have gone wrong, whether the mind in question is a person, an institution, or a model. It (...)
- THE POPPERIAN-HOLMESIAN PLAYBOOK: How to Construct Genuine Falsification Conditions and Execute Systematic Exit Elimination - A Methodological Manual for Structural Argument Under Closing Windows.Gia Bao Huynh - manuscriptMost philosophical and structural arguments fail at one of two opposite epistemic defects. The first defect is self-sealing: the argument is constructed so that no conceivable evidence can count as falsification, which produces rhetorical invulnerability at the cost of epistemic legitimacy. The second defect is unfalsifiability-by-vagueness: the argument is technically falsifiable but the falsification conditions are too imprecise to guide research or compel acknowledgment when they are met. The Popperian-Holmesian method is a two-step procedure that avoids both defects simultaneously. Step (...)
- Autonomous Probe Networks as an Explanation for the Irreducible Core of Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: An Interpretive Framework with Testable Predictions}.O. Gonzalez - unknownUnidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) represent a persistent challenge to national security and scientific inquiry. Decades of official investigation across multiple countries have produced a consistent pattern: most cases are explained by conventional causes, but an irreducible subset---approximately 3--5\% of well-documented incidents---exhibits kinematic, electromagnetic, and behavioral properties that have resisted attribution to known human technology or catalogued natural phenomena despite rigorous investigation. This paper proposes an interpretive framework modeling that irreducible core as the atmospheric manifestation of a network of autonomous non-human (...)
- ◉ The Buffer Zone Effect: Peripheral Controversy, Identity Maintenance, and the Avoidance of Core Theological Risk.Phil Stilwell - manuscriptThis paper analyzes a recurrent pattern in contemporary apologetic culture: energy is displaced from the most vulnerable theological claims to peripheral controversies that feel urgent, identity-forming, and intellectually respectable. Debates about sexuality, cultural decline, evolution, abiogenesis, fine-tuning, religious liberty, school curricula, or secular hypocrisy may be important in their own right. The problem arises when they function as buffer zones: arenas of conflict that let believers experience defense of Christianity without directly defending Christianity's central claims. The argument does not claim (...)
- Resistance to Evidence, by Mona Simion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024. Pp. xiv + 214. (Review). [REVIEW]Carolina Flores - 2026 - Mind.
- Parity and the Permissivism Puzzle: A Defense of Epistemic Options.Chris Tucker & Elizabeth Jackson - 2026 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 113 (1):233-247.Moral philosophers generally affirm that there are moral options: a single person sometimes has multiple morally permissible actions at a time. But epistemologists generally deny that there are epistemic options: a single person never has multiple epistemically permissible doxastic attitudes at a time. This asymmetry is striking. Furthermore, there are intuitive cases of epistemic options. However, it’s not clear how these cases differ from cases where withholding is required, such as a coin flip case. We call this the Permissivism Puzzle. (...)
- Against Interpretivism.Ali Hossein Khani - forthcoming - Organon F: Medzinárodný Časopis Pre Analytickú Filozofiu.This paper argues that interpretivism, at least in certain influential forms, fails to meet the conditions required to sustain its central metaphysical claim: that facts about what a subject intends are constitutively dependent on the judgements of another subject, or interpreter. I focus on what I have called ‘Third-Person-Based’ or ‘Third-Personal Judgement-Dependent’ accounts of mental content, which hold that, as an a priori matter, facts about a subject’s intentional states are determined by the judgements of a second person. I argue (...)
- Intuition is Evidence.Vincent Tanzil - 2026 - Acta Analytica:1-18.Intuition is a psychological state that often accompanies some propositions, particularly when engaging in thought experiments. I argue that these intuitive states can sometimes serve as evidence for the propositions they accompany. To support this claim, I present a novel argument for the evidentiary role of intuition: Some philosophical arguments rely solely on intuition for at least one of their premises. Some conclusions from such arguments are justified. If the conclusion of an argument is (i) justified and; (ii) justified by (...)
- The benign/malignant distinction for false premises.Claudio de Almeida - 2023 - In Rodrigo Borges & Ian Schnee, Illuminating Errors: New Essays on Knowledge from Non-Knowledge. New York, NY: Routledge. pp. 120-138.Faced with vivid cases of inferential knowledge to which false premises seem evidentially indispensable—knowledge-from-falsehood cases, or 'KFF cases'—some of us retreat from the traditional, Aristotelian view that only knowledge begets knowledge in reasoning. But KFF-ers are a minority in the debate over such cases. The epistemology of reasoning is still dominated by KDF-ers, those for whom, on close inspection, purported KFF cases turn out to be knowledge-despite-falsehood cases. Each group has its own warring factions. I belong with those who think (...)Find it on Amazon.com (collection)Remove from this list Direct downloadExport citationBookmark 2 citations
- Transcendental Taphonomy: The Material Conditions of Paleobiological Evidence.Lorand Bruhacs - manuscriptTaphonomy is usually treated as a correction to paleobiological inference: the study of how organisms and traces become fossils. We argue for a stronger thesis. Fossils are not transparent samples of past life but archive-mediated projections, and taphonomic regimes help determine which extinct organisms, behaviors, communities and absences can become evidentially available and through which preservational pathways. We call this view transcendental taphonomy, in a weak and material sense. The central analytic tool is the legibility horizon, the point at which (...)
- When Benchmark Results Do Not License Strong Claims: Same-Channel Non-Repairability in AI Evaluation.Evoluit M. - manuscriptThis article examines a specific problem in AI evaluation: cases in which strong capability claims are drawn from results that do not, by themselves, justify those claims. Its central argument is that some benchmark results, behavioural outputs, and evaluative signals fail to support stronger conclusions not merely because the evidence is weak, but because the result-channel does not preserve the distinctions required for those conclusions. -/- The paper introduces a minimal criterion for identifying such cases, described here as same-channel non-repairability, (...)
- La Profilée - The Verification Layer: On the Convergence of Formal Necessity, Empirical Instantiation, and Ex-Ante Validation.Marc Maibom - manuscriptLa Profilée (LP) establishes the persistence condition IR = R / (F · M · K) ≤ 1 as the structurally necessary constraint governing identity under real transformation (Paper 103). Subsequent work has established: • the admissibility regime is induced by the persistence problem itself (Paper 122) • no alternative formulation of persistence exists outside trivialisation, indeterminacy, or structural equivalence (Paper 123) • LP defines explicit and exhaustive falsification routes (Paper 124) • the condition is instantiated across structurally independent domains (...)
- (1 other version)Ad hominem arguments in scientific discourses – rational heuristic or dangerous immunisation strategy?Leon-Philip Schäfer - 2026 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 16 (1):3.Ad hominem arguments have, in terms of their relevance for scientific discourses, a peculiar status that seems to be surprisingly unfathomed in modern philosophy of science. The main aim of the current paper is to shed some light on this latent blind spot and to familiarise philosophers of science with some of the recent discussions that this topic has launched in argumentation theory. In particular, I would like to examine whether ad hominem arguments are to be regarded as epistemically detrimental (...)
- (1 other version)Out in the Open: Public Evidence and the Limits of Experience.Ted Poston - 2026 - Philosophical Issues.Public evidence plays a central role in the justification of scientific theories—but does its importance extend beyond science, for instance, to political or religious belief? To address this question, we first need a clear account of public evidence. This paper de- velops such an account, characterizing public evidence as non-experiential evidence that meets the non-factive epistemic conditions for common knowledge. I argue that public evidence not only underwrites the justification of scientific theories but also constrains how experience can justify belief (...)
- (1 other version)Political Epistemology, Rationality, and Externalism about Bias.Thomas Kelly - 2026 - Philosophical Issues.Externalism about Bias is the thesis that a person's biases do not supervene on their internal states and the causal relations among those states. This paper defends Externalism about Bias and explores some of its implications.
- (1 other version)Appreciating the Evidence.Kevin McCain - 2025 - Philosophical Issues 35 (1):115-125.Having evidence does not in itself make a doxastic attitude justified even if the evidence supports the attitude in question. Plausibly, one must also appreciate the support one's evidence provides for the doxastic attitude. Although such appreciation seems central to the picture of justification offered by Evidentialism, its nature has been largely unexplored by Evidentialists. This article seeks to rectify this situation by explaining how Evidentialists should understand appreciation and its role in justification. Additionally, the account of appreciation defended here (...)
- Affine Shadows: Accuracy-First Bayesianism and Its Limits.Lorand Bruhacs - manuscriptAccuracy-first arguments show that Bayesian updating uniquely minimizes expected inaccuracy relative to a fixed, scoreable evidential representation. Accepting that theorem-level result, we ask a different question: what philosophical burden can such derivations bear? We argue that the strongest foundational reading of accuracy-first Bayesianism presupposes more than the mathematics itself establishes. Proper-scoring arguments require evidential content to inhabit an affine space on which inaccuracy is well defined, but diachronic coherence does not itself force affineness. Moreover, coherent global evidential order can be (...)
- Local Bayes Charts: Descent, Obstruction and Global Non-Affine Order.Lorand Bruhacs - manuscriptScientific inquiry often supports disciplined Bayesian update only patchwise. Different instruments, evidential partitions, or reporting practices can each sustain a local public calculus without jointly yielding one global affine evidence space. The local/global problem for Bayesianism is therefore this: when do local canonical Bayes charts glue into one global canonical update law, and when does globalization fail by genuine obstruction rather than by mere local incoherence? -/- The core result is a local/global duality. In one direction, global canonical Bayes exists (...)
- Dynamic Evidential Architectures: Theory Revision and the Temporal Integrability of Observation.Lorand Bruhacs - manuscriptInquiry rarely evolves inside one fixed evidential space. New instruments, altered challenge classes, revised standards of measurement, and changing explanatory demands reshape what counts as publicly observable in the first place. The problem of this paper is therefore temporal rather than merely static: when does revision of an observational architecture remain globally coherent through time, and when does it force branch-dependent reclassification of what is visible and hidden? -/- The core result is a dynamic descent theorem. Rectangular revision is exactly (...)
- Essential Theoreticity: Hidden Invariants and Non-Canonical Inquiry.Lorand Bruhacs - manuscriptTheoreticity matters structurally, not merely taxonomically. This paper treats theoreticity as fiber-dependence relative to an observational projection: what is observational factors through the current public quotient, and what is theoretical still depends on the hidden fibers. Its central result identifies essential theoreticity with the maximal hidden invariant of an admissible architecture class, the largest family of hidden distinctions preserved across the allowed revision family. In non-canonical regimes, where observation is too weak to force a unique update law, that maximal hidden (...)
- Hidden Structure and Explanation: Explanatory Descent and Minimal Hidden Support.Lorand Bruhacs - manuscriptExplanatory adequacy descends to the public side of an admissible evidential architecture only under specific structural conditions. The core result is an explanatory descent criterion: explanatory structure is fully public exactly when the invariants required for explanatory adequacy factor through admissible public quotients. Public explanation is therefore a special success case rather than the default form of explanatory order. -/- Three main consequences follow. First, the descent criterion yields a minimal-support theory of explanation: explanatory adequacy depends not only on invariants, (...)
- When Bayesianization Becomes Canonical: Reflective Collapse, Observation and the Geometry of Update.Lorand Bruhacs - manuscriptReflective Bayesianization becomes the canonical update law of an observational regime exactly under specific structural conditions. The central result is an identification theorem: when the reflective quotient itself is observationally regular, unramified, and sufficiently separating, the update rule generated by disintegration is exactly reflective Bayesianization. In that setting, the Bayes report selected by equilibrium reasoning and the Bayes operator forced by strong observation are the same structure. -/- Two consequence branches follow. First, equilibrium semantics that previously lived only at the (...)
- Skepticism about epistemic dilemmas.Kevin McCain, Scott Stapleford & Matthias Steup - 2021 - In Kevin McCain, Scott Stapleford & Matthias Steup, Epistemic Dilemmas: New Arguments, New Angles. New York, NY: Routledge.Talk of epistemic dilemmas is old talk in epistemology. But are there such things? In this paper I argue for modest skepticism about epistemic dilemmas. In order to do that, I first point out that not all normative conflicts constitute dilemmas: more needs to be the case. Second, I look into the moral dilemmas literature for inspiration and identify a set of conditions that need to be at work for a mere normative conflict to be a genuine normative dilemma. Last, (...)Find it on Amazon.com (collection)Remove from this list Direct download (3 more)Export citationBookmark 3 citations
- Alternatives to Hypothesis Testing: Demonstrative Induction in Cognitive Science.Brendan Fleig-Goldstein - manuscriptThere is a general view that scientific inferences from data to theory are rarely, if ever, deductive inferences. Against this view is a rising tide of work showing the importance of deductive inference in science. Such inferences have been called demonstrative inductions (DI). However, critics have argued against the epistemic advantages of DI, claiming that it merely passes the buck of inductive risk to the premises. In this paper, I defend the advantages of demonstrative induction. I argue that the virtues (...)
- p-hacking inflates Type I error rates in the error statistical approach but not in the formal inference approach.Mark Rubin - manuscriptp-hacking occurs when researchers conduct multiple significance tests (e.g., p1;H0,1 and p2;H0,2) and then selectively report tests that yield desirable (usually significant) results (e.g., p2 ≤ 0.05;H0,2) without correcting for multiple testing (e.g., 0.05/2 = 0.025). In the present article, I consider p-hacking in the context of two philosophies of significance testing — the error statistical approach and the formal inference approach. I argue that although p-hacking inflates Type I error rates in the error statistical approach, it does not inflate (...)
- Rational Inconsistency Against Non-skeptical Infallibilism.Nathan Lauffer - 2026 - Acta Analytica 41 (1):151-166.Recent epistemological literature features compelling and novel arguments for thinking that an agent can rationally believe each member of a set of propositions while knowing that one of the members is false. Perhaps more provocatively, these proponents of “Rational Inconsistency,” as it were, claim that it’s also possible to know each true member of the set while knowing that one of the members is false. Call this “Knowledgeable Inconsistency.” In this article, I explain why, if Knowledgeable Inconsistency is true, then, (...)
- Closing the Loop in Cognitive Science: The Diachronic Evidential Strategy of Bounded Rational Analysis.Brendan Fleig-Goldstein - manuscriptWhy might a scientist want to establish a cognitive model as optimally suited to some particular environment? In this paper, I suggest that an unexamined motivation for establishing models as optimal is to uncover systematic discrepancies between idealized human behavior and observed human behavior. These discrepancies can lead to the discovery of previously unknown cognitive architecture details (e.g., resource constraints), which can then be incorporated into models and give rise to new idealized models that factor in these newly uncovered details. (...)
- Being Rational and Being Right.Juan Comesaña - 2020 - Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press.This book defends a cluster of theses related to the rationality of action and belief. The starting point is that rational action requires rational belief but tolerates false belief. From there, it argues for a novel account of empirical evidence according to which said evidence consists of the content of undefeated experiences. This view, “Experientialism,” differs from the two main views of empirical evidence on offer nowadays: Factualism, according to which our evidence is what we know, and Psychologism, according to (...)
- Accuracy, Coherence, and Evidence.Kenny Easwaran - 2015 - In Tamar Szabó Gendler & John Hawthorne, Oxford Studies in Epistemology: Volume 5. Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press UK. pp. 61-96.Taking Joyce’s (1998; 2009) recent argument(s) for probabilism as its point of departure, this chapter proposes a new way of grounding formal, synchronic, epistemic coherence requirements for (opinionated) full belief. This approach yields principled alternatives to deductive consistency, sheds new light on the preface and lottery paradoxes, and reveals novel conceptual connections between alethic and evidential epistemic norms.Find it on Amazon.com (collection)Remove from this list Direct downloadExport citationBookmark 58 citations
- Revisiting epistemic sensitivity and evidence.Haicheng Zhao - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.One influential approach to distinguishing individual evidence from statistical evidence in legal epistemology is the sensitivity account, proposed by Enoch, Spectre, and Fisher (2012. “Statistical Evidence, Sensitivity, and the Legal Value of Knowledge.” Philosophy & Public Affairs 40 (3): 197–224). More recently, Günther (2024. “Epistemic Sensitivity and Evidence.” Inquiry 67 (6): 1348–1366) has advanced a revised version – the epistemic sensitivity account – claimed to improve upon Enoch et al.’s original proposal. In particular, it is argued that the account not (...)
- Toward a Fundamental Ontology of Probability: Evidence, Memory, and the Geometry of Epistemic Being.Bouzaiene Khaled - forthcoming - Philosophy.We argue that probability theory, in its canonical formulation, suffers from a pathol- ogy we term epistemic presentism: the systematic erasure of evidential history through normalization. This is not a technical limitation but an ontological mistake— mistaking the shadow for the substance, the map for the territory, the amnesia for the truth. Drawing on contact geometry, we demonstrate that probability distributions are exiled fragments of richer dynamical objects whose memory has been surgically removed. Evidence is not accumulated but integrated—not summed (...)
- Error Statistics Using the Akaike and Bayesian Information Criteria: Error Statistics Using AIC.Beckett Sterner & Henrique Cheng - 2024 - Erkenntnis 91 (1):379-408.Many biologists, especially in ecology and evolution, analyze their data by estimating fits to a set of candidate models and selecting the best model according to the Akaike Information Criterion (AIC) or the Bayesian Information Criteria (BIC). When the candidate models represent alternative hypotheses, biologists may want to limit the chance of a false positive to a specified level. Existing model selection methodology, however, allows for only indirect control over error rates by setting a threshold for the difference in AIC (...)
- Is a little learning dangerous?Bernhard Salow - forthcoming - Noûs.I argue that a little learning is often dangerous even for ideal reasoners who are operating in extremely simple scenarios and know all the relevant facts about how the evidence is generated. More precisely, I show that, on many plausible ways of assigning value to a credence in a hypothesis H, ideal Bayesians should sometimes expect other ideal Bayesians to end up with a worse credence if they gather additional evidence, even when they agree completely about the likelihoods of the (...)
- Dimensional Decoupling: Symmetry-Protected Topological Stability via Moir´e Interference Khaled Bouzaiene1.Bouzaiene Khaled - 2025 - Edited by Khaled Bouzaiene.Physical systems across varying scales—from macroscopic lattice structures to correlated quan- tum materials—face a common information-theoretic challenge: stabilizing discrete, global identi- ties against continuous, local fluctuations. In this work, we propose a unified theoretical framework termed Dimensional Decoupling. We posit that for systems admitting a compact symmetry group and non-trivial cohomology, observable information flows decompose into two orthogonal channels: a Geometric Channel (encoding local metric variability and kinetic dissipation) and a Topological Channel (encoding global invariants). We derive a rigorous Quantitative (...)
- Evidential Reconfiguration as Bayesian Confirmation For Dark Matter in 1974: How Existing Data Become Evidence in New Structures.Simon Allzén - manuscriptThe 1974 papers by Ostriker et al. [1974] and Einasto et al. [1974] are considered by many to be pivotal in establishing the epistemic foundations for the dark matter hypothesis. From a theory confirmation point of view, the circumstances surrounding this pivot are difficult to reconcile with common approaches to epistemic support. First, the papers did not introduce any new observations. Second, they synthesized existing data from two separate contexts to construct a hypothesis under which the joint data became evidentially (...)
- Epistemic Justification and Higher-Order Requirements.Simon Graf - 2025 - Episteme:1-23.Traditionally, many have imposed higher-order requirements on epistemic justification. That is, many have argued that for a belief to be epistemically justified, it not only needs to satisfy first-order requirements, such as being formed via a reliable process or supported by sufficient evidence, but also some higher-order requirement that bears on the way the belief is formed. For example, BonJour (1980) has famously argued that a clairvoyance belief, however reliable, is not justified unless one also has a justified belief that (...)
- Knowing Our Limits.Nathan Ballantyne - 2019 - New York, US: OUP Usa.Changing our minds isn’t easy. Even when we recognize our views are disputed by intelligent and informed people, we rarely doubt our rightness. Why is this so? How can we become more open-minded, putting ourselves in a better position to tolerate conflict, advance collective inquiry, and learn from differing perspectives in a complex world? In this engrossing, provocative book, Nathan Ballantyne defends the indispensable role of epistemology in tackling these issues. For early modern philosophers, the point of reflecting on inquiry (...)
- (1 other version)Isaac Newton, Interdisciplinarian: Newton's Cross-Domain Evidential Reasoning.Brendan Fleig-Goldstein - 2026 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 117:102154.This paper argues that Newton employed a non-hypothetical method of evidential reasoning called demonstrative induction in his chronological studies. In demonstrative induction, inductive risk is confined to the premises, and the secureness of the conclusion depends on the secureness of those premises. I show that Newton's approach to chronology exemplifies two key restrictions on demonstrative induction: (i) premises must themselves be supported by demonstrative induction or by inductive generalizations, and (ii) inductive risk should be confined to premises drawn from domains (...)
- Coherence as a constraint on scientific inquiry.Martin Justin & Borut Trpin - 2025 - Synthese 206 (4):1-28.We investigate the epistemic role of coherence in scientific reasoning, focusing on its use as a heuristic for filtering evidence. Using a novel computational model based on Bayesian networks, we simulate agents who update their beliefs under varying levels of noise and bias. Some agents treat reductions in coherence as higher-order evidence and interpret such drops as signals that something has gone epistemically awry, even when the source of error is unclear. Our results show that this strategy can improve belief (...)
- Re-construction or re-invention? Experimental strategies in the historical sciences.Franziska Reinhard - 2025 - Synthese 206 (194):1-30.Prototypical historical sciences are in the business of reconstructing the past based on traces. Experimental research into the past often seems precluded by the very nature of historical phenomena: they are not only unobservable, but unmanipulable. In this paper, I focus on a less prototypical historical science–origins-of-life research–to add to the debate over the role of experiments in the historical sciences. I identify and address two distinct challenges for experimental research into the deep past. The first, Turner’s challenge, concerns scientists’ (...)
- Belief Inertia and Awareness-Evidence Commutativity.Zhongwei Xu - forthcoming - Analysis.It is alleged that imprecise probabilism can render one unable to update one’s credence in light of new evidence. While such belief inertia by itself is already quite worrying, I argue that it has other worrying epistemic implications that were previously unnoticed. It opens the possibility that one’s doxastic state depends not only on the evidence one has but also on the temporal order between awareness growth and evidence acquisition. I find this implication difficult to accept.
- Two or Three Strands to the Concept of Ignorance.Thomas Raleigh - forthcoming - Erkenntnis:1-25.This article discusses two under-explored strands to the concept of ignorance. Firstly, how ignorance relates to a subject’s degrees of belief; secondly how ignorance relates to a subject’s evidence. I also consider a third alleged strand to the concept of ignorance, which is that ignorance requires some kind of normative failure. I argue that this is false; ignorance does not essentially require any such failure. I finish with some reflections on the extent to which conceptual analysis and linguistic intuitions about (...)
- The New Evil Demon Problem and the Nature of Evidence.Thomas Kelly - 2025 - In Juan Comesaña & Matthew McGrath, Knowledge and rationality: essays in honor of Stewart Cohen. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. pp. 18-42.This chapter explores the challenge that the New Evil Demon Problem poses for so-called “externalist” theories of evidence. It argues that the best view of evidence is a liberalized form of externalism. According to that view, paradigmatic evidence in the sciences and elsewhere includes publicly known facts about the external world, evidence that we would not have in a hypothetical scenario in which we are the victims of radical deception. On the other hand, our evidence is not limited to our (...)Find it on Amazon.com (collection)Remove from this list Direct downloadExport citationBookmark 4 citations
- Moral encroachment and group-to-individual inferences.Martin Smith - 2025 - Philosophical Studies 182 (11):3247-3267.The paper is concerned with a special class of inferences, in which we draw conclusions about individual people based on evidence about the groups to which they belong. One thing that is notable about these inferences is that they are often subject to a kind of moral criticism. By judging people in this way, it is claimed, we demean or diminish them, and fail to properly respect them as individuals. And yet, if these inferences are epistemically sound – as they (...)
- Are Credences Thoughts about Probability? A Reply to the Inscrutable Evidence Argument.Benjamin Lennertz - 2025 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 12 (48):1259-1279.The Inscrutable Evidence Argument targets the thesis that credences are thoughts about evidential probabilities (CTEP). It does so using cases where one knows one’s evidence speaks either strongly in favor of or strongly against a proposition, but one doesn’t know which; in such cases, it seems possible to have a middling credence in that proposition even though one doesn’t think the probability of the proposition is near 50%—contra CTEP. In this paper, I defend CTEP by conceiving of the thoughts involved (...)
- Astrobiology and the Transformation of Scientific Epistemology.Kristina Šekrst - forthcoming - In Steven J. Dick, Astronomy and Philosophy: Conceptual and Methodological Foundations and Challenges. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Astrobiology occupies an unusual position within the philosophy of science. Confronted with the n = 1 problem – having only a single example of life to study – it attempts to investigate life beyond Earth while relying entirely on Earth’s biosphere as its reference point, a constraint that creates unique epistemic challenges. Unlike traditional sciences with clear predictive frameworks, astrobiology operates as what we might call a transient science: a discipline functioning without foundational certainties, relying predominantly on abductive reasoning, and (...)
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