The Normativity of Evidence

Abstract

Any case against the argument from analogy appears to rely on the assumption that the evidential-support relation is not itself a normative relation. This chapter identifies three ways in which one might challenge this assumption and responds to each. In doing so it claims that existing responses to this problem in the literature are insufficient: they rely on objective conceptions of probability that are ill-suited to account for epistemic probabilities. It claims that epistemic error theorists may be forced to deny that there are any evidential-support relations but that, surprisingly, this is less of a concession than it may at first appear.