The Space of Reasons 2007-06-26

Lottery Argument Against Defeasible Evidence

This post is an updated version of one I published over at the Web of Belief.I wish to argue that it is a conceptual requirement of justification that it be factive. On this view, it is a conceptual requirement vis-à-vis some type or token reason {R}, that {R} may only justify a subject’s belief that p if {R} guarantees the truth of p. When {R} meets this stipulation, I will describe {R} as a factive reason for believing that p. I contrast having a factive reason for p with having evidence for p, in which evidence is essentially defeasible. Typically, when we describe some evidence {E} as defeasible, we mean that {E} may be evidence for p despite the fact that {E} ∪ {E*} is not evidence for p. In such a case, we would say that {E*} defeats {E}, ...

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