Académique Documents
Professionnel Documents
Culture Documents
Clayton Littlejohn
cmlittlejohn@gmail.com
(1) What evidence do they have? That he was the last one to see the victim alive and
that his prints were on the murder weapon. Of course, he wasn’t the last one to see
the victim alive and his prints weren’t on the weapon.
(2) What evidence do they have? That he was the last one to see the victim alive and
that his prints were on the murder weapon. That being said, I don’t know if his
prints were on the weapon or not.
Both seem defective, but it is hard to see why these would be defective unless evidence ascriptions
are factive in the way knowledge ascriptions are and beliefs ascriptions aren’t.1
Second, think about evidence and explanation. If you know p is part of your evidence and know
that p is not a brute fact, you know that there’s some q such that ’p because q’ is true. But,
you can’t know that unless p is true. If you know that p is part of your evidence and don’t know
whether p is a brute fact or not, you know that either p is a brute fact or there’s some q such that
’p because q’ is true. Either way, p is true.
1 Seems to work with reason ascriptions, too. As Unger noted, I can’t say “His reason for going to the store/believing
that it is a good idea to go to the store is that he is out of milk but he doesn’t know that he is out of milk”. Why
not? Obvious explanation–if p is S’s reason for V-ing, S knows p. So, p isn’t anyone’s reason for anything if ∼p.
1
Evidence and Justification
Objection: external evidence is idle at best. In the good case, the subject knows non-inferentially
that p is the case because it looks as if p is the case. What’s the subject’s evidence for believing
p? I would say that it is p itself. What about the bad case? The subject’s evidence for believing p
cannot be p because in the bad case, p is false. Is there something available to the subject in the
bad case that justifies believing p? Sure—that is seems/appears that p is the case. The problem
is that it seems that this will be the subject’s basis for believing p iff it is the subject’s basis for
believing p in the good case. But, the subject’s basis for believing p in the good case is not limited
to p-neutral propositions. So, it seems that we should say that the subject in the bad case forms a
belief that isn’t based on evidence. But, then how can we say that this subject is as justified in his
belief as the subject in the good case is justified?
Objection assumes:
S’s belief that p is justified only if it is based on (appropriate) evidence (Basing).
The contentful states or contents that provide the basis for the subject’s belief in the
good case are the same in good case and bad (Same Basis).
2 Whether an e-proposition is true depends (in part) upon external facts. Not so with i-propositions.