Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The notion of evidence figures prominently in several epistemological issues. A good way to raise the central philosophical questions about evidence is in the context of a discussion of a theory of epistemic justification known as “evidentialism”. Evidenti-alism, suggested by Chisholm (1977) and defended explicitly in Feldman and Conee (1985) , holds that a belief is epistemically justified for a person if and only if the person's evidence supports that belief. Working out the details of this view requires resolving several questions about the concept of evidence, including the following: (1) What sorts of things can be evidence? (2) Under what conditions does a body of evidence support a particular proposition or belief? (3) What is it for someone to have something as evidence? Of course, these questions retain their interest whatever the merits of evidentialism. The concept of evidence appealed to in evidentialism, and in epistemology generally, differs from the related concept of evidence used in the law. In the law, or at least in informal discussions of the law, evidence includes physical objects and events. Weapons and footprints, for example, are ordinarily said to be evidence. In philosophical discussions, evidence is generally taken to be either internal states such as beliefs, or the believed propositions themselves. Thus, the belief (or proposition) that a weapon of ... log in or subscribe to read full text