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 I have a couple of contributions to this, an unpublished paper arguing that “inductive knowledge isn’t evidence”:http://brian.weatherson.org/EK.pdf, and a small aside in “Deontology and Descartes’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?

I’ve been rereading John Bigelow and Robert Pargetter’s “Science and Necessity”, which is full of good stuff. (Sadly, it isn’t in the Rutgers library, so it was a bit harder to read than it should have been.) They open with a defence of the correspondence theory of truth against various rivals. Much like I think the JTB theory of knowledge, and the “UnGettierized” JTB theory (as discussed “here”:http://twitter.com/AidanMcGlynn/status/5994795696) fail because of the paradoxes, I think the correspondence theory of truth fails for the same reason. I assume this isn’t a new point. (It is at least implicit in several arguments Roy Sorensen has made, for instance.) The problem is that (Co) is obviously true.

(Co) (Co) does not correspond to reality.

Assume (Co) corresponds to reality. Then it is true, assuming at least the correspondence theory. So it does not correspond to reality, assuming only the weaker version of the T-schema (that if p is true, then p). That contradicts our original assumption. So (Co) does not correspond to reality. And that’s what it says, so presumably it is true. (Though this step does require a p, therefore p is true inference, which some might find problematic.) So something that does not correspond to reality is true, contradicting the correspondence theory.

Bigelow and Pargetter, like many defenders of correspondence, focus primarily on various kinds of ‘anti-realist’ alternatives to the correspondence theory, such as coherentist and pragmatist theories. But I don’t think those are the major problems for the correspondence theory, or truthmaker like alternatives to correspondence. Rather, the paradoxes are the real problem.