Evidentialism - Essays in Epistemology

Evidentialism is a view about the conditions under which a person is epistemically justified in having a particular doxastic attitude toward a proposition. Evidentialism holds that the justified attitudes are determined entirely by the person's evidence. This is the traditional view of justification.

It is now widely opposed. The essays included in this volume develop and defend the tradition. Evidentialism has many assets.

In addition to providing an intuitively plausible account of epistemic justification, it helps to resolve the problem of the criterion, helps to disentangle epistemic and ethical evaluations, and illuminates the relationship between epistemic evaluations of beliefs and the evaluation of the methods used to form beliefs. These issues are all addressed in the essays presented here. External world skepticism poses the classic problem for an epistemological theory.