Abstract
Mark Schroeder's Reasons First is admirable in its scope and execution, deftly demonstrating the theoretical promise of extending the reasons-first approach from ethics to epistemology. In what follows we explore how (not) to account for the evidence-that relation within the reasons-first program, we explain how factive content views of evidence can be resilient in the face of Schroeder's criticisms, and we explain how knowledge from falsehood threatens Schroeder's view of knowledge. Along the way we sketch a reliabilist account of the reasons-for relation (inspired by Alston) and show how it limits the applicability of Schroeder's arguments. 1. Evidence As Reasons for Belief? The expression 'Q is evidence that P' is used to refer to the evidential relation that relates one proposition (the evidence) to another proposition that is supported by the evidence. Every serious knowledge-seeking discipline employs it, and it is a relation that has also had a central place in epistemology. If reasons are to be 'first' in epistemology, something needs to be said about how reasons are related to that evidential relation and why the ideology of reasons is important for understanding the nature of this evidential relation. Here is the principle Schroeder (2021: 16) provides in response: Evidence as Reasons [For Belief] (ERB): Evidence matters in epistemology because if something is evidence that P, it is a reason to believe that P. But here's an alternative reasons-centric view of the evidence-that relation: Evidence as Truth-Indicative Reasons (ETIR): Evidence matters in epistemology because: Q is evidence that P for some agent S iff: (i) Q is a reason that S has, and (ii) Q supports the truth of P. The intended relations of 'support' are familiar deductive and ampliative inference relations among sets of propositions. It's notable that ETIR and ERB are logically compatible and logically independent. Their compatibility is of note when considering whether both are true. For were both true, it is arguable that ERB's truth would in part be owed to ETIR's truth. For if the aim of belief involves truth, then evidence of truth would seem to provide reasons for belief. Their independence is of note because there are objections to ERB that gain no traction at all against ETIR, allowing us to endorse ETIR without necessarily inheriting ERB's problems. We'll highlight a few challenges to ERB that ETIR seems to survive. The first objection to ERB involves lotteries. Take a lottery case in which you have a cognitively mature ticket-holder who recognizes that: they have significant evidence (L) that their ticket