Abstract

Wordly internalists claim that while internal duplicates always share the same evidence, our evidence includes non-trivial propositions about our environment. It follows that some evidence is false. Worldly internalism is thought to provide a more satisfying answer to scepticism than classical internalist views that deny that these propositions about our environment might belong to our evidence and to provide a generally more attractive account of rationality and reasons for belief. We argue that worldly internalism faces serious difficulties and that its apparent advantages are illusory. First, it cannot adequately handle some not terribly strange cases of perceptual error. Second, it cannot explain why one should plan to use their evidence to update their beliefs. The second issue allows us to explain why cases of misplaced certainty do not require us to introduce false evidence into our views and that why the alleged advantage of worldly internalism in resisting sceptical pressures is illusory.

Highlights

  • According to Williamson (2000), all evidence is knowledge, and all knowledge is evidence

  • We argue that worldly internalism faces serious difficulties and that its apparent advantages are illusory

  • If we can agree that the scope of our knowledge extends beyond the things that we might know if, say, we were brains in vats, his identification of evidence and knowledge (‘E = K’ hereafter) would commit us to the view that our evidence likewise goes beyond the evidence we could have if we were brains in vats

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Summary

Introduction

According to Williamson (2000), all evidence is knowledge, and all knowledge is evidence. A thinker’s evidence is world-implicating if it includes some propositions that entail that certain propositions about the existence of and properties of mind-independent objects are true. It is veridical if propositionally specified evidence is limited to truths (i.e., facts or true propositions) On this classical internalist view, the thinker’s evidence is not world-implicating because it consists of the thinker’s experiences (e.g., feelings of hunger, the experience of a book looking a certain way, etc.) or facts about the thinker’s non-factive mental states and events, not propositions about the things that we encounter in experience (e.g., tomatoes, tables, books, shadows, etc.). Experiences might be about mind-independent objects and their properties, but so long as they do not constitutively involve them, the classical internalist maintains that neither the evidence nor a complete description of it would entail that, say, a tomato is present, that it is red and bulgy, etc. There are interesting and prima facie plausible arguments for thinking that a thinker’s evidence might be world-implicating, but we think that worldly internalism faces significant difficulties that do not seem to arise for classical internalism

Worldly internalism
Rationality and evidential consistency
If Inconsistent evidence is possible
If Inconsistent evidence is impossible
Evidence and updating
Worldly internalism and sceptical pressure
First response
Second response
Third response
Conclusion: evidence and reasons
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