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The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 2008 59(1):89-119; doi:10.1093/bjps/axn003
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© The Author (2008). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of British Society for the Philosophy of Science. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

What Evidence Do You Have?

Ram Neta

Department of Philosophy, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3125, USA

ramneta{at}yahoo.com


  Abstract

Your evidence constrains your rational degrees of confidence both locally and globally. On the one hand, particular bits of evidence can boost or diminish your rational degree of confidence in various hypotheses, relative to your background information. On the other hand, epistemic rationality requires that, for any hypothesis h, your confidence in h is proportional to the support that h receives from your total evidence. Why is it that your evidence has these two epistemic powers? I argue that various proposed accounts of what it is for something to be an element of your evidence set cannot answer this question. I then propose an alternative account of what it is for something to be an element of your evidence set.

1 Introduction
2 The elements of one's evidence set are propositions
3 Which kinds of propositions are in one's evidence set?
3.1 Doxastic accounts of evidence
3.2 Non-doxastic accounts of evidence

4 Elaborating and defending the LIE


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