Even if it might not be true, evidence cannot be false

Philos Stud https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-021-01695-0 Even if it might not be true, evidence cannot be false Clayton Littlejohn1 • Julien Dutant2 Accepted: 29 June 2021  The Author(s) 2021 Abstract Wordly internalists claim that while internal duplicates always share the same evidence, our evidence includes non-trivial propositions about our environment. It follows that some evidence is false. Worldly internalism is thought to provide a more satisfying answer to scepticism than classical internalist views that deny that these propositions about our environment might belong to our evidence and to provide a generally more attractive account of rationality and reasons for belief. We argue that worldly internalism faces serious difficulties and that its apparent advantages are illusory. First, it cannot adequately handle some not terribly strange cases of perceptual error. Second, it cannot explain why one should plan to use their evidence to update their beliefs. The second issue allows us to explain why cases of misplaced certainty do not require us to introduce false evidence into our views and that why the alleged advantage of worldly internalism in resisting sceptical pressures is illusory. Keywords Evidence  Epistemic rationality  Epistemic internalism 1 Even if it might not be true, evidence cannot be false Internalists about evidence (‘internalists’ hereafter) believe that internal duplicates necessarily have the same evidence. While many internalists have held that our evidence is constituted by the states of mind we share in common with our internal & Clayton Littlejohn Julien Dutant 1 Dianoia Insitute of Philosophy, Australian Catholic University, Melbourne, Australia 2 King’s College London, London, England 123 C. Littlejohn, J. Dutant duplicates (e.g., our experiences, apparent memories, intuitions, etc.), worldly internalists claim that our evidence includes (non-trivial) propositions about our environment. They think that when we have the experience as of, say, a red, bulgy tomato, our evidence might include propositions that will be true iff there is something before us that is red, that it is bulgy, or (perhaps) is a tomato. To reconcile the idea that our evidence might entail that there is something ‘outside’ the mind that is red, that is bulgy, or that is a tomato with internalism, worldly internalists embrace the idea that a worldly proposition might be evidence even if it is false. Traditional internalists, by contrast, don’t have to recognise the possibility of false evidence because they can either characterise our evidence as consisting of (true) propositions about our own mental lives or propose that our evidence is constitutes by mental states or events rather than the propositions that capture their contents. We shall argue that worldly internalism faces some serious difficulties because of its reliance on false evidence (i.e., false propositions about the properties of mind-independent objects that constitute part of a thinker’s evidence). First, the view cannot adequately handle some not terribly strange cases of perceptual error. Second, it cannot explain why one should plan to use their evidence to update their beliefs. The second issue allows us to explain why cases of misplaced certainty do not require us to introduce false evidence into our views and that why the alleged advantage of worldly internalism in resisting sceptical pressures is illusory. As we see it, it might be wise for internalists to embrace a view of evidence on which evidence is something that is (strictly speaking) neither capable of being true or being false (e.g., a view on which it is constituted by states of mind or mental events instead of propositions). 2 Introduction According to Williamson (2000), all evidence is knowledge, and all knowledge is evidence. If we can agree that the scope of our knowledge extends beyond the things that we might know if, say, we were brains in vats, his identification of evidence and knowledge (‘E = K’ hereafter) would commit us to the view that our evidence likewise goes beyond the evidence we could have if we were brains in vats (assuming, of course, that we are not). This idea that our evidence might go beyond theirs troubles quite a few epistemologists. If nothing else, it might seem that our beliefs are just as justified as theirs are and that the attitudes that it would be rational for us to have are the attitudes that it would be rational for them to have. It’s not hard to see why this would be if we shared the same evidence. It’s harder to see why this would be if our evidence differs significantly from theirs.1 1 See Cohen (1984) for an initial presentation of this idea where the target is reliabilism but the sameness of evidence assumption is operative. See Silins (2005) and Wedgwood (2002) for more recent discussion that engages with E = K. For attempts to reconcile the intuition that the same attitudes are rational for us with a view on which our evidence differs, see Fratantonio and McGlynn (2018), Ichikawa (2014), Kiesewetter (2017), and Lord (2018). 123 Even if it might not be true, evidence cannot be false Internalists about evidence (‘internalists’ hereafter) believe that if two thinkers are in the same non-factive mental states, they’ll have the same evidence and that this is so even if they happen to be embedded in different environments (e.g., that we are in a normal situation and some of our counterparts are embedded in environments in which malign forces conspire against them). Upon pain of scepticism, internalists have to reject E = K, but their rejection of E = K only tells us what they think evidence isn’t. It’s good to know what evidence isn’t, but it would be better to know what it is. In some initial responses to Williamson, some internalists defended the view that a thinker’s evidence is constituted by some of the thinker’s non-factive mental states and events. McCain, for example, proposed this: Your experience of being in pain is evidence for you that you are in pain. Your experience of being hungry is evidence for you that you are hungry. Your experience of a book looking blue is evidence for you that the book is blue (2014: 19). We find similar proposals about experience and evidence in Brueckner (2009) and Conee and Feldman (2004). Notice that this view differs from Williamson’s on two key points. On Williamson’s view, a thinker’s evidence must be veridical and it might be world-implicating. A thinker’s evidence is world-implicating if it includes some propositions that entail that certain propositions about the existence of and properties of mind-independent objects are true. It is veridical if propositionally specified evidence is limited to truths (i.e., facts or true propositions). On this classical internalist view, the thinker’s evidence is not world-implicating because it consists of the thinker’s experiences (e.g., feelings of hunger, the experience of a book looking a (...truncated)