I plan to think more about the nature of evidence and its role in epistemology. But I don’t know enough about where to start looking in the literature. Really, I only know three kinds of things.

First, there is formal work from Bayesian epistemology, and especially confirmation theory. But I’ve always found that work quite disappointing in terms of its foundations. The issue of just what the E is that goes into Pr(H | E) is never satisfactorily addressed. When you press people informally on it, they seem to fall back on an unexamined version of the phenomenological theory of evidence. This obviously isn’t part of the theory – Williamson has shown how to do Bayesian epistemology with an externalist conception of evidence – but it is what most practitioners seem to assume.

Second, there is work around the debates about evidentialism as promoted by Conee and Feldman. This is all very interesting, though the focus there was more on what evidence does than what evidence is.

Third, there are the debates started by Williamson’s defence of E=K, including in the recent volume of papers on Williamson. This has led to lots of interesting discussions, such as Clayton Littlejohn’s idea that evidence is “non-inferential knowledge”:http://claytonlittlejohn.blogspot.com/2009/11/scattered-thoughts-fantl-and-mcgrath-on.html. I have a couple of contributions to this, an unpublished paper arguing that “inductive knowledge isn’t evidence”:http://brian.weatherson.org/EK.pdf, and a small aside in “Deontology and Descartes’ Demon”:http://brian.weatherson.org/DDD.pdf suggesting that, for creatures like us, evidence is knowledge gained directly from a perceptual module. This seems to be an interesting, if young, field.

But there must be other stuff out there. What should I be reading?