JUSTIFICATORY HOLISM AND ES-EVIDENCE
A holist might allow me to use my preferred definition of evidence, which yields particularism for evidential statements of the form “e is evidence that h” But he might insist that holism is still lurking, since the justification for any claim, whether or not that claim is an evidential one, is holistic.
We might call this view “justificatory holism.”Consider my set of beliefs at a given time. If I want to justify or defend a claim, I will do so by reference to this set. (Certainly I don't want to defend a claim by invoking beliefs I don't have.) Now, a justificatory holist might concede, how I defend a claim depends upon how and why it is being challenged, which can vary from one context to another. In one case, I may appeal to some parts of my set of beliefs; in other cases, to other parts. But here we are talking about the illocutionary speech-act “defending a claim,” which involves uttering certain words in a given context with a certain intention. If challenged by you to defend my evidential claim
(1) "The fact that John got sick is evidence that he ate contaminated fish,
I may appeal to (3) and (4) in the previous section. When offering defenses of claims in actual practice, we are not holists. We do not invoke our entire belief set in such a defense. We take into account the context of the real or imagined request for a defense, including what the requester knows and wants to know.
But now, the justificatory holist will urge, let us consider justification in a more abstract way, one that is not relativized to any particular context. We ask whether a claim such as (1) is justified—not for any particular challenge or challenger—but in general, irrespective of context. Yes, we do need to relativize justification to some set of beliefs in virtue of which a belief in claim (1) is justified. “How else can justification be understood?,” a justificatory holist will ask.
We need to determine whether anyone holding the totality of beliefs in this set would be justified in believing (1). But we don't need to relativize justification to any actual or potential challenger or defender, since we are not thinking of justification as a speech-act. We don't need to know what parts of a set of beliefs a defender of (1) might invoke in defending particular challenges. Such defenses may vary, but whether one is justified in believing (1) in virtue of a set of beliefs does not vary. That depends only on the set of beliefs.Such a view can be expressed using my concept of ES- (epistemic situation) evidence, introduced in chapter 1. An epistemic situation ES contains a set of beliefs of an actual or potential believer.[125] There may or may not be any actual person in a given epistemic situation. On the account I presented in chapter 1, e is ES-evidence that h (with respect to an epistemic situation ES) if and only if e is true and anyone in such a situation would be justified in believing that e is veridical evidence that h. “Veridical evidence,” whose definition I gave in chapter 1, is defined in terms of “potential evidence”: for e to be veridical evidence that h, it is necessary and sufficient that e be potential evidence that h, and that there be an explanatory connection between h and e. Finally, whether e is ES-evidence that h, with respect to a particular ES, and hence whether anyone in epistemic situation ES is justified in believing that e is veridical evidence that h (and hence that h is true), depends just on the beliefs in ES.
Suppose we grant the holist that there is a sense of “justified evidential claim” that is abstracted from different possible challenges to an evidential claim and different contexts in which those challenges might be made. And suppose it is true that one can be justified in believing an evidential claim in virtue of the set of the beliefs comprising one's epi- stemic situation, independent of different possible challenges to the claim that might be made in different contexts.
This can be admitted, an opponent of holism might say, without a commitment to holism. It may be that, if one is in an epi- stemic situation ES, one is justified in believing an evidential claim of the form(2) e is (veridical) evidence that h,
without its being the case that every belief in ES contributes to, or is part of, that justification. It may be that one who is in an epistemic situation ES is justified in believing (2) because of some but not all of the beliefs in ES. Yes, we might say, anyone in ES is justified in believing (2), but this is so because ES contains a subset (perhaps a very small one) which is such that anyone who holds the beliefs in this subset is justified in believing (2). This would be incompatible with justificatory holism as I am characterizing it. It doesn't adequately reflect the “holistic” essence of holism—the idea that it is an entire system of beliefs that one has or might have that provides a justificatory basis for an evidential claim. So, let's see how a justificatory holist could strengthen the view.
10.