Standing in a Garden of Forking Paths

In McCain Kevin (ed.), Believing in Accordance with the Evidence: New Essays on Evidentialism. Cham: Springer Verlag (2018)
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Abstract

According to the Path Principle, it is permissible to expand your set of beliefs iff (and because) the evidence you possess provides adequate support for such beliefs. If there is no path from here to there, you cannot add a belief to your belief set. If some thinker with the same type of evidential support has a path that they can take, so do you. The paths exist because of the evidence you possess and the support it provides. Evidential support grounds propositional justification. The principle is mistaken. There are permissible steps you may take that others may not even if you have the very same evidence. There are permissible steps that you cannot take that others can even if your beliefs receive the same type of evidential support. Because we have to assume almost nothing about the nature of evidential support to establish these results, we should reject evidentialism.

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Clayton Littlejohn
Australian Catholic University

Citations of this work

How to combine evidentialism with knowledge-first epistemology.Giada Fratantonio - forthcoming - In Scott Stapleford, Kevin McCain & Matthias Steup (eds.), Evidentialism at 40: New Arguments, New Angles. Routledge.

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References found in this work

Justification and the Truth-Connection.Clayton Littlejohn - 2012 - New York: Cambridge University Press.
Knowledge and Its Limits.Timothy Williamson - 2000 - Philosophy 76 (297):460-464.
Ignorance: A Case for Scepticism.Peter K. Unger - 1975 - Oxford [Eng.]: Oxford University Press.
Knowledge and Its Limits.Timothy Williamson - 2003 - Philosophical Quarterly 53 (210):105-116.
Knowledge and Its Limits.Timothy Williamson - 2005 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 70 (2):452-458.

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