William D. Rowley

Historically, it has not been uncommon to find discussions of evidentialism clustering around puzzles about the evidence of perception, introspection, memory, intuition, and inference. Evidentialists have given less attention to social epistemology, with the important exception of the epistemic significance of peer disagreement. Taking its cue from this literature, in this essay I will sketch the outlines of a unified evidentialist social epistemology. At its center is a principle about higher-level evidence from the literature on disagreement, the “evidence of evidence principle,” which links our higher-level evidence about the evidence others possess for particular propositions with our own object-level evidence. I will argue that this principle is not only fruitful for understanding the effect of discovering peer disagreement, but that it also accounts for our having evidence from both group and individual testimony. The social epistemology on offer seems to accommodate the common-sense extent of our testimonial evidence, providing an insight into what is unique about social sources of evidence and what is not, as well as pointing ahead to interesting problems for evidentialists in social epistemology.

An objection to reductionism in the epistemology of testimony that is often repeated but rarely defended in detail is that there is not enough positive evidence to provide the non-testimonial, positive reasons reductionism requires. Thus, on pain of testimonial skepticism, reductionism must be rejected. Call this argument the ‘Not Enough Evidence Objection’. I will defend reductionism about testimonial evidence against the NEEO by arguing that we typically have non-testimonial positive reasons in the form of evidence about our testifier's evidence. With a higher-level evidence principle borrowed from recent work on the epistemology of disagreement, I argue that, granting some plausible assumptions about conversational norms, the NEEO is unsound.

According to Roderick Chisholm, there are three ways of responding to the Problem of the Criterion and they all leave something to be desired. Michael DePaul, Paul Moser, and Earl Conee have each proposed variations of a fourth way of responding to this problem that rely on reflective equilibrium. We argue that these four options for responding to the Problem of the Criterion leave one with a tough choice: accept one of the three that Chisholm describes or DePaul’s reflective equilibrium approach and beg the question or accept a reflective equilibrium response of the sort Conee and Moser propose and embrace epistemic circularity.

According to Roderick Chisholm, there are three ways of responding to the Problem of the Criterion and they all leave something to be desired. Michael DePaul, Paul Moser, and Earl Conee have each proposed variations of a fourth way of responding to this problem that rely on reflective equilibrium. We argue that these four options for responding to the Problem of the Criterion leave one with a tough choice: accept one of the three that Chisholm describes or DePaul’s reflective equilibrium approach and beg the question or accept a reflective equilibrium response of the sort Conee and Moser propose and embrace epistemic circularity.