Higher-Order Evidence

In science and in everyday life we collect evidence to acquire justified beliefs and to see whether what we believe is supported by the evidence. Recently, a special kind of evidence, higher-order evidence (HOE), has been getting more and more attention in epistemology. Ordinary, or first-order, evidence is assumed to inform directly about the world and HOE is taken to be evidence about ordinary evidence. Popular examples that have been presented as instances of HOE are evidence about doxastic disagreement or evidence about the unreliability of human reasoning when it comes to deductive inference. Despite the great importance of HOE for discussions of the justificatory status of beliefs there is no commonly shared characterization and taxonomy of HOE. Hitherto, there has been no agreement on the exact influence of HOE. The main aim of the project is to develop a theory of HOE and to investigate its epistemological role for rational reasoning. The project is divided into three sub-projects: <U+F0B7>Sub-Project 1: Characterization and Taxonomies of HOE. <U+F0B7>Sub-Project 2: HOE and Doxastic Disagreement <U+F0B7>Sub-Project 3: HOE and Deductive Inference. <U+F0B7> The working hypothesis of Sub-Project 1 is that HOE is best understood as evidence that describes or prescribes the epistemic state of an agent. The working hypotheses of Sub-Project 2 are: First, HOE about the evidential support relation of other agents does not necessarily play an important role for rational reasoning, because one can continue to rationally believe a proposition even if an epistemic peer believes its negation in the light of the same evidence. Second, if one possesses HOE that the other agent is more or less like one`s better-informed future-self, then one should adopt her degree of belief. The working hypothesis of Sub-Project 3 is that HOE cannot require us to lower our degree of belief in logical truths or and propositions that are implied by the propositions that we believe. Instead the role of HOE for rational reasoning in these cases requires the agent to suspend judgment on these propositions in the sense that the agent does not assign any degree of belief to these propositions. The project has the potential to revolutionize our conceptions of rational reasoning by emphasizing the importance of HOE. The project will develop a theory of HOE and will take the crucial steps to integrate it with our theories about rational reasoning with ordinary first-order evidence. This project discusses topics from traditional and formal epistemology and uses the methods of both. The methods of traditional epistemology relevant for the project include conceptual analyses and explications. The methods of formal epistemology relevant for the project include logic and probability theory. The researcher responsible for the project is Anna- Maria Asunta Eder.

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