{"id":769,"date":"2019-04-23T16:43:51","date_gmt":"2019-04-23T16:43:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.fecundity.com\/nfw\/?p=769"},"modified":"2019-04-26T17:01:49","modified_gmt":"2019-04-26T17:01:49","slug":"why-evidentialism-is-tantamount-to-scepticism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.fecundity.com\/nfw\/2019\/04\/23\/why-evidentialism-is-tantamount-to-scepticism\/","title":{"rendered":"Why evidentialism is tantamount to scepticism"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Over on Facebook, Carl Sachs offers a send-up of evidentialist reasoning<\/a>. In the comments, I boil the argument down to this:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

  1. Only believe on the basis of univocally sufficient evidence.<\/li>
  2. Evidence is never univocally sufficient.<\/li>
  3. Therefore, don’t believe!<\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n

    It’s valid, but are the premises true?<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

    Premise 1 is the principle of strict envidentialism famously defended by William Clifford.<\/span>1<\/sup><\/a><\/span> I’ve added the word “univocally” to capture the evidentialist’s idea that evidence determinately supports some claims and not others. They hold that there isn’t room for personal variation or disagreement over whether it does or doesn’t.<\/span>2<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Premise 2 is the upshot of much 20th-century philosophy of science. There is no single, precise solution to the problem of induction. Every strategy of learning from experience applies only contingently, so using one strategy rather than another necessarily involves risks. And there is no a priori rule for how to reckon with those risks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Clifford himself was not a sceptic, but he rejected premise 2. Here’s what he says to evade the problem of induction:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    We… add to our experience on the assumption of a uniformity in nature; we may fill in our picture of what is and has been, as experience gives it us, in such a way as to make the whole consistent with this uniformity.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

    Lots of scientists and philosophers have thought that the problem of induction could be dissolved by positing a Principle of the Uniformity of Nature (PUN). So it was a sensible thing for Clifford to write in the late 19th-century, I guess.<\/span>3<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Yet this stratagem is undone by 20th-century philosophy. There is no satisfactory way to specify the content of PUN. It is not enough to say that nature is uniform, because there are countless ways in which it is not<\/em>. The future resembles the past in some respects but not in others. The problem is precisely to say which uniformities will hold and which won’t.<\/span>4<\/sup><\/a><\/span> Any answer involves speculation and risk.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Although I understand why Clifford could accept premise 1 without seeing that it leads to the conclusion, the case for premise 2 is now too strong to resist.<\/span>5<\/sup><\/a><\/span> So I don’t see how contemporary evidentialists can accept premise 1 without scepticism.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Over on Facebook, Carl Sachs offers a send-up of evidentialist reasoning. In the comments, I boil the argument down to this: Only believe on the basis of univocally sufficient evidence. Evidence is never univocally sufficient. Therefore, don’t believe! It’s valid, but are the premises true?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[9],"tags":[54,23,15],"class_list":["post-769","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-philosophy","tag-epistemology","tag-pragmatism","tag-values-in-science"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7PjAo-cp","jetpack_likes_enabled":false,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fecundity.com\/nfw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/769","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fecundity.com\/nfw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fecundity.com\/nfw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fecundity.com\/nfw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fecundity.com\/nfw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=769"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.fecundity.com\/nfw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/769\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":775,"href":"https:\/\/www.fecundity.com\/nfw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/769\/revisions\/775"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fecundity.com\/nfw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=769"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fecundity.com\/nfw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=769"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fecundity.com\/nfw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=769"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}