Online Papers - Brian Weatherson

Do Judgments Screen Evidence? 233
our basis for p, and yet we have good (if misleading) grounds for believing E does not
support p. Here’s his setup of the debate.
Consider a person who has some evidence, E, concerning a proposition,
p, and also has some evidence about whether E is good evidence for p.
I will say that the person is respecting the evidence about E and p when
the person’s belief concerning p corresponds to what is indicated by the
person’s evidence about E’s support for p. That is, a person respects the
evidence about E and p by believing p when his or her evidence indicates
that this evidence supports p or by not believing p when the evidence
indicates that this evidence does not support p. (Feldman 2005: 95-6)
Feldman goes on to argue that we should respect the evidence. Obviously I disagree.
If E is all the agent’s evidence, then the agent’s attitude towards p should be determined
by how strongly E supports p. One case that strongly suggests this is when
the agent has no evidence whatsoever about how E supports p, so the agent’s evidence
indicates nothing about E’s support for p. If that implies that the agent can’t
have any attitudes about p, then we are led quickly into an unpleasant regress.
But the main point I want to make here concerns the arguments that Feldman
makes for respecting the evidence. It is true that sometimes disrespecting the evidence
has counterintuitive consequences. See, for example, Feldman’s example of the
baseball website (Feldman 2005: 112) or, for that matter, the discussion of kitchen
scales in the previous subsection. But other cases might point the other way. Is it
really intuitive that the student can’t soundly infer p from ¬¬ p after hearing some
lectures from a talented but mistaken intuitionistic logician? I think intuition is sufficiently
confused here that we should rely on other evidence. Feldman’s primary
argument concerns the oddity of the position I’m defending. In his taxonomy of
views, ‘View 1’ is the view that when an agent has evidence E, which is in fact good
evidence for p, and gets misleading evidence that E does not in fact support p, then
she can know p, but not know that she knows p. That’s what I think happens at
least some of the time, at least when the connection between E and p is basic, so his
arguments are meant to tell against my position.
View 1... has the implication that a person could be in a situation in
which she justifiably denies or suspends judgment about whether her
basis for believing a proposition is a good one, but nevertheless justifiably
believes the proposition. Imagine such a person reporting her situation:
“ p, but of course I have no idea whether my evidence for p is any good.”
At the very least, this sounds odd. (Feldman 2005: 105)
He later goes into more detail on this point.
View 1 leads to the conclusion that our student can correctly believe
things such as
6. T , but my overall evidence does not support T .