Evidentialism defined
Earl Conee and Richard Feldman define evidentialism in terms of a supervenience thesis.
As we understand it, evidentialism is a view about the conditions under which a person is epistemically justified in having some doxastic attitude toward a proposition.
It holds that this sort of epistemic fact is determined entirely by the person's evidence. In its fundamental form, then, evidentialism is a supervenience thesis according to which facts about whether or not a person is justified in believing a proposition supervene on facts describing the evidence that the person has.Again,
Our bedrock view is a Supervenience thesis. Justification strongly supervenes on evidence.5
Following Connee and Feldman's characterization in terms of justification, we can define evi- dentialism more broadly as follows:
(E) The facts about the individual's evidence determine the facts about the individual's epistemic status (of one sort or another).
The first thing to note is that evidentialism entails epistemic individualism. In effect, epistemic individualism makes positive epistemic status (of one sort or another) supervene on the cognitive resources of the individual. Evidentialism restricts that further, making positive epistemic status (of one sort or another) supervene on the individual's evidence. Accordingly, evidential- ism continues to endorse the ideal of intellectual self-sufficiency, and to reject real epistemic dependence on others.
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