Evidentialism, Vice, and Virtue

According to evidentialism, epistemic justification is a function of the evidence one has in support of one’s beliefs. More precisely, evidentialists subscribe to the following general principle: (E) A person S is justified in believing a proposition p at time t if and only if S’s evidence at t supports p. “Evidence” should be construed broadly here such that it includes (or might include) supporting beliefs, experiential and introspective states, and rational insights. It is less clear how exactly to understand the relevant support relation. But according to one intuitive and fairly standard account, one’s evidence supports a proposition just in case it makes this proposition more probable than not. As this suggests, the kind of support in question – as well as epistemic justification itself – is a matter of degree. Evidentialism has been subjected to a barrage of criticisms in recent years, many of which have been aimed at showing that the satisfaction of (E) is not necessary for justification. My concern here is with the sufficiency of (E). I begin by discussing several cases in which a belief apparently satisfies (E) but fails to instantiate one or more varieties of epistemic justification that presumably are of interest to evidentialists. I go on to argue, however, that this problem does not warrant abandoning the thrust of evidentialism. Instead it calls for supplementing (E) with a constraint according to which (under certain conditions) justification requires intellectually virtuous agency. The discussion thus reveals an important link between the recent enterprise of virtue epistemology and a more traditional, evidentialist account of knowledge. Before getting started, a methodological point is in order. There are at least two notably different ways of understanding what might be involved with showing that the satisfaction of (E) is not sufficient for epistemic justification. The first is predicated on the idea that there exists a single determinate and univocal concept of epistemic justification and that disputes about the nature of justification are disputes about this concept. Here, arguing against the sufficiency of (E) involves arguing that a belief can satisfy (E) but fail to instantiate the concept in question. There are, however, serious problems with the idea that there exists a single determinate and univocal concept of justification. Indeed, as William Alston has argued, much of the debate in epistemology in recent years suggests that there are several such concepts or several “epistemic desiderata.” But if there are a variety of different concepts of epistemic justification, what would it mean to argue that the satisfaction of (E) is not sufficient for justification? We can see an answer to this question by noting that while there may be a rather wide and diverse variety of epistemic desiderata, it is plausible to think that evidentialists are interested in a certain limited subset of them, and indeed, perhaps just in a single desideratum. This is, at any rate, what I shall be assuming here. Thus my concern shall be limited to what might be called “evidentialist-relevant” or “e-relevant” varieties of justification, which again are varieties the nature of which at least some evidentialist accounts of justification presumably are aimed at capturing. My immediate aim, then, is to show that a belief can satisfy (E) while failing to instantiate one or more e-relevant varieties of justification.