Timeline for Is there such a thing as weak evidence?
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| Jun 25, 2023 at 6:27 | comment | added | Kristian Berry | Perhaps I am thinking along the lines of Quinean holism, and so I myself see little problem with saying that the fingerprint does count as evidence of guilt. On another level, then, I also doubt that the concept of evidence is stable enough for us to say with absolute precision that something simply is or isn't evidence, "just like that," by itself. But so I also see highly general propositions as akin to pre-interpreted schema, which in terms of model-theoretic logic aren't quite true or false "just like that" either; and a general definition of evidence is then a schema, arguably. | |
| Jun 25, 2023 at 6:14 | comment | added | Futilitarian | @KristianBerry. Yes. I tried to acknowledge the fact that we do use 'evidence' to mean something like 'likelihood'. Maybe I should emphasise that more. In colloquial use though, I maintain we tend to use 'weak' and 'strong' evidence incorrectly (although perhaps pragmatically?), much in the same way we use probability to express a lack of knowledge rather than an actual probability. | |
| Jun 25, 2023 at 6:09 | comment | added | Kristian Berry | This still seems inconsistent with the full range of uses of the word/concept of evidence (including so-called higher-order evidence, i.e. evidence about evidence). That evidence reduces to facts in some sense is similar to Timothy Williamson's "K = E" (there is knowledge prior to evidence, and this knowledge is what counts as evidence of other things, not themselves known), though. | |
| Jun 25, 2023 at 5:47 | history | answered | Futilitarian | CC BY-SA 4.0 |