| In a message dated 3/20/2001 8:09:36 PM Central Standard Time,
xod@sixgirls.org writes: , I return to my originalchallenge: Show American Heritage: ev·i·dence n. 1. A thing or things helpful in forming a conclusion or judgment: I take it that the things must be propositional since only propositionscan enter into forming a conclusion; ordinary things enter only as they become the subjects of claims (not necessarily uttered or even consciously formulated). Alternatively, this could be about the causes of judgements (not conclusions, of course), though I doubt that most people would agree with this (the claim that Berkeley's immaterialsm was caused by his bad toilet training is usually called ridiculous, for example). As written, it would include the abacus used to calculate the area of a room from the floor measurements. Pretty useless, then. Webster Collegiate: 1.a. an outward sign b. something that furnishes proof. a. doesn't seem too relevant, but b. seems spang on, aside from "proof"being somewhat more than we can usually hope for, so taking that as "gives support for claims." It does not seem that causes enter into this at all and that seems quite right, contrary to xod's opinion that they are evidence in some cases. So, if we ignore causes, then sense-data claims, e.g., "I have a yellowpatch in my visual field," are beliefs that do not have evidence. If asked to justify/give evidence for that belief, the experience can answer at best "I have this experience" (even "am having") and when asked evidence for this second claim, surely can't do anyhting more than say, "I just am." Admittedly, we would ordinarily not ask for evidence in these cases, taking the experiencer's word for it -- and that, in itself, suggests that we recognize that evicence is not to be called for in these cases. And the same pretty much applies even for more complex cases: "I see a robin on the lawn" and the like (though, for many of us, "I see a UFO" will probably require evidence and most of the complex cases could be called into question in certain situations). If we let causes in as evidence, then presumably sense-data claims have evidence in this sense. But then the claim that every belief has evidence becomes trivial, since like every other event, beliefs have causes, hence, on this view, evidence. And, on the other hand, we find among the evidence for the structure of the benzene molecule Kekule's dream of Ouroboros, which would normally be thought irrelevant. If we restrict the cases where causes are evidence to those cases which lack any other kind of evidence, thenthis appears to be an ad hoc definition, designed simply to make the generalclaim true, despite flying in the face of ordinary usage. so, let's drop causes once and for all. Then I say that no belief as such has evidence. That is, the status of being a belief does not in any way depend upon evidence. This is clearer in the case of {krici} than of "belief," because {krici} overtly has no place for evidence (or even epistmology) and, in fact, has "not based on evidence" written into the definition (indeed, that is where this all began). The matter of evidence comes up only when the issue is whether the belief is justified, and that presupposes that it is already a belief. People do not usually (indeed, it is hard to come up with a contrary case) come to their beliefs on the basis of evidence -- back to the old issue that belief is not volitional, if nothing else. They ahve the beliefs from whatever cause and then try to justify them as best they can when they are challenged. Even the cases of "believing because of the evidence" in fact involves a number of other factors than the evidence itself (believing the evidence being a major one). Now, xod's point may be simply what it says on the outside, that there is no belief for which there is not evidence, not anything about how one comes to believe or what constitutes a belief, but an empirical claim about beliefs in general. I don't know how one would go about proving such a claim. As I have said, there is probably no belief so bizarre but that something could be taken as evidence for it, maybe even something we accept as true (look at all the things that have been taken as evidence for the existence of God --or for God's non-existence, for that matter). I'm not sure that I would want to buy into this, especially if what one came up with -- for "There is a unicorn in the garden," say -- is not something that the claimant did not propose. Nor would I want to accept something whose connection to the claim was also not something the claimant could explain. I think that the resulting claim, for everything thing that x believes there a true claim that x would make and which is plausibly connected to the belief as support, would be hard toprove and might, in fact, be easy to disprove. I believe (let us imagine) that I have squared the circle. The evidence is a number of scribbled pages which I claim constitute a proof of the construction I offer. The claim is plausibly connected to the belief, but it is false. Does it constitute evidence? If yes, then we have to drop the "true" part above. And then again, the whole become trivial: the hoof prints that no one else can find, the gouges that no one else can see, the white hairs in the bushes, etc. are all evidence for the unicorn in the garden, even though the claims about them are all false. So, of course, I can fadge up some evidence, as long as it does not have to be true. Maybe, what we have in a psychological principle: no one believes anything unless he believes he has evidence for it. This is more plausible, though the beliefs of small children might constitute difficult cases (but that just may be the difficulty in formulating those beliefs to begin with) -- orthey may all come down to "So-and-so told me so." The sense-datacases would also be a difficulty, but, happily, they almost never occur, and, when they do, there are usually factors about the environment that allow for reasonable evidence to be formulated. The obvious possibility for infinite regress can be handled in the deep-sea ship-repair sort of way, taking care of one step at a time and, provided no circle turns up before, stopping at a point of agreement between challenger and challenged (or, for radical disagreements, when they get tired). |