Introduction
When it comes to figuring out what one should believe one looks to the evidence. If one wants to know the best practices for avoiding a particular illness, one should read up on the latest evidence on how the illness is spread and the proper precautions to take. If one wants to figure out whether a particular politician is deserving of one’s vote, one seeks out evidence about her stance on various issues, her track record, and so on. In general, if one wants to make an informed decision, one goes with the evidence. As David Hume famously said, “A wise man…proportions his belief to the evidence” (1748/1955: 118). Thomas Reid, perhaps overly optimistic about the wishes of some people, similarly claimed “To believe without evidence is a weakness which every man is concerned to avoid, and which every man wishes to avoid” (1785/1941: 178). To put it plainly, it seems commonsensical that if one wants to get to the truth, one believes according to the evidence.
Despite the fact...
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References
Chisholm, R. (1977). Theory of knowledge (2nd ed.). Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall.
Conee, E., & Feldman, R. (1985). Evidentialism. Philosophical Studies, 48, 15–34.
Conee, E., & Feldman, R. (2004). Evidentialism: Essays in epistemology. New York: Oxford University Press.
Conee, E., & Feldman, R. (2008). Evidence. In Q. Smith (Ed.), Epistemology: New essays (pp. 83–104). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Conee, E., & Feldman, R. (2011). In T. Dougherty (Ed.), Evidentialism and its discontents (pp. 283–323). New York: Oxford University Press.
DeRose, K. (2000). Ought we to follow our evidence? Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 60, 697–706.
Goldman, A. (2011). Toward a synthesis of reliabilism and evidentialism? Or: Evidentialism’s troubles, reliabilism’s rescue package. In T. Dougherty (Ed.), Evidentialism and its discontents (pp. 254–280). New York: Oxford University Press.
Hume, D. (1748/1955). In C. W. Hendel (Ed.), An enquiry concerning human understanding. Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc.
Kelly, T. (2014). Evidence. In Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/evidence/
McCain, K. (2015). Is forgotten evidence a problem for evidentialism? Southern Journal of Philosophy, 53, 471–480.
Reid, T. (1785/1941). In A. D. Woozley (Ed.), Essays on the intellectual powers of man. London: Macmillan.
Williamson, T. (2000). Knowledge and its limits. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Further Reading
Dougherty, T. (Ed.). (2011). Evidentialism and its discontents. New York: Oxford University Press.
Feldman, R. (2003). Epistemology. Upper Saddle River: Prentice-Hall.
Haack, S. (1993). Evidence and inquiry: Towards reconstruction in epistemology. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.
McCain, K. (2014). Evidentialism and epistemic justification. New York: Routledge.
McCain, K. (2015). No knowledge without evidence. Journal of Philosophical Research, 40, 369–376.
McCain, K. (Ed.). (2018). Believing in accordance with the evidence: New essays on evidentialism. Cham: Springer.
Mittag, D. (2019). Evidentialism. In Internet encyclopedia of philosophy. https://www.iep.utm.edu/evidenti/#SH3a
Stapleford, S., & McCain, K. (2020). Bound by the evidence. In K. McCain & S. Stapleford (Eds.), Epistemic duties: New arguments, new angles. New York: Routledge.
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McCain, K. (2020). Evidentialism. In: Peters, M. (eds) Encyclopedia of Educational Philosophy and Theory. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-287-532-7_692-1
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