Book chapter
Evidentialism and Truth
Evidentialism and its Discontents
Oxford University Press
08/25/2011
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199563500.003.0012
Abstract
One must be either an infallibilist or a fallibilist. Infallibilism has been common in the internalist tradition, but tends to lead to skepticism. Then one must be either an internalist or externalist. Externalists typically assert a strong connection between justification and truth. Fallibilist internalists, though, face a special problem. To maintain supervenience, they can either assert that propositions describing evidential connections are contingent propositions describing the subject states of a believer or that they are necessary truths trivially entailed by propositions describing the subjective states of believers. The former entails radical subjectivism, and thelatter alternative—that taken by Conee and Feldman—severs an important conceptual connection between justification and truth: possibly, a large stuck proportion (or even all) of one’s justified beliefs are false. So to get such a connection one is with a choice between externalism and infallibilist internalism. Finally, Fumerton suggests that it obfuscates this discussion to say that all justified beliefs are epistemically likely because epistemic probability is defined in terms of evidence.
Details
- Title: Subtitle
- Evidentialism and Truth
- Creators
- Richard Fumerton
- Resource Type
- Book chapter
- Publication Details
- Evidentialism and its Discontents
- Publisher
- Oxford University Press; Oxford
- DOI
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199563500.003.0012
- Language
- English
- Date published
- 08/25/2011
- Academic Unit
- Philosophy
- Record Identifier
- 9984397200602771
Metrics
7 Record Views