Evidentialism

[Tea Earl Grey Hot]

I've been reading up on evidentialist epistemology, mostly from Richard Carrier in "Sense and Goodness without God" and Jonathan E Adler's "Beliefs Own Ethics". Along the way I've been creating my own understanding of evidentialist epistemology loosely inspired by these materials which I'm going to share here. This is all tentative and I'm just an amateur philosopher so this all might be a load of crap that I'm about to state.

Experiences are undeniable. You cannot coherently deny that you are experiencing something right now. Experiences come from several sources. Sight, sound, taste, smell, and touch -- aka the senses -- are the most obvious. Imagination is also a sort of experience and it is the most important for my case. Imagination is our capacity to invoke sensations in our mind. We know this for instance as our "mind's eye" but properly speaking we also have a "mind's ear", a "mind's nose" etc. Each instance of imagination allows us to experience a simulation of a sensation.

A proposition can believed to be true only if the experiences entailed by the proposition if true are experienced. This last sentence is not self defeating either. The experience I'd expect if that sentence is true is experiencing being completely unable to find a proposition that can be known to be true apart from experience. This is what I experience. Also, the sentence "I believe x is true but I have no reason or evidence (i.e. anything that can be experienced in someway) to demonstrate x is true" is incoherent. Does it make any sense to say "I know the number of stars is even but I have not counted them"? So these two things makes me confident in the truth of the claim.

I can believe "I own a car" to be true if I experience: (1) being in possession of car keys (2) having a car in my driveway (3) being able to unlock the car with the keys (4) having registration for the car. These are experiences I predict from "I own a car" being true and if I experience them I know "I own a car" is true.

In essence what we are doing is comparing the experiences created by our imagination to experiences from our senses. A proposition is true if its imagined experiences matches the sensory experiences we predict, false if predictions fail, and meaningless if we can't conceive of any predictions in the first place.

Since imagination is also an experience, propositions that do not entail predictions that can only be experienced directly from the five senses are still knowable. I can know "1+1=2" is true by picturing one thing and then picturing another thing next to it and realizing that I am now picturing two things. Those are experiences I'd predict to experience in the world of imagination. It is crucial to understand this point because many theists scoff at the notion that everything can be known only through experience because they take "experience" to mean "known via the five senses" which would rule out abstract thinking. But to me at least imagination is just another source of experience and abstract thinking is the imagination making predictions about itself.

I hope this makes sense.

[Minimalist]

There are xtians who believe they own a car and do a lot of walking as a result.

[Tea Earl Grey Hot]

I wrote this really to counter the common notion that evidentialism is "self defeating" as in "what's the evidence for evidentialism?". Supposedly there is no evidence for evidentialism but I think I've shown this not to be the case.

I think most of the misunderstanding about an evidentialist thesis is thinking that "evidence" is only empirical evidence. Supposedly I must be able to point to physical proof of evidentialism but this is obviously impossible. Understanding however evidence as really being experiences then I can support evidentialism without contradiction.

No?

[bennyboy]

I wrote this really to counter the common notion that evidentialism is "self defeating" as in "what's the evidence for evidentialism?". Supposedly there is no evidence for evidentialism but I think I've shown this not to be the case.

I think most of the misunderstanding about an evidentialist thesis is thinking that "evidence" is only empirical evidence. Supposedly I must be able to point to physical proof of evidentialism but this is obviously impossible. Understanding however evidence as really being experiences then I can support evidentialism without contradiction.

No?

No. Your experiences don't serve as evidence unless you can share them with others.

[Tea Earl Grey Hot]

I wrote this really to counter the common notion that evidentialism is "self defeating" as in "what's the evidence for evidentialism?". Supposedly there is no evidence for evidentialism but I think I've shown this not to be the case.

I think most of the misunderstanding about an evidentialist thesis is thinking that "evidence" is only empirical evidence. Supposedly I must be able to point to physical proof of evidentialism but this is obviously impossible. Understanding however evidence as really being experiences then I can support evidentialism without contradiction.

No?

No. Your experiences don't serve as evidence unless you can share them with others.

They serve as evidence to myself which is all that matters in a discussion of "how does one know things" (versus "how does one convince others of things.")

[bennyboy]

They serve as evidence to myself which is all that matters in a discussion of "how does one know things" (versus "how does one convince others of things.")

Experiences in and of themselves only serve as evidence of those experiences. They are not a good source of evidence for underlying truth. For example, you can know exactly what it's like to have a certain kind of religious experience-- but that does not serve as evidence that God exists.

[Tea Earl Grey Hot]

They serve as evidence to myself which is all that matters in a discussion of "how does one know things" (versus "how does one convince others of things.")

Experiences in and of themselves only serve as evidence of those experiences. They are not a good source of evidence for underlying truth. For example, you can know exactly what it's like to have a certain kind of religious experience-- but that does not serve as evidence that God exists.

Well, what I'm saying is that there is no other way to coherently believe something to be true except by experience(s). Whether if what I believe is actually true or whether I used good methods of evaluating the evidence is another matter. What's being addressed here is whether experience (or "reason and evidence" as it's more commonly called) is required at all to coherently believe something is true. I'm saying for a person to hold a belief requires experiences that support the truth of that belief or at least seem to to themselves. There's no such thing as a belief without support anymore than there's a square circle. When certain people say for instance that they don't need any support at all to believe in God, they're just spouting gibberish.

[Jackalope]

They serve as evidence to myself which is all that matters in a discussion of "how does one know things" (versus "how does one convince others of things.")

Experiences in and of themselves only serve as evidence of those experiences. They are not a good source of evidence for underlying truth. For example, you can know exactly what it's like to have a certain kind of religious experience-- but that does not serve as evidence that God exists.

Evidentialism is a theory of justification, not knowledge. It seeks only to provide one framework for the question "is my belief justified". Whether that belief corresponds to underlying truth is a different kettle of fish.