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It is a piece of common sense that we can be mean-spirited, cruel, and unfair in the ways that we form beliefs. That is, we can wrong others through our doxastic activity. This fact shows that, con...

It's often said that it is impossible to respond to non-evidential considerations in belief-formation, at least not directly and consciously. Many philosophers think that this provides grounds for accepting a normative thesis: typically, some kind of evidentialism about reasons for belief, or what one ought to believe. Some also think it supports thinking that evidentialist norms are constitutive of belief. There are a variety of ways in which one might try to support such theses by appeal to the impossibility-claim. In this paper, I put pressure on these various attempts by raising a simple yet overlooked problem for them. In brief, the problem is that it isn't true that one cannot (directly and consciously) respond, in belief-formation to considerations that don't actually constitute (good) evidence for the proposition under consideration; what is true, at most, is that one cannot (directly and consciously) respond, in belief-formation to considerations that one oneself takes to be evidentially irrelevant to that proposition. While this point is obvious once stated, its significance hasn't been appreciated, or so I'll argue. Once we take full account of it, the standard arguments from the impossibility-claim to evidentialism don't go through.

It is often argued that there are no practical reasons for belief because we could not believe for such reasons. A recent reply by pragmatists is that we can often believe for practical reasons because we can often cause our beliefs for practical reasons. This paper reveals the limits of this recently popular strategy for defending pragmatism, and thereby reshapes the dialectical options for pragmatism. I argue that the strategy presupposes that reasons for being in non-intentional states are not reducible to reasons to act. Pragmatists who want to preserve a motivational constraint on reasons therefore have exactly two options: either arguing that there are irreducible reasons for being in non-intentional states (new pragmatism); or arguing that we can believe directly for practical reasons (traditional pragmatism). I argue that the prospects for the former option are dim because irreducible reasons to be in states are hard to square with the motivational constraint on reasons. Returning to the more traditional route of arguing for pragmatism by defending a version of doxastic voluntarism therefore seems to be the more promising way for pragmatists to go.

The broad question asked under the heading “Ethics of Belief” is: What ought one believe? An ethics of belief attempts to uncover the norms that guide belief formation and maintenance. The dominant view among contemporary philosophers is that evidential norms do; I should always follow my evidence and only believe when the evidence is sufficient to support my belief. This view is called “evidentialism,” although, as we shall see, this term gets applied to a number of views that can be distinguished from one another. Evidentialists often cite David Hume (1999: 110) as their historic exemplar who said “a wise man … proportions his beliefs to the evidence” and thus argued against the reasonableness of believing in miracles (see Hume, David; Wisdom). Those who argue that there can be good practical reasons for believing, independent of one's evidence, can turn for inspiration to Blaise Pascal (1966: 124), who argued that the best reason to form a belief in God was a practical one, namely the possibility of avoiding eternal suffering (see Reasons; Reasons for Action, Morality and; Faith). Keywords: ethics; James, William; philosophy; Williams, Bernard; duty and obligation; knowledge; rationality; responsibility

It is plausible that there is a distinctively epistemic standard of correctness for belief. It is also plausible that there is a range of practical reasons bearing on belief. These theses are often thought to be in tension with each other. To resolve the tension, the authors draw on an analogy with a similar distinction between types of reasons for actions in the context of activities. This motivates a two-level account of the structure of normativity. The account relies upon a further distinction between normative reasons and authoritatively normative reasons. Only the latter constitutively play the functional role of explaining what state one just plain ought to be in. The authors conjecture that all and only practical reasons are authoritative. Hence, in one important sense, all reasons for belief are practical reasons. But this account also preserves the autonomy and importance of epistemic reasons.

What is the relationship between faith and evidence? It is often claimed that faith requires going beyond evidence. In this paper, I reject this claim by showing how the moral demands to have faith warrant a person in maintaining faith in the face of counter-evidence, and by showing how the moral demands to have faith, and the moral constraints of evidentialism, are in clear tension with going beyond evidence. In arguing for these views, I develop a taxonomy of different ways of irrationally going beyond evidence and contrast this with rational ways of going against evidence. I then defend instances of having a moral demand to have faith, explore how this stands in tension with going beyond and against evidence, and develop an argument for the claim that faith involves a disposition to go against, but not beyond evidence.

When one has both epistemic and practical reasons for or against some belief, how do these reasons combine into an all-things-considered reason for or against that belief? The question might seem to presuppose the existence of practical reasons for belief. But we can rid the question of this presupposition. Once we do, a highly general ‘Combinatorial Problem’ emerges. The problem has been thought to be intractable due to certain differences in the combinatorial properties of epistemic and practical reasons. Here we bring good news: if we accept an independently motivated version of epistemic instrumentalism—the view that epistemic reasons are a species of instrumental reasons—we can reduce The Combinatorial Problem to the relatively benign problem of how to weigh different instrumental reasons against each other. As an added benefit, the instrumentalist account can explain the apparent intractability of The Combinatorial Problem in terms of a common tendency to think and talk about epistemic reasons in an elliptical manner.

Sometimes it is practically beneficial to believe what is epistemically unwarranted. Philosophers have taken these cases to raise the question are there practical reasons for belief? Evidentialists argue that there cannot be any such reasons. Putative practical reasons for belief are not reasons for belief, but (to use a distinction from Pamela Hieronymi) reasons to manage our beliefs in a particular way. Pragmatists are not convinced. They accept that some (or perhaps all) reasons for belief are practical. The debate, it is widely thought, is at an impasse. But this debate fails to address what is puzzling and interesting about the cases. By focusing on reasons for belief, the debate completely overlooks the role of action in relation to belief. We should be talking about the reasons for actions that shape our beliefs, which I will call belief management. I argue for three related theses: (1) the interesting cases that motivate the debate are about belief management; (2) Evidentialism is irrelevant to belief management; (3) agents have practical reasons to manage their beliefs with the aim of forming true beliefs. These reasons are categorical in nature and result in the tension of conflict cases.

I motivate and develop a novel account of the epistemic assessability of suspension as a development of my knowledge-first, virtue-epistemological research program. First, I extend an argument of Ernest Sosa's for the claim that evidentialism cannot adequately account for the epistemic assessability of suspension. This includes a kind of knowledge-first evidentialism of the sort advocated by Timothy Williamson. I agree with Sosa that the reasons why evidentialism fails motivate a virtue-epistemological approach, but argue that my knowledge-first account is preferable to his view. According to my account, rational belief is belief that manifests proper practical respect for what it takes to know. Beliefs are the only primary bearers of epistemic evaluation since they are the only candidates for knowledge. However, suspension can manifest a derivative kind of practical respect for what it takes to know. Thus, we can explain why the same sort of assessment is applicable to both belief and suspension (epistemic rationality), and why belief has a privileged claim to these properties. Lastly, I'll look at Sosa's and Williamson's treatments of Pyrrhonian skepticism, which treats a certain kind of suspension as the epistemically superior practice, and argue that my account provides a better anti-skeptical response than either of their approaches.

Susanna Rinard has recently offered a new argument for pragmatism and against evidentialism. According to Rinard, evidentialists must hold that the rationality of belief is determined in a way that is different from how the rationality of other states is determined. She argues that we should instead endorse a view she calls Equal Treatment, according to which the rationality of all states is determined in the same way. In this paper, I show that Rinard’s claims are mistaken, and that evidentialism is more theoretically virtuous than its opponents sometimes give it credit for. Not only does evidentialism not make an exception for belief, but it fits naturally into a unified, explanatorily powerful account of the rationality of intentional mental states. According to such an account, the rationality of all intentional mental states, including belief, is determined by the right kind of reasons for those states. Since the right kind of reasons for belief just are evidential considerations, this unified account entails evidentialism. I conclude, contra Rinard, that evidentialism can be (and often is) situated within a general account of rationality that is at least as theoretically virtuous as pragmatism, if not more so.

From what norms does the ethics of belief derive its virtues and vices, its permissions and censures? Since pragmatists understand epistemology as the theory of inquiry, the paper will try to explain what the aims and tasks are for an ethics of belief, or project of guidance, which best fits with this understanding of epistemology. It will support it with the work of William James and several contemporary pragmatists. This paper approaches the ethics of belief from a focus on responsible risk management, where doxastic responsibility is understood in terms of the degree of riskiness of agents’ doxastic strategies, which is in turn most objectively measured through accordance or violation of inductive norms. Doxastic responsibility is attributable to agents on the basis of how epistemically risky was the process or strategies of inquiry salient in the etiology of their belief or in their maintenance of a belief already held. Treating the “doxastic strategies” of individual and collective agents as central to the projects of epistemic assessment results in a significantly different account than either the standard epistemological externalists focus on “processes” in the objectively reliable etiology of belief, or than the standard evidentialist focus on an agent’s reflectively available “reasons” which lend the agent a certain kind of personal or subjective justification for her belief.

To say that evidence is normative is to say that what evidence one possesses, and how this evidence relates to any proposition, determines which attitude among believing, disbelieving and withholding one ought to take toward this proposition if one deliberates about whether to believe it. It has been suggested by McHugh that this view can be vindicated by resting on the premise that truth is epistemically valuable. In this paper, I modify the strategy sketched by McHugh so as to overcome the initial difficulty that it is unable to vindicate the claim that on counterbalanced evidence with respect to P one ought to conclude deliberation by withholding on P. However, I describe the more serious difficulty that this strategy rests on principles whose acceptance commits one to acknowledging non-evidential reasons for believing. A way to overcome this second difficulty, against the evidentialists who deny this, is to show that we sometimes manage to believe on the basis of non-epistemic considerations. If this is so, one fundamental motivation behind the evidentialist idea that non-epistemic considerations could not enter as reason in deliberation would lose its force. In the second part of this paper I address several strategies proposed in the attempt to show that we sometimes manage to believe on the basis of non-epistemic considerations and show that they all fail. So, I conclude that the strategy inspired by McHugh to ground the normativity of evidence on the value of truth ultimately fails.

This article aims to highlight the extent to which Kant’s account of belief draws on the views of his contemporaries. Situating the non-evidentialist features of Crusius’ account of belief within his broader account, I argue that they include antecedents to both Kant’s distinction between pragmatic and moral belief and his conception of a postulate of pure practical reason. While moving us closer to Kant’s arguments for the first postulate, however, both Crusius’ and Meier’s arguments for the immortality of the soul fail to anticipate the most important aspect of their Kantian counterparts. Developing the non-evidentialist features of Basedow’s account of belief, I distinguish it from its Pascalian and Jamesian relatives and argue that it is the clearest antecedent to Kant’s arguments for the first and second postulates. Finally, I consider the development of Kant’s account of belief after the firstCritiqueand discuss the broader implications of my analysis.

Zusammenfassung Im ersten Teil dieses Aufsatzes werden einige der Strategien, mit deren Hilfe Atheisten unverdiente Privilegien für ihre Position reklamieren, analysiert. Insbesondere wird dabei auf den Zusammenhang zwischen dem Evidentialismus und der Vorstellung eingegangen, dass der Atheismus die natürliche Ausgangsposition ist („presumption of atheism“, Anthony Flew). Zudem wird untersucht, inwiefern die Ausschaltung des Agnostizismus als dritte Option zwischen Theismus und Atheismus zur diskursiven Privilegierung des Atheismus beiträgt (bei Paul Cliteur). Im zweiten Teil wird der Evidentialismus als kontextabhängige Begründungstheorie rekonstruiert und das (A)theismusproblem im Handlungs- statt im Erkenntniskontext situiert. Dadurch werden einseitige Verteilungen der Begründunglast vermieden, vor allem der atheistische Versuch, der Theistin die volle Begründungslast aufzubürden und gleichzeitig den Atheisten von allen Begründungslasten zu befreien. Dadurch kann der Diskurs um das (A)theismusproblem ohne die Zuschreibung unverdienter Privilegien rekonstruiert werden.

According to recently popular pragmatist views, it may be rational for one to believe p when one’s evidence doesn’t favour p over not-p. This may happen according to pragmatists in situations where...

Despite disagreement about what is fundamental or necessary to intellectual humility, there is broad agreement that intellectual humility will bear on the higher-order epistemic attitudes one takes towards one’s beliefs (and other doxastic attitudes). Intellectually humble people tend not to under- or overstate the epistemic strength of their doxastic attitudes. This article shows how incentivized beliefs—beliefs that are held partly for pragmatic reasons—present a test case for intellectual humility. Intellectually humble persons will adopt ambivalent higher-order epistemic attitudes towards their incentivized beliefs. This is important for institutions that incentivize belief with material or social rewards, such as religious institutions that require orthodoxy for membership. The article argues that such institutions cannot simultaneously incentivize orthodox belief and enjoin conviction about such beliefs, unless they are willing to reject intellectual humility as a virtue.

Part One of the paper argues against evidentialism and individualism in religiousepistemology, and in favor of a “social turn” in the field. The idea here is that humanbelief in general, and religious belief in particular, is largely characterized by epistemicdependence on other persons. An adequate epistemology, it is agued, ought to recognizeand account for social epistemic dependence.Part Two considers a problem that becomes salient when we make such a turn. Inshort, how are we to understand the transmission of knowledge and rational faith in areligious tradition? The problem arises because, by all accounts, even the best traditionstransmit superstitions, self-serving prejudices, and other things that are down right falseon any reasonable view. So how is it that these same traditions can also transmit rationalfaith and even knowledge by means of the very same channels, for example channels ofreligious authority and religious teaching?Part Three offers a tentative solution to this problem.

The paradox of hedonism is the idea that making pleasure the only thing that we desire for its own sake can be self-defeating. Why would this be true? In this paper, I survey two prominent explanations, then develop a third possible explanation, inspired by Joseph Butler's classic discussion of the paradox. The existing accounts claim that the paradox arises because we are systematically incompetent at predicting what will make us happy, or because the greatest pleasures for human beings are found in certain special goods which hedonists cannot enjoy. On the account that I develop, the paradox is a consequence of a theory about the nature of pleasure, together with a view about the requirements of rational belief. Which of these explanations is correct, I argue, bears on central questions about how to understand the nature and extent of the paradox.

One not infrequently hears rumors that the robust practice of natural theology reeks of epistemic pride. Paul Moser’s is a paradigm of such contempt. In this paper we defend the robust practice of natural theology from the charge of epistemic pride. In taking an essentially Thomistic approach, we argue that the evidence of natural theology should be understood as a species of God’s general self-revelation. Thus, an honest assessment of that evidence need not be prideful, but can be an act of epistemic humility, receiving what God has offered, answering God’s call. Lastly, we provide criticisms of Moser’s alternative approach, advancing a variety of philosophical and theological problems against his conception of personifying evidence.

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.

In an important 2006 paper, Nishi Shah defends ‘evidentialism’, the position that only evidence for a proposition’s truth constitutes a reason to believe this proposition. In opposition to Shah, Anthony Robert Booth, Andrew Reisner and Asbjørn Steglich-Petersen argue that things other than evidence of truth, so-called non-evidential or ‘pragmatic’ reasons, constitute reasons to believe a proposition. I argue that we can effectively respond to Shah’s pragmatist critics if, following Shah, we are careful to distinguish the evaluation of the reasons for a belief from the process of actually forming a belief and allowing it to influence action. Drawing this distinction is assisted if we utilize Rudolf Carnap’s probabilistic interpretation of what it means to be disposed to believe a claim.

Evidentialism is generally taken to be a position which is not friendly to a religious epistemology. However, in this paper, I will argue for a religious epistemology which is compatible with fundamental tenets of an evidentialist position on epistemic justification. It is a position which entails both a “will to believe” which goes beyond the standard evidentialist principles governing the appropriate doxastic attitude towards a proposition, but nonetheless satisfies epistemic principles at the basis of an evidentialist position on justification. If my argument is successful, a proponent of a conception of religious faith may be able to have her cake and eat it too: namely, she may be able to fundamentally accept both the evidentialist demand that epistemically rational belief fit, or be supported by evidence as well as the position that rational faith is willing belief beyond what one’s evidence strictly demands.

Several influential characterizations of paternalism or its distinctive wrongness emphasize a belief or judgement that it typically involves—namely, the judgement that the paternalized is likely to act irrationally, or some such. But it’s not clear what about such a belief can be morally objectionable if it has the right epistemic credentials (if it is true, say, and is best supported by the evidence). In this paper, I elaborate on this point, placing it in the context of the relevant epistemological discussions. I explain how evidentialism is opposed to such thoughts; I show that possible ways of rejecting evidentialism (along lines analogous to those of pragmatic encroachment) won’t work; and I sketch an account of the wrongness of paternalism that doesn’t depend on any flaw in the belief about others’ likely behaviour.

Phenomenology is a method that aims to ground its findings in evidence, so as to counter metaphysics. This chapter argues that an important aspect of Being and Time is to radicalize the basic concept of evidence that is operative in Husserlian phenomenology, conceived in terms of apodictic certainty, which commits Husserl to mentalist evidentialism. Heidegger overcomes mentalist evidentialism and relaunches phenomenology on the basis of a different “epistemic” measure, which turns phenomenology into a hermeneutics of facticity. The chapter analyzes the fundamental mood of angst in terms of evidence, so as to better illustrate the methodological role it plays in Being and Time. Angst serves as the hermeneutic equivalent to what analytic epistemologists call “justifier of knowledge”, that is, it takes on the function of evidence that phenomenologically grounds the interpretation of the basic structures of Dasein, as these are disclosed in authentic existence.

In some circumstances, a wedge may be driven between what is advantageous or beneficial to believe and what is true. Cases range from the exotic—with diabolical forces conspiring to punish a hapless victim for believing the truth—to the mundane—with excessive optimism increasing one’s chances of success at some tasks. In contemporary discussions about normative reasons for belief, it is often argued or assumed that all reasons for belief arise only from epistemological considerations. This chapter assesses the case for the contrary claim: that there are genuine pragmatic reasons for belief. The chapter begins with a discussion of the standard arguments for and against non-ecumenical evidentialism. After concluding that case for non-ecumenical evidentialism is tenuous, the chapter canvasses and assesses the diverse range of arguments in favor of there being pragmatic reasons for belief.

Suspension and Disagreement Some sceptics claim that in cases of peer disagreement, we ought to suspend judgment about the topic of discussion. In this paper, we argue that the sceptic’s conclusions are only correct in some scenarios. We show that the sceptic’s conclusion is built on two premises (the principle of evidential symmetry and the principle of evidentialism) and argue that both premises are incorrect. First, we show that although it is often rational to suspend judgment when an epistemic peer disagrees with you, peer disagreements are not symmetrical. Next, we argue that even if one assumes that peer disagreements are symmetrical, it might still be rational to stick to one’s guns in the light of peer disagreement.

In this paper I argue against what I call ‘strict evidentialism’, the view that evidence is the sole factor for determining the normative status of beliefs. I argue that strict evidentialism fails to capture the uniquely subjective standpoint of believers and as a result it fails to provide us with the tools necessary to apply its own epistemic norms. In its place I develop an interest-relative theory of justification which I call quasi-evidentialism, according to which S has a justified belief that P at time t if and only if S's evidence at time t supports P in proportion to S's interest in P. I take interests as fixed and argue that adjusting our confidence in a proposition in the right way, given our interests, is fine-tuned through the exercise of intellectual virtue, in particular the virtue of epistemic conscientiousness. This theory refocuses epistemic responsibility in the subject and by locating agency in the cultivation of epistemic virtue it also provides a handy solution to the problem of doxastic voluntarism, insofar as the development of our epistemic virtue guides our responsiveness to reason.

Solved by Sacrifice: Austin Farrer, Fideism, and the Evidence of Faith. By Robert MacSwain. Studies in Philosophical Theology, Book 51. Leuven, Belgium: Peeters Publishers, 2013. 275 pp. $71.00 (paper).Robert MacSwain has written one of the best books on the work of Austin Farrer to this day. Beyond being an authoritative guide to the philosophical theology of Farrer, MacSwain offers a brilliant and nuanced narrative of Anglophone philosophical theology in the second half of the twentieth century, especially as this was practiced by those in the Anglican Communion. I know of nothing equal in any of the secondary literature on Farrer to MacSwain's meticulous care with his sources and his masterful use of details that he includes in the text but does not allow to intrude on an engaging, critical, but constructive overall narrative on how philosophical theology was and may be practiced. His subject, Austin Farrer, was an Anglican divine who, in his time, attracted the attention of leading philosophers (of no less significance than Wittgenstein) and, in particular, those who would become leading philosophers of religion: Basil Mitchell cites Farrer as instrumental in his mature embracing of Christian faith, and C. S. Lewis was a close personal friend. Farrer is especially worthy of attention today given the lively debate over faith and reason, the very nature of faith, and the use of metaphors and image in revelation.There is a helpful introduction situating MacSwain s study, five chapters, and an impressive appendix that includes some of Farrers correspondence and a bibliography of work by or on Farrer. Rather than begin straightaway with a narrative of Farrer s life and diving into primary texts, MacSwain dedicates his first two chapters to some stage setting. We are introduced to Farrer through considering the response to his work; this is a fitting way to anticipate the issues that will emerge later in arriving at a judicious interpretation of Farrers theology, epistemology, and his work on revelation. We are also able to recapture or (for younger readers) see for the first time the importance of Farrer in the mid-twentieth century on up through the 1970s.Getting into some of the details of MacSwain's narrative, the first chapter takes us into Farrer's work with attention to the perennial question that is often put in terms of the relationship of faith and reason. We see tension between those who are committed to some form of evidentialism, such as Basil Mitchell and Brian Hebblethwaite, and those who embrace a moderate form of fideism, such as John Hick, or a position that hovers on the borders of fideism, such as the position advanced by Diogenes Allen. Chapter 2 takes us into exploring the different forms of fideism that have significance historically and today. …

This paper defends a principle I call Equal Treatment, according to which the rationality of a belief is determined in precisely the same way as the rationality of any other state. For example, if wearing a raincoat is rational just in case doing so maximizes expected value, then believing some proposition P is rational just in case doing so maximizes expected value. This contrasts with the popular view that the rationality of belief is determined by evidential support. It also contrasts with the common idea that in the case of belief, there are two different incommensurable senses of rationality, one of which is distinctively epistemic. I present considerations that favor Equal Treatment over these two alternatives, reply to objections, and criticize some arguments for Evidentialism. I also show how Equal Treatment opens the door to a distinctive kind of response to skepticism.

A number of philosophers have claimed that non-evidential considerations cannot play a role in doxastic deliberation as motivating reasons to believe a proposition. This claim, interesting in its own right, naturally lends itself to use in a range of arguments for a wide array of substantive philosophical theses. I argue, by way of a counterexample, that the claim to which all these arguments appeal is false. I then consider, and reply to, seven objections to my counterexample. Finally, as a way of softening the blow, I show how the counterexample itself suggests a plausible diagnosis of why this claim has seemed so plausible to so many.

Wisdom is an important epistemic virtue. Do wise people follow the demands of evidentialism? W.K. Clifford, one of the most influential defenders of evidentialism, tells us to believe all and only what our evidence supports. Richard Feldman and Earl Conee, more moderate contemporary evidentialists, tell us to believe all and only what our evidence supports when our goal is to have epistemically justified beliefs. What if our goal is to achieve wisdom? Should we believe all and only what our evidence supports? Although having justified beliefs seems to be a requirement for wisdom, wisdom also seems to involve more epistemic boldness, intuitive insight, hope, and faith than evidentialism allows. That is, evidentialism seems far too cautious and confining for wisdom. This paper will explore the apparent tension between the demands of evidentialism and the achievement of wisdom. I will show that the demands of evidentialism, once properly understood, are essential to wisdom.

Let ‘strong normative evidentialism’ be the view that a belief is doxastically justified just when (i) the belief is (properly) based on evidence in the agent’s possession, and (ii) the evidence constitutes a good reason for the belief. Strong normative evidentialism faces two challenges. One is that of explaining which kinds of evidence can serve as a good reason for belief. The other is to explain how inferential justification is possible. If a belief p is based on a belief q that justifies p, then it would seem that the subject would need to be justified in believing that q makes p likely. The problem for the evidentialist is to explain what justifies this belief about likelihood. I will argue that the evidentialist can respond to both worries by construing basic evidence as seemings and then adopt a version of phenomenal dogmatism – the view that seemings can confer immediate and full justification upon belief – that takes seemings to be good reasons when they are evidence-insensitive in virtue of their phenomenology. This view meets the first challenge by explaining what kinds of evidence constitute a good reason. It meets the second challenge by taking beliefs that one phenomenon makes another phenomenon more likely to be immediately and fully justified by memory seemings.

Here I shall examine the appeal of William Lane Craig, which ties in with the contemporary sociological phenomenon of some Christians’ desire to present a rational justification for their beliefs, via a brief social criticism. This apologetic attitude is contrasted with fideists and presuppositionalists; evidentialists are people who largely believe because they think the evidence suggests that they should. Christian fans of William Lane Craig seem to regard as important that their beliefs can be supported with objective evidence, a position that foregrounds the style of evangelism and apologetics practiced by New Theologians like William Lane Craig and his colleagues. This position diminishes the importance of the traditional faith-based belief in the central tenets of Christianity, and shall herein be described as ‘Christian evidentialism’.

Historically, it has not been uncommon to find discussions of evidentialism clustering around puzzles about the evidence of perception, introspection, memory, intuition, and inference. Evidentialists have given less attention to social epistemology, with the important exception of the epistemic significance of peer disagreement. Taking its cue from this literature, in this essay I will sketch the outlines of a unified evidentialist social epistemology. At its center is a principle about higher-level evidence from the literature on disagreement, the “evidence of evidence principle,” which links our higher-level evidence about the evidence others possess for particular propositions with our own object-level evidence. I will argue that this principle is not only fruitful for understanding the effect of discovering peer disagreement, but that it also accounts for our having evidence from both group and individual testimony. The social epistemology on offer seems to accommodate the common-sense extent of our testimonial evidence, providing an insight into what is unique about social sources of evidence and what is not, as well as pointing ahead to interesting problems for evidentialists in social epistemology.

McCain’s evidentialism embraces Statism—the view that identifies evidence with mental states—over its denial, where the denial is identified as Propositionalism the two positions in question offer quite different prospects for addressing Sellars’ Problem about the intelligibility of believing on the basis of experience. In Sellars’ mind, this problem provides fodder for a regress argument against experientially-based foundationalism, but that’s not only a bad argument, it skirts the fundamental worry. The more fundamental worry is about adopting a kind of “black box” epistemology on which the only connection between experience and belief is a functional one, the internal workings of which are opaque and mysterious. Propositionalism, by design, is formulated to avoid such limitations. It is designed so that the link from experience to belief makes sense from the perspective of the person whose belief is in question. I argue that Statism, at best, contorts to try to do so.

According to evidentialism, justification is a matter of evidential fit. Some evidentialists analyze the notion of evidential fit in terms of explanation. Applied to perception, the idea is, roughly, that an experience as of p is evidence for you in support of believing p if, and only if, p is either included in, or is a logical consequence of, the set of propositions that explain why you have that seeming. In this paper, I will raise problems for this approach and argue in defense of an alternative proposal.

We generally consider that we should not believe on the basis of insufficient evidence. Yet there are many beliefs which are deprived of adequate epistemic evidence. In such cases, James recommends the “subjective method” which allows us to hold beliefs for practical reasons. This pragmatist move is rejected by evidentialists who think that beliefs must be grounded on adequate epistemic evidence. My contention is that Reid’s approach to irresistible beliefs we do not hold for epistemic reasons offers a persuasive means to escape the contemporary stalemate between evidentialism and pragmatism. Are we rational in holding beliefs for which we don’t possess sufficient epistemic evidence? Reid and James subscribe to a permissivist ethics of belief, according to which we are allowed to hold a belief even if we cannot show its epistemic credentials. Yet I show that the abandonment of the stringent evidentialist requirement (which is tied to a form of internalism) does not necessarily commit one to a pure form of pragmatism (which offers practical reasons instead of epistemic ones). If Reid proposes arguments built on a pragmatist line, he does not reject the evidentialist demand per se, only its internalist form. Moreover, in his view, immediate beliefs are carried by a kind of instinctive epistemic trust. On the whole, pragmatism and common sense do not defend the same kind of epistemic permissivism.

According to an orthodox account of the relationship between propositional and doxastic justification, basing one’s belief in P on one’s source of propositional justification to believe P suffices for having a doxastically justified belief. But in an increasingly recognized work Turri (Philos Phenomenol Res 80:312–326, 2010a) argues that this thesis fails and proposes a new view according to which having propositional justification depends on having the ability to acquire doxastic justification. Turri’s novel position has surprisingly far-reaching epistemological consequences, ruling out some common epistemological positions that afford one propositional justification in the absence of an ability to acquire doxastic justification (e.g., common forms of evidentialism, conservatism, and closure principles). In what follows I show Turri’s novel position to be problematic and go on to suggest a more modest revision to orthodoxy. The first section presents the orthodox view of the relationship between propositional and doxastic justification and Turri’s counterexample to it. The second section introduces Turri’s novel view of that relationship and draws out some of its epistemological implications. The third section gives counterexamples to Turri’s proposal. The fourth section defends a modest revision to orthodoxy.

According to orthodox views of philosophical methodology, when philosophers appeal to intuitions, they treat them as evidence for their contents. Call this “descriptive evidentialism.” Descriptive evidentialism is assumed both by those who defend the epistemic status of intuitions and by those, including many experimental philosophers, who criticize it. This article shows, however, that the idea that philosophers treat intuitions as evidence struggles to account for the way philosophers treat intuitions in a variety of philosophical contexts. In particular, it cannot account for philosophers' treatment of a priori intuitions, for nonpropositional uses of intuition, and for philosophers' failure to use intuition to exclude the counterintuitive. The article concludes that alternatives to descriptive evidentialism (some of which are sketched) must be developed, and that much of the recent debate between traditionalists and skeptics from, for example, experimental philosophy is probably based on a false presupposition.

What do you get when you cross a fallacy with a good argument? A fugu, that is, a valid argument that tempts you to reach its conclusion invalidly (named after the dangerous but delicious Japanese puffer fish). You have yielded to the temptation more than you realize. If you are a teacher, you may have served many fugus. They arise systematically through several mechanisms. Fugus are interesting intermediate cases that shed light on the following issues: bare evidentialism, false pleasure, philosophy of education, and the ethics of argument. Normally, a fugu will not yield knowledge from known premises. But if the reasoning is only slightly fallacious, they do yield knowledge. These mild fugus show that we can gain knowledge by invalid reasoning. This is a conservative resource for historians. They want to credit discoveries to Euclid rather than those who made minor corrections to his proofs, such as David Hilbert. We also benefit from this practice of grandfathering in old standards of knowledge attribution. For we can compete spiritedly for priority. We do not need to worry that credit will instead go to future scholars who will make the minor amendments needed to raise present proofs to a future standard of demonstration.