An anti-evidentialist turn

The main point I want to make in this section is that externalism motivates anti-evidentialism. This is because, as we saw, externalism deems important one's causal and other modal relations to the world.

This line of thought, for example, opens the door to non-evidentialist accounts of percep­tion, memory and knowledge of other minds that are more in line with contemporary cognitive science. First, consider perceptual knowledge, and the various tortured attempts in the history of philosophy to show that perceptual evidence adequately supports beliefs about the external world.¹⁶ Evidentialist theories of perception understand perception as involving a kind of infer­ence from experience to world, thereby inviting skeptical questions about whether any such inference is adequate to the task. By attempting to understand perception within this frame­work, evidentialists take reasoning as the model for perceiving.That is, they think of perception as a kind of inference from evidence to conclusions supported by that evidence. Contemporary cognitive science, on the other hand, does not try to assimilate the kind of cognitive processing in perception to the kind of processing that goes on in reasoning proper.

Similar points can be made about memory, “mind-reading” capacities, and a host of other cognitive functioning. But again, once we give up an evidentialist framework in favor of reliabi- lism, proper functionalism, or some other externalist view, these various sorts of cognitive func­tion need not be understood as involving unconscious or implicit inference from good evidence, and need not be evaluated according to the norms of good reasoning. On the contrary, various cognitive functioning will be seen as epistemically valuable insofar as it places cognizers in an epistemically valuable relation to the world—i.e., relations that are reliable, safe, sensitive, etc.

23.7