Varieties of Evidentialism

Abstract

In contemporary epistemology, a number of different ideas travel under the banner of “evidentialism.” In this paper, I distinguish and offer some critical reflections on three of these ideas: (1) evidentialism as an account of epistemic justification; (2) evidentialism as anti-pragmatism; and (3) evidentialism as ‘evidence-first’ epistemology. I argue that, when evidentialism is offered as an account of epistemic justification, it is best understood as a grounding thesis, as opposed to a thesis about supervenience or as a biconditional, as proposed by Conee and Feldman in their work on the topic