Evidentialism as an epistemic tool for philosophical justifications

Abstract

In the 20th century, Richard Feldman’s and Earl Conee’s evidentialism attracted many interests as it is seen as an interesting theory of epistemic justification. Feldman and Conee explains evidentialism as a theory of justification which posits that every knowledge claim must be justified only by evidence. That is, for a proposition to be epistemically justified, there must be a fitting evidence that qualifies it to be justified. It is the quality of the believer’s evidence that is prerequisite for any epistemic justification, and this evidence must internal to the person. Put differently, one’s evidence for a belief must be available to the person and not just a hearsay or an unverified testimony. Over the years, many critiques have been developed by different philosophers against this view of justification. In the same manner, Feldman and Conee, together with some evidentialists have rebutted to these critiques with counter-argument, in order to prove that evidentialism is the most plausible theory of justification. Against this background, this work adopts a hermeneutic methodological approach to examine Feldman’s and Conee’s evidentialism as a theory of justification. By exposing, discussing, and examining their thoughts, it argues that evidentialism although being a plausible theory of justification, lays much emphasis on evidences available to the believers, leading them to a quagmire of skepticism. It therefore recommends that evidentialism could be modified to address its limitation if it adopts critical methods to examine individual evidences irrespective of the degree of evidences, in order to establish a more fitting evidence that would be unquestionable for epistemic justification