Kevin Gausselin

An important question for evidentialism is: what does it take to have evidence? Feldman (2004) and McGrath (2018) argue that evidence possession requires more than psychological access—it must also satisfy an epistemic condition, such as being justified. In this paper, I argue that the epistemic condition either results in a problematic regress or denies internalism unless one distinguishes between two senses of evidence possession. Developing this distinction helps to clarify the structure and nature of our evidence. In particular, it shows that one’s evidence, at a fundamental level, is self-supporting and consists of one’s mental states rather than their propositional contents.

This paper develops a problem for conciliationism that is structurally similar to the self-undermining problem but which is immune to most of the solutions offered against it. A popular objection to conciliationism is that it undermines itself. Given the current disagreement among philosophers about conciliationism, conciliationism seems to require rejecting conciliationism. Adam Elga (2010) has influentially argued that this shows that conciliationism is an incoherent method. By recommending its own rejection, conciliationism recommends multiple, incompatible responses to the same body of experience. Many have offered solutions to this problem, including Elga himself. However, there is another undermining problem. When a peer disagrees about their own peerhood, conciliationism can require the rejection of the peer’s peerhood. The result is that conciliationism recommends two incompatible responses to the same body of experience in a way that parallels the original self-undermining problem. But since many, if not all, of the proposed solutions to the original undermining problem depend on distinctive characteristics of conciliationism undermining itself, they cannot apply to a peer undermining themself. I illustrate this by dividing the solutions that have been offered against the self-undermining problem into two categories: self-exempting solutions and non-exempting solutions. I then show how the proposed solutions under each type do not extend to the peer-undermining problem. If that is right, then conciliationism is faced with a more difficult undermining problem than has been so far acknowledged.