Kevin's Watch

Some dude Clifford (I forget his first name, or his last name if "Clifford" is first) once said something like, "It is wrong always, everywhere, for any reason, to believe not on the evidence." Less fanatically stated if, though, to the same effect, the principle of evidentialism is like, "One ought to proportion one's beliefs to the evidence."

Now, this principle, if believed in: is it believed in "on the evidence"? For some, it might seem self-evident, and indeed we might say that there are some people who really ought to proportion all their beliefs exactly to their evidence. However, no major ethical theory or religion of which I am aware would support such a principle without qualification/exception (certainly some strains of some religions would tend to support opposite principles, even!).

Also, what counts as evidence? Deductive logic seems to be just a shuffling about of already given information: if A then B; A; therefore B--but knowing the if-clause and A, when I conclude with B, I am, to be sure, concluding in a belief for which I have evidence, but it's not like I wasn't implicitly already aware of the fact of B if I was aware of the other facts too, now was I? Perhaps in higher mathematics this matter is obscured, except of course there are mathematical beliefs that one might have about some infinite set, without knowing some proof-by-transfinite-induction, and in those cases, since the brute-force examination of all involved samples would require processing an infinite amount of evidence, proportioning one's belief to the evidence would preclude making a transfinite hypothesis (so to say).

Also, for a person who draws upon, or cites, a religious text, on its own merits more than less: are they contradicting a principle of actual evidence, or do they hold that their citations are their evidence? I bring this up in light of this incredibly fascinating atmosphere of argument in these books (A Christian Theory of Knowledge and The Defense of the Faith by Cornelius Van Til; for a semi-recap of the ideas, see Alvin Plantinga's "Warranted Christian Belief" at ccel.org) another member of this site has provided me with (I will allow said member to announce themselves on this count if they wish). My general reply would tend to be that no book or similar physical object could ever outrank sense perception and linguistic reasoning as a basic source of evidence, on the ground that unless I trust my eyes and hearing, and my knowledge of my own language, first, I will not have any reason to believe that I know what a scriptural document claims to say; but I don't need to accept such claims, to turn around and corroborate my visual-semantic capacities; ergo, no book/w/e could ever count as basic evidence. OTOH the analysis of history comes down to an analysis, to a great degree, of books written about history, in historical times, etc. and historical beliefs are not necessarily inferred all the way, I suspect.

EDIT: Complicating the religious case is the theory that God directly authenticates a certain book for some people. Now we might wonder in what this authentication consists. For example, while reading a creation account, does God teleport my mind into some frame of temporal reference in which I can actually see the event of creation itself? But this is not what is asserted.* Instead, the corroboration is testimonial, i.e. a witness that appears perfectly reliable, proclaims a certain account of something. But whence the appearance of perfect reliability? Is not a claim to illumination by such a witness, ultimately a claim that said witness has caused, honestly or not, an incorrigible belief in me? I would be, to be sure, unable to disbelieve the witness in such a case, and allowing that God really is this witness, then assuming that God does not lie (not completely clear to me, this is, I will note!), I would have a sort of evidence for the book in question, a complete article of evidence even then.

*Now, unfortunately, there are a lot (and I mean a LOT) of people who have done extreme psychedelic drugs, who throw a conniption fit if you express doubts about their claimed visions of the creation of reality as a whole. And by "doubts" I mean not even that you question the content of their visions, but the form: if you think you can show by reason that something like their mystical crystal-light world at least metaphorically exists for us, many of them will accuse you of being insufficiently in awe of the power of the drugs they've taken. I was a member of the DMT Nexus website, and tried to explain to the people there that sequences of concepts and states of consciousness like the ones described there, had been written of by others throughout history who had never done DMT, and I was not only told, "You just think that because you haven't done DMT," but I had an entire post of mine moved to the "jokes and humor" section of the website, in mockery of my lack of faith in the necessity of the drug. (And sadly later, I went ahead and humbled myself enough to "do the experiment," which triggered the most terrifying instant in my entire life it seemed, the moment I was most certain ever that I was about to die and be blanked into oblivion--and in any event my heartrate was seriously destabilized on that night, by the event.)

Evidence is used only to check one's theory. Real knowledge extends well beyond appearance, and hence, evidence. One should base one's beliefs upon good explanations, not evidence. Appearance can be deceiving.

Well, some concepts of evidence might include, "Proposition X, if true, would explain the truth/fact of Y," as implying, "Therefore, I have evidence for X" (and even Y in some ways and instances). So this is another problem with raw evidentialism: an unclear presentation of its naming notion.