Nikolaj Jang Lee Linding Pedersen

Crispin Wright has recently introduced a non-evidential notion of warrant, entitlement of cognitive project, as a promising response to certain sceptical arguments that purport to show that we cannot claim any warrant for a wide range of beliefs that we ordinarily take ourselves to possess a warrant for. The basic idea is that, for a given class of cognitive projects, there are certain basic propositions – entitlements – which one is warranted in trusting provided there is no sufficient reason to think them false. Having presented Wright's notion of entitlement and rehearsed the sceptical arguments he invokes the notion to respond to, we proceed to raise what will be referred to as “the generality problem”. The problem raises the question whether entitlements come on the cheap. The good news delivered by entitlement is that it seems to deliver a way of resisting the sceptical conclusion. The bad news, however, is that it also appears to do much more than that by supporting, or providing a foundation for, what we would consider crazy and bizarre cognitive projects.

Our main aim in this paper is to contribute towards a better understanding of the epistemology of absence-based inferences. Many absence-based inferences are classified as fallacies. There are exceptions, however. We investigate what features make absence-based inferences epistemically good or reliable. In Section 2 we present Sanford Goldberg’s account of the reliability of absence-based inference, introducing the central notion of epistemic coverage. In Section 3 we approach the idea of epistemic coverage through a comparison of alethic and evidential principles. The Equivalence Schema–a well-known alethic principle–says that it is true that $p$ if and only if $p$ . We take epistemic coverage to underwrite a suitably qualified evidential analogue of the Equivalence Schema: for a high proportion of values of $p$ , subject $S$ has evidence that $p$ due to her reliance on source $S^{*}$ if and only if $p$ . We show how this evidential version of the Equivalence Schema suffices for the reliability of certain absence-based inferences. Section 4 is dedicated to exploring consequences of the Evidential Equivalence Schema. The slogan ‘absence of evidence is evidence of absence’ has received a lot of bad press. More elaborately, what has received a lot of bad press is something like the following idea: absence of evidence sufficiently good to justify belief in $p$ is evidence sufficiently good to justify belief in $\sim p$ . A striking consequence of the Evidential Equivalence Schema is that absence of evidence sufficiently good to justify belief in p is evidence sufficiently good to justify belief in $\sim p$ . We establish this claim in Section 4 and show how this supports the reliability of an additional type of absence-based inference. Section 4 immediately raises the following question: how can we make philosophically good sense of the idea that absence of evidence is evidence of absence? We address this question in Section 5. Section 6 contains some summary remarks