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evidentialism

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Evidentialism is a thesis in epistemology which states that one is justified to believe something if and only if that person has evidence which supports said belief. Evidentialism is, therefore, a thesis about which beliefs are justified and which are not.

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Encyclopedic overview

6 sections
Contents
  • Criticism
  • Infinite regress argument
  • Non-evidentialist theories of knowledge and justification
  • Notes
  • References
  • External links

Evidentialism is a thesis in epistemology which states that one is justified to believe something if and only if that person has evidence which supports said belief. Evidentialism is, therefore, a thesis about which beliefs are justified and which are not.

For philosophers Richard Feldman and Earl Conee, evidentialism is the strongest argument for justification because it identifies the primary notion of epistemic justification. They argue that if a person's attitude towards a proposition fits their evidence, then their doxastic attitude for that proposition is epistemically justified. Feldman and Conee offer the following argument for evidentialism as an epistemic justification:

Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “evidentialism” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.

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