What is Evidence in Natural Language?

Abstract

This chapter tries to understand the proper notion of evidence to use in the semantic analysis of natural language evidentials. I review various notions of justification from the epistemological literature, and consider how they relate to the use of evidentials and related constructions. I then consider how (some) evidentials behave under Gettier scenarios. The conclusion is that the required notion of evidence is one which is weaker than (many accounts of) knowledge, involves increase of speaker credence, but which is necessarily first-person. I thus settle on a view based on a self-ascription of probability increase due to knowledge of propositions that increase credence after conditionalization.