Russell Ming

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.

Presumptivism, or so-called anti-reductionism, of testimonial warrant is a controversial yet popular view in epistemology of testimony. Presumptivists argue that a hearer can have prima facie epistemic warrant to believe P if the hearer comprehends as of a speaker as asserting P. Among the defenders, Tyler Burge famously argued for presumptivism a priori, though not without significant challenge. Recently, Mona Simion presented another a priori argument for presumptivism based on the idea that assertions are governed by a social norm of truth-telling, calling her view “strong social anti-reductionism”. Subsequently, J. P. Grodniewicz provided another argument for presumptivism and also named his view “strong social anti-reductionism”, following Simion. The purpose of this paper is to elucidate their “strong social anti-reductionist” arguments, illuminate the problems in their views, and examine which variant(s) of presumptivist positions the “social anti-reductionist” approach may support. I start by clarifying Simion’s commitments and reconstructing her argument, and demonstrate that Simion fails to provide a sound argument for her position. Then I argue that Grodniewicz’s position should be understood as more moderate than Simion’s, and that while his defense of presumptivism is promising, two issues need to be resolved: First, what version of presumptivism is argued for remains unclear; second, it still suffers from what Simion called “the Source Problem”, or what Sanford Goldberg called “the problem of easy entitlements”. To address these challenges, Grodniewicz’s view needs to be integrated with a robust theory of warrant, for which I suggest that Peter Graham’s warrant functionalism is a suitable candidate. Lastly, I will briefly explore presumptivist positions that align with Grodniewicz’s “social anti-reductionist” framework.