EXPLANATIONIST EVIDENTIALISM (original) (raw)
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TWO NEW OBJECTIONS TO EXPLANATIONISM
Two New Objections to Explanationism
After a period of inactivity, interest in explanationism as a thesis about the nature of epistemic justification has been renewed. Ted Poston (2014) and Kevin McCain (2014) have both recently offered versions of explanationist evidentialism. In this paper, we pose two objections to explanationist evidentialism. First, explanationist evidentialism fails to state a sufficient condition for justification. Second, explanationist evidentialism implies a vicious regress.
Problems for Mainstream Evidentialism
Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 2016
Evidentialism says that a subject S’s justification is entirely determined by S’s evidence. The plausibility of evidentialism depends on (1) what kind of entities constitute a subject S’s evidence and (2) what one takes the support relation to consist in. Conee and Feldman’s mainstream evidentialism (ME) incorporates a psychologist answer to (1) and an explanationist answer to (2). ME naturally accommodates perceptual justification. However, it does not accommodate intuitive cases of inferential justification. In the second part of the paper, I consider and reject a reply based on a refined explanationist theory of the support relation proposed by K McCain.
An epistemic analysis of explanations and causal beliefs
Topoi, 1990
Causation and explanation are obviously connected. A sterling task for a philosopher of science is to lay bare the connection. The dominating tradition has been that an explanation is a form of inferential relation between the sentences included in the explanans and the explanandum. This tradition can be traced back to Aristotle:
Evidentialism, Explanationism, and Beliefs About the Future
Erkenntnis, 2014
Earl Conee and Richard Feldman have argued that epistemic support should be understood in terms of explanatory considerations. Very roughly, they hold that one's evidence supports a given proposition when that proposition is part of the best explanation of one's evidence. This proposal is attractive, but T. Ryan Byerly has recently argued that it is false. Byerly claims that such explanationist accounts of epistemic support cannot account for the fact that one's evidence can support propositions about the future. Although Byerly presents an interesting challenge, his argument is problematic and, ultimately, unconvincing.
Explanationism: Defended on All Sides
Logos & Episteme, 2015
Explanationists about epistemic justification hold that justification depends upon explanatory considerations. After a bit of a lull, there has recently been a resurgence of defenses of such views. Despite the plausibility of these defenses, explanationism still faces challenges. Recently, T. Ryan Byerly and Kraig Martin have argued that explanationist views fail to provide either necessary or sufficient conditions for epistemic justification. I argue that Byerly and Martin are mistaken on both accounts.
In the first section of this paper I present epistemic evidentialism and, in the following two sections, I discuss that view with counterexamples. I shall defend that adequately supporting evidence is a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition for epistemic justification. Although we need epistemic elements other than evidence in order to have epistemic justification, there can be no epistemically justified belief without evidence. However, there are other kinds of justification beyond the epistemic justification, such as prudential or moral justification; therefore, there is room for justified beliefs (in a prudential or moral sense) without evidence.
Justify This! The Roles of Epistemic Justification
2017
Endriss Justify This! The Roles of Epistemic Justification 2 [J]ustification is primarily a status which knowledge can confer on beliefs that look good in its light without themselves amounting to knowledge. Timothy Williamson(2000),p. 9. 0. BACKGROUND Suppose that Smith and Jones have applied for a certain job. 1 And suppose that Smith has strong evidence for the following conjunctive proposition: (i) Jones is the man who will get the job, and Jones has ten coins in his pocket. Smith's evidence for (i) might be that the president of the company assured him that Jones would in the end be selected, and that he, Smith, had counted the coins in Jones's pocket ten minutes ago. Proposition (i) implies: (ii) The man who will get the job has ten coins in his pocket. Let us further suppose that Smith sees the implication from (i) to (ii) and accepts (ii) on the grounds of (i), for which he has strong evidence. In this case, Smith is clearly justified in believing that (ii) is true. But imagine, further, that unknown to Smith, he himself, not Jones, will get the job. And, also, unknown to Smith, he himself has ten coins in his pocket. Proposition (ii) is then true, though proposition (i), from which Smith inferred (ii), is false. In our example, then, all of the following are true: (ii) is true, Smith believes that (ii) is true, and Smith is justified in believing that (ii) is true. But it is equally clear that Smith does not know that (ii) is true; for (ii) is true in virtue of the number of coins in Smith's pocket, while Smith does not know how many coins are in Smith's pocket, and bases his belief in 1 The following case study is taken directly from Edmund Gettier's (1963/2008) "Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?" Some minor changes have been made to remove elements of the original language that are unnecessary for this paper. Endriss Justify This! The Roles of Epistemic Justification
Explanationism Provides the Best Explanation of the Epistemic Significance of Peer Disagreement
Philosophical Studies
In this paper, I provide a novel explanationist framework for thinking about peer disagreement that solves many of the puzzles regarding disagreement that have troubled epistemologists over the last two decades. Applying explanationism to the problem of peer disagreement yields the following principle: In cases of peer disagreement, the thing that subjects ought to believe is the thing that is the best explanation of their total evidence, where part of their evidence is the fact that they are in disagreement with an epistemic peer. In this paper, I show how to understand and apply this idea.
How to Supplement Mentalist Evidentialism: What Are the Fundamental Epistemological Principles
Evidentialism and mentalism enjoy much popularity. In fact, mentalist evidentialism is often considered the most plausible internalist approach towards epistemic justification. However, mentalist evidentialism does not amount to a comprehensive theory of epistemic justification. In their attempt to complete their epistemological system and to answer the question of why experiences are justifiers, Conee and Feldman supplement mentalist evidentialism with explanationism. They take principles of best explanation to be the fundamental epistemic principles. In this paper, I show that explanationist mentalist evidentialism is plagued by severe shortcomings. What is more, I argue for an alternative in the spirit of Conee and Feldman's internalism that avoids the problems of explanationism, offering a straightforward commonsense account of epistemic justification. The fundamental epistemological principles are phenomenological principles.