truth evidence essay

What this handout is about

This handout will provide a broad overview of gathering and using evidence. It will help you decide what counts as evidence, put evidence to work in your writing, and determine whether you have enough evidence. It will also offer links to additional resources.

Introduction

Many papers that you write in college will require you to make an argument ; this means that you must take a position on the subject you are discussing and support that position with evidence. It’s important that you use the right kind of evidence, that you use it effectively, and that you have an appropriate amount of it. If, for example, your philosophy professor didn’t like it that you used a survey of public opinion as your primary evidence in your ethics paper, you need to find out more about what philosophers count as good evidence. If your instructor has told you that you need more analysis, suggested that you’re “just listing” points or giving a “laundry list,” or asked you how certain points are related to your argument, it may mean that you can do more to fully incorporate your evidence into your argument. Comments like “for example?,” “proof?,” “go deeper,” or “expand” in the margins of your graded paper suggest that you may need more evidence. Let’s take a look at each of these issues—understanding what counts as evidence, using evidence in your argument, and deciding whether you need more evidence.

What counts as evidence?

Before you begin gathering information for possible use as evidence in your argument, you need to be sure that you understand the purpose of your assignment. If you are working on a project for a class, look carefully at the assignment prompt. It may give you clues about what sorts of evidence you will need. Does the instructor mention any particular books you should use in writing your paper or the names of any authors who have written about your topic? How long should your paper be (longer works may require more, or more varied, evidence)? What themes or topics come up in the text of the prompt? Our handout on understanding writing assignments can help you interpret your assignment. It’s also a good idea to think over what has been said about the assignment in class and to talk with your instructor if you need clarification or guidance.

What matters to instructors?

Instructors in different academic fields expect different kinds of arguments and evidence—your chemistry paper might include graphs, charts, statistics, and other quantitative data as evidence, whereas your English paper might include passages from a novel, examples of recurring symbols, or discussions of characterization in the novel. Consider what kinds of sources and evidence you have seen in course readings and lectures. You may wish to see whether the Writing Center has a handout regarding the specific academic field you’re working in—for example, literature , sociology , or history .

What are primary and secondary sources?

A note on terminology: many researchers distinguish between primary and secondary sources of evidence (in this case, “primary” means “first” or “original,” not “most important”). Primary sources include original documents, photographs, interviews, and so forth. Secondary sources present information that has already been processed or interpreted by someone else. For example, if you are writing a paper about the movie “The Matrix,” the movie itself, an interview with the director, and production photos could serve as primary sources of evidence. A movie review from a magazine or a collection of essays about the film would be secondary sources. Depending on the context, the same item could be either a primary or a secondary source: if I am writing about people’s relationships with animals, a collection of stories about animals might be a secondary source; if I am writing about how editors gather diverse stories into collections, the same book might now function as a primary source.

Where can I find evidence?

Here are some examples of sources of information and tips about how to use them in gathering evidence. Ask your instructor if you aren’t sure whether a certain source would be appropriate for your paper.

Print and electronic sources

Books, journals, websites, newspapers, magazines, and documentary films are some of the most common sources of evidence for academic writing. Our handout on evaluating print sources will help you choose your print sources wisely, and the library has a tutorial on evaluating both print sources and websites. A librarian can help you find sources that are appropriate for the type of assignment you are completing. Just visit the reference desk at Davis or the Undergraduate Library or chat with a librarian online (the library’s IM screen name is undergradref).

Observation

Sometimes you can directly observe the thing you are interested in, by watching, listening to, touching, tasting, or smelling it. For example, if you were asked to write about Mozart’s music, you could listen to it; if your topic was how businesses attract traffic, you might go and look at window displays at the mall.

An interview is a good way to collect information that you can’t find through any other type of research. An interview can provide an expert’s opinion, biographical or first-hand experiences, and suggestions for further research.

Surveys allow you to find out some of what a group of people thinks about a topic. Designing an effective survey and interpreting the data you get can be challenging, so it’s a good idea to check with your instructor before creating or administering a survey.

Experiments

Experimental data serve as the primary form of scientific evidence. For scientific experiments, you should follow the specific guidelines of the discipline you are studying. For writing in other fields, more informal experiments might be acceptable as evidence. For example, if you want to prove that food choices in a cafeteria are affected by gender norms, you might ask classmates to undermine those norms on purpose and observe how others react. What would happen if a football player were eating dinner with his teammates and he brought a small salad and diet drink to the table, all the while murmuring about his waistline and wondering how many fat grams the salad dressing contained?

Personal experience

Using your own experiences can be a powerful way to appeal to your readers. You should, however, use personal experience only when it is appropriate to your topic, your writing goals, and your audience. Personal experience should not be your only form of evidence in most papers, and some disciplines frown on using personal experience at all. For example, a story about the microscope you received as a Christmas gift when you were nine years old is probably not applicable to your biology lab report.

Using evidence in an argument

Does evidence speak for itself.

Absolutely not. After you introduce evidence into your writing, you must say why and how this evidence supports your argument. In other words, you have to explain the significance of the evidence and its function in your paper. What turns a fact or piece of information into evidence is the connection it has with a larger claim or argument: evidence is always evidence for or against something, and you have to make that link clear.

As writers, we sometimes assume that our readers already know what we are talking about; we may be wary of elaborating too much because we think the point is obvious. But readers can’t read our minds: although they may be familiar with many of the ideas we are discussing, they don’t know what we are trying to do with those ideas unless we indicate it through explanations, organization, transitions, and so forth. Try to spell out the connections that you were making in your mind when you chose your evidence, decided where to place it in your paper, and drew conclusions based on it. Remember, you can always cut prose from your paper later if you decide that you are stating the obvious.

Here are some questions you can ask yourself about a particular bit of evidence:

• OK, I’ve just stated this point, but so what? Why is it interesting? Why should anyone care?
• What does this information imply?
• What are the consequences of thinking this way or looking at a problem this way?
• I’ve just described what something is like or how I see it, but why is it like that?
• I’ve just said that something happens—so how does it happen? How does it come to be the way it is?
• Why is this information important? Why does it matter?
• How is this idea related to my thesis? What connections exist between them? Does it support my thesis? If so, how does it do that?
• Can I give an example to illustrate this point?

Answering these questions may help you explain how your evidence is related to your overall argument.

How can I incorporate evidence into my paper?

There are many ways to present your evidence. Often, your evidence will be included as text in the body of your paper, as a quotation, paraphrase, or summary. Sometimes you might include graphs, charts, or tables; excerpts from an interview; or photographs or illustrations with accompanying captions.

When you quote, you are reproducing another writer’s words exactly as they appear on the page. Here are some tips to help you decide when to use quotations:

• Quote if you can’t say it any better and the author’s words are particularly brilliant, witty, edgy, distinctive, a good illustration of a point you’re making, or otherwise interesting.
• Quote if you are using a particularly authoritative source and you need the author’s expertise to back up your point.
• Quote if you are analyzing diction, tone, or a writer’s use of a specific word or phrase.
• Quote if you are taking a position that relies on the reader’s understanding exactly what another writer says about the topic.

Be sure to introduce each quotation you use, and always cite your sources. See our handout on quotations for more details on when to quote and how to format quotations.

Like all pieces of evidence, a quotation can’t speak for itself. If you end a paragraph with a quotation, that may be a sign that you have neglected to discuss the importance of the quotation in terms of your argument. It’s important to avoid “plop quotations,” that is, quotations that are just dropped into your paper without any introduction, discussion, or follow-up.

Paraphrasing

When you paraphrase, you take a specific section of a text and put it into your own words. Putting it into your own words doesn’t mean just changing or rearranging a few of the author’s words: to paraphrase well and avoid plagiarism, try setting your source aside and restating the sentence or paragraph you have just read, as though you were describing it to another person. Paraphrasing is different than summary because a paraphrase focuses on a particular, fairly short bit of text (like a phrase, sentence, or paragraph). You’ll need to indicate when you are paraphrasing someone else’s text by citing your source correctly, just as you would with a quotation.

When might you want to paraphrase?

• Paraphrase when you want to introduce a writer’s position, but their original words aren’t special enough to quote.
• Paraphrase when you are supporting a particular point and need to draw on a certain place in a text that supports your point—for example, when one paragraph in a source is especially relevant.
• Paraphrase when you want to present a writer’s view on a topic that differs from your position or that of another writer; you can then refute writer’s specific points in your own words after you paraphrase.
• Paraphrase when you want to comment on a particular example that another writer uses.
• Paraphrase when you need to present information that’s unlikely to be questioned.

When you summarize, you are offering an overview of an entire text, or at least a lengthy section of a text. Summary is useful when you are providing background information, grounding your own argument, or mentioning a source as a counter-argument. A summary is less nuanced than paraphrased material. It can be the most effective way to incorporate a large number of sources when you don’t have a lot of space. When you are summarizing someone else’s argument or ideas, be sure this is clear to the reader and cite your source appropriately.

Statistics, data, charts, graphs, photographs, illustrations

Sometimes the best evidence for your argument is a hard fact or visual representation of a fact. This type of evidence can be a solid backbone for your argument, but you still need to create context for your reader and draw the connections you want them to make. Remember that statistics, data, charts, graph, photographs, and illustrations are all open to interpretation. Guide the reader through the interpretation process. Again, always, cite the origin of your evidence if you didn’t produce the material you are using yourself.

Do I need more evidence?

Let’s say that you’ve identified some appropriate sources, found some evidence, explained to the reader how it fits into your overall argument, incorporated it into your draft effectively, and cited your sources. How do you tell whether you’ve got enough evidence and whether it’s working well in the service of a strong argument or analysis? Here are some techniques you can use to review your draft and assess your use of evidence.

Make a reverse outline

A reverse outline is a great technique for helping you see how each paragraph contributes to proving your thesis. When you make a reverse outline, you record the main ideas in each paragraph in a shorter (outline-like) form so that you can see at a glance what is in your paper. The reverse outline is helpful in at least three ways. First, it lets you see where you have dealt with too many topics in one paragraph (in general, you should have one main idea per paragraph). Second, the reverse outline can help you see where you need more evidence to prove your point or more analysis of that evidence. Third, the reverse outline can help you write your topic sentences: once you have decided what you want each paragraph to be about, you can write topic sentences that explain the topics of the paragraphs and state the relationship of each topic to the overall thesis of the paper.

For tips on making a reverse outline, see our handout on organization .

Color code your paper

You will need three highlighters or colored pencils for this exercise. Use one color to highlight general assertions. These will typically be the topic sentences in your paper. Next, use another color to highlight the specific evidence you provide for each assertion (including quotations, paraphrased or summarized material, statistics, examples, and your own ideas). Lastly, use another color to highlight analysis of your evidence. Which assertions are key to your overall argument? Which ones are especially contestable? How much evidence do you have for each assertion? How much analysis? In general, you should have at least as much analysis as you do evidence, or your paper runs the risk of being more summary than argument. The more controversial an assertion is, the more evidence you may need to provide in order to persuade your reader.

Play devil’s advocate, act like a child, or doubt everything

This technique may be easiest to use with a partner. Ask your friend to take on one of the roles above, then read your paper aloud to them. After each section, pause and let your friend interrogate you. If your friend is playing devil’s advocate, they will always take the opposing viewpoint and force you to keep defending yourself. If your friend is acting like a child, they will question every sentence, even seemingly self-explanatory ones. If your friend is a doubter, they won’t believe anything you say. Justifying your position verbally or explaining yourself will force you to strengthen the evidence in your paper. If you already have enough evidence but haven’t connected it clearly enough to your main argument, explaining to your friend how the evidence is relevant or what it proves may help you to do so.

Common questions and additional resources

• I have a general topic in mind; how can I develop it so I’ll know what evidence I need? And how can I get ideas for more evidence? See our handout on brainstorming .
• Who can help me find evidence on my topic? Check out UNC Libraries .
• I’m writing for a specific purpose; how can I tell what kind of evidence my audience wants? See our handouts on audience , writing for specific disciplines , and particular writing assignments .
• How should I read materials to gather evidence? See our handout on reading to write .
• How can I make a good argument? Check out our handouts on argument and thesis statements .
• How do I tell if my paragraphs and my paper are well-organized? Review our handouts on paragraph development , transitions , and reorganizing drafts .
• How do I quote my sources and incorporate those quotes into my text? Our handouts on quotations and avoiding plagiarism offer useful tips.
• How do I cite my evidence? See the UNC Libraries citation tutorial .
• I think that I’m giving evidence, but my instructor says I’m using too much summary. How can I tell? Check out our handout on using summary wisely.
• I want to use personal experience as evidence, but can I say “I”? We have a handout on when to use “I.”

Works consulted

We consulted these works while writing this handout. This is not a comprehensive list of resources on the handout’s topic, and we encourage you to do your own research to find additional publications. Please do not use this list as a model for the format of your own reference list, as it may not match the citation style you are using. For guidance on formatting citations, please see the UNC Libraries citation tutorial . We revise these tips periodically and welcome feedback.

Lunsford, Andrea A., and John J. Ruszkiewicz. 2016. Everything’s an Argument , 7th ed. Boston: Bedford/St Martin’s.

Miller, Richard E., and Kurt Spellmeyer. 2016. The New Humanities Reader , 5th ed. Boston: Cengage.

University of Maryland. 2019. “Research Using Primary Sources.” Research Guides. Last updated October 28, 2019. https://lib.guides.umd.edu/researchusingprimarysources .

You may reproduce it for non-commercial use if you use the entire handout and attribute the source: The Writing Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

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For my own part, I think that if one were looking for a single phrase to capture the stage to which philosophy has progressed, ‘the study of evidence’ would be a better choice than ‘the study of language’.    —A.J. Ayer, Philosophy in the Twentieth Century

And when we try to define ‘evidence’ … we find it very difficult.    —R.G. Collingwood, The Idea of History

The concept of evidence is central to both epistemology and the philosophy of science. Of course, ‘evidence’ is hardly a philosopher's term of art: it is not only, or even primarily, philosophers who routinely speak of evidence, but also lawyers and judges, historians and scientists, investigative journalists and reporters, as well as the members of numerous other professions and ordinary folk in the course of everyday life. The concept of evidence would thus seem to be on firmer pre-theoretical ground than various other concepts which enjoy similarly central standing within philosophy. (Contrast, for example, the epistemologist's quasi-technical term ‘epistemic justification’.)

When one compares philosophical accounts of evidence with the way the concept is often employed in non-philosophical contexts, however, a tension soon emerges. Consider first the kinds of things which non-philosophers are apt to count as evidence. For the forensics expert, evidence might consist of fingerprints on a gun, a bloodied knife, or a semen-stained dress: evidence is, paradigmatically, the kind of thing which one might place in a plastic bag and label ‘Exhibit A’. Thus, a criminal defense attorney might float the hypothesis that the evidence which seems to incriminate his client was planted by a corrupt law enforcement official or hope for it to be misplaced by a careless clerk. For an archaeologist, evidence is the sort of thing which one might dig up from the ground and carefully send back to one's laboratory for further analysis. Similarly, for the historian, evidence might consist of hitherto overlooked documents recently discovered in an archive or in an individual's personal library. [ 1 ] Reflection on examples such as these naturally suggests that evidence consists paradigmatically of physical objects, or perhaps, physical objects arranged in certain ways. For presumably, physical objects are the sort of thing which one might place in a plastic bag, dig up from the ground, send to a laboratory, or discover among the belongings of an individual of historical interest.

However natural such a picture might be, it is at least somewhat difficult to reconcile with historically prominent philosophical accounts of the nature of evidence. Russell, the greatest empiricist of the first half of the twentieth century, tended to think of evidence as sense data , mental items of one's present consciousness with which one is immediately acquainted. In this, he stood squarely within the tradition of classical empiricism. Quine, the greatest empiricist of the second half of the century, maintained throughout his career that evidence consisted of the stimulation of one's sensory receptors. [ 2 ] The logical positivists held that whatever evidence there is for a given scientific theory is afforded by observation statements or ‘protocol sentence’, linguistic entities with suitably-restricted contents; the precise nature of the restrictions became a vigorously contested matter within the tradition itself. [ 3 ] According to one recent and influential study, one's evidence consists of the totality of propositions that one knows (Williamson 2000). According to another, one's evidence consists exclusively of one's current mental states (Conee and Feldman 2004). Within contemporary confirmation theory, a prominent version of Bayesianism is naturally understood as identifying one's evidence with those beliefs of which one is psychologically certain. Of course, the suggestion that one might place sense data, sensory receptor stimulations, known propositions, or one's current mental states in a plastic bag (or dig them up from the ground, or send them to a laboratory, or …) is of dubious intelligibility. From the perspective of much ordinary thought and talk about evidence, much philosophical theorizing about evidence would seem to embody a particularly grotesque category mistake.

Moreover, it is not simply that the accounts of evidence that have been advanced by philosophers stand in at least some prima facie tension with much that is said and thought about evidence outside of philosophy. As even the cursory survey offered above makes clear, philosophers themselves have offered quite divergent theories of what sorts of things are eligible to serve as evidence. What might account for such discrepancies?

One possibility is the following. Both in and outside of philosophy, the concept of evidence has often been called upon to fill a number of distinct roles. Although some of these roles are complementary, others stand in at least some measure of tension with one another. Indeed, as we will see below, it is far from obvious that any one thing could play all of the diverse roles that evidence has at various times been expected to play. Different theories about the nature of evidence might thus naturally emerge from different emphases on the competing demands that have been placed on the concept. In what follows, I survey some of the theoretical roles that the concept of evidence has been asked to play and explore some of the relations among them.

1. Evidence as That Which Justifies Belief

2. rational thinkers respect their evidence, 3. evidence as a guide to truth: evidence as sign, symptom, or mark, 4. objectivity, publicity, and intersubjectivity: evidence as neutral arbiter, other internet resources, related entries.

In any event, the concept of evidence is inseparable from that of justification. When we talk of ‘evidence’ in an epistemological sense we are talking about justification: one thing is ‘evidence’ for another just in case the first tends to enhance the reasonableness or justification of the second.… A strictly nonnormative concept of evidence is not our concept of evidence; it is something that we do not understand.    —Jaegwon Kim, ‘What is “Naturalized Epistemology”?’

Evidence, whatever else it is, is the kind of thing which can make a difference to what one is justified in believing or (what is often, but not always, taken to be the same thing) what it is reasonable for one to believe. Some philosophers hold that what one is justified in believing is entirely determined by one's evidence. This view—which sometimes travels under the banner of ‘Evidentialism’—can be formulated as a supervenience thesis, according to which normative facts about what one is justified in believing supervene on facts about one's evidence (See especially Conee and Feldman 2004). Thus, according to the Evidentialist, any two individuals who possessed exactly the same evidence would be exactly alike with respect to what they are justified in believing about any given question.

Given Evidentialism, various traditional debates within the theory of knowledge are naturally cast as debates about the status of various underdetermination theses. Thus, the skeptic about our knowledge of the external world maintains that one's evidence (understood, perhaps, as the totality of one's present experiences) does not favor one's ordinary, commonsense views about one's surroundings over various skeptical alternatives (e.g., the hypothesis that one is hallucinating in an undetectable way). Similarly, one longstanding controversy that divides realists and antirealists in the philosophy of science can be understood as a debate about whether the kind of evidence which is available to scientists is ever sufficient to justify belief in theories that quantify over entities that are in principle unobservable, such as electrons or quarks.

Inasmuch as evidence is the sort of thing which confers justification, the concept of evidence is closely related to other fundamental normative concepts such as the concept of a reason . Indeed, it is natural to think that ‘reason to believe’ and ‘evidence’ are more or less synonymous, being distinguished chiefly by the fact that the former functions grammatically as a count noun while the latter functions as a mass term. [ 4 ]

To the extent that what one is justified in believing depends upon one's evidence, what is relevant is the bearing of one's total evidence. Even if evidence E is sufficient to justify believing hypothesis H when considered in isolation, it does not follow that one who possesses evidence E is justified in believing H on its basis. For one might possess some additional evidence E ′, such that one is not justified in believing H given E and E ′. In these circumstances, evidence E ′ defeats the justification for believing H that would be afforded by E in its absence. Thus, even if I am initially justified in believing that your name is Fritz on the basis of your testimony to that effect, the subsequent acquisition of evidence which suggests that you are a pathological liar tends to render this same belief unjustified. A given piece of evidence is defeasible evidence just in case it is in principle susceptible to being undermined by further evidence in this way; evidence which is not susceptible to such undermining would be indefeasible evidence. It is controversial whether any evidence is indefeasible in this sense. [ 5 ]

Following Pollock (1986), we can distinguish between undercutting and rebutting defeaters. Intuitively, where E is evidence for H , an undercutting defeater is evidence which undermines the evidential connection between E and H . Thus, evidence which suggests that you are a pathological liar constitutes an undercutting defeater for your testimony: although your testimony would ordinarily afford excellent reason for me to believe that your name is Fritz , evidence that you are a pathological liar tends to sever the evidential connection between your testimony and that to which you testify. In contrast, a rebutting defeater is evidence which prevents E from justifying belief in H by supporting not- H in a more direct way. Thus, credible testimony from another source that your name is not Fritz but rather Leopold constitutes a rebutting defeater for your original testimony. It is something of an open question how deeply the distinction between ‘undermining’ and ‘rebutting’ defeaters cuts.

Significantly, defeating evidence can itself be defeated by yet further evidence: at a still later point in time, I might acquire evidence E ″ which suggests that you are not a pathological liar after all, the evidence to that effect having been an artifice of your sworn enemy. In these circumstances, my initial justification for believing that your name is Fritz afforded by the original evidence E is restored. In principle, there is no limit to the complexity of the relations of defeat that might obtain between the members of a given body of evidence. Such complexity is one source of our fallibility in responding to evidence in the appropriate way.

In order to be justified in believing some proposition then, it is not enough that that proposition be well-supported by some proper subset of one's total evidence; rather, what is relevant is how well-supported the proposition is by one's total evidence. In insisting that facts about what one is justified in believing supervene on facts about one's evidence, the Evidentialist should be understood as holding that it is one's total evidence that is relevant. Of course, this leaves open questions about what relation one must bear to a piece of evidence E in order for E to count as part of one's total evidence, as well as the related question of what sorts of things are eligible for inclusion among one's total evidence. [ 6 ]

Given the thesis that evidence is that which justifies belief, one's intuitions about the evidence that is available to an individual in a hypothetical scenario will shape one's views about what the individual would be justified in believing in that scenario. Of course, one can also theorize in the opposite direction as well: to the extent that one has independent intuitions about what an individual would be justified in believing in a given scenario, such intuitions will shape one's views about what evidence must be available to an individual so situated—and therefore, one's views about the more general theoretical issue about what evidence is, or what sorts of things can and cannot qualify as evidence. Thus, if one is firmly convinced that an individual in circumstances C might be justified in believing that p is the case, it follows immediately that being in circumstances of kind C is consistent with having evidence sufficient to justify the belief that p . As we will see below (Section 2), reasoning of this general form has often encouraged a picture according to which one's total evidence is exhausted by one's present experiences.

Here is an example of the way in which intuitions about justification can drive one's account of evidence, given a commitment to the Evidentialist thesis that changes in what an individual is justified in believing always reflect changes in her total evidence. It is sometimes suggested that how confident a scientist is justified in being that a given hypothesis is true depends, not only on the character of relevant data to which she has been exposed, but also on the space of alternative hypotheses of which she is aware. According to this line of thought, how strongly a given collection of data supports a hypothesis is not wholly determined by the content of the data and the hypothesis. (Nor is it wholly determined by their content together with the scientist's background theory of how the world works.) Rather, it also depends upon whether there are other plausible competing hypotheses in the field. It is because of this that the mere articulation of a plausible alternative hypothesis can dramatically reduce how likely the original hypothesis is on the available data. [ 7 ]

Consider an historical example that is often thought to illustrate this phenomenon. Many organisms manifest special characteristics that enable them to flourish in their typical environments. According to the Design Hypothesis , this is due to the fact that such organisms were designed by an Intelligent Creator (i.e., God). The Design Hypothesis is a potential explanation of the relevant facts: if true, it would account for the facts in question. How much support do the relevant facts lend to the Design Hypothesis? Plausibly, the introduction of the Darwinian Hypothesis as a competitor in the nineteenth century significantly diminished the support enjoyed by the Design Hypothesis. That is, even if there were no reason to prefer the Darwinian Hypothesis to the Design Hypothesis, the mere fact that the Design Hypothesis was no longer the only potential explanation in the field tends to erode (to some extent at least) how much credence the Design Hypothesis merits on the basis of the relevant considerations.

Assume for the sake of illustration that what one is justified in believing does in fact depend upon the space of alternative hypotheses of which one is aware: as new hypotheses are introduced, one's justification for believing already proposed hypotheses changes. Given the Evidentialist thesis that differences in justification are always underwritten by differences in evidence, it follows that a complete specification of one's evidence at any given time will make reference to the set of hypotheses which one is aware of at that time. This is an example of the way in which intuitive judgments about what individuals are justified in believing in certain circumstances, when coupled with a commitment to Evidentialism, can drive one's theory of evidence (i.e., make a difference to which items one classifies as ‘evidence’ in one's theorizing).

The justifying or rationalizing role of evidence is also central to other prominent epistemological views, including views which are strictly speaking incompatible with Evidentialism as formulated above. Consider, for example, Bayesianism. (See the entry on Bayesian epistemology .) The Bayesian holds that what it is reasonable for one to believe depends both on the evidence to which one is exposed as well as on one's prior probability distribution. According to the Bayesian then, two individuals who share exactly the same total evidence might differ in what it is reasonable for them to believe about some question in virtue of having started with different prior probability distributions. Still, inasmuch as Bayesians often focus upon rational belief change , or on what is involved in rationally revising one's beliefs over time, the justificatory role of evidence retains a certain pride of place within the Bayesian scheme. For Bayesians typically maintain that that which distinguishes those changes in one's beliefs that are reasonable from those that are not is that the former, unlike the latter, involve responding to newly-acquired evidence in an appropriate way. [ 8 ] Thus, for the Bayesian no less than for the Evidentialist, it is evidence which justifies that which stands in need of justification.

Notably, even views which tend to marginalize the role of a subject's evidence in determining facts about what he or she is justified in believing typically do not take facts about the subject's evidence to be wholly irrelevant. Consider, for example, reliabilist theories of epistemic justification (Goldman 1979, 1986). In its purest and most straightforward form, reliabilism holds that the status of a token belief as justified or unjustified depends upon whether or not the psychological process which gives rise to the belief is a reliable one, i.e., one that is truth-conducive. When formulated in this way, the concept of evidence plays no role in the reliabilist account of justification: in particular, the status of a given belief as justified or unjustified depends upon whether the relevant belief-forming process is in fact reliable, and not on any evidence which the believer might possess which bears on the question of its reliability (or even, for that matter, on any evidence which the believer might possess which bears more directly on the truth of the belief itself). Thus, someone who was in fact a reliable clairvoyant would be justified in holding beliefs that she forms on the basis of clairvoyance, even if her total evidence strongly suggested both that (i) she does not possess the faculty of clairvoyance, and that (ii) the relevant beliefs are false (BonJour 1985, Chapter 3). However, in response to such examples, reliabilists typically seek to accommodate the intuition that such a subject is not justified in maintaining her reliably-arrived-at beliefs in the face of her evidence, and they seek to modify the simple reliabilist account to allow for this (See, e.g., Goldman 1986: 109–112). The felt need to modify the original, more straightforward account is, perhaps, a testament to the resilience of the idea that one's evidence can make a difference to what one is justified in believing—even if other factors are also taken to be relevant.

A rational man is one who makes a proper use of reason: and this implies, among other things, that he correctly estimates the strength of evidence.    —Ayer, Probability and Evidence

Insofar as we are rational in our beliefs, the intensity of belief will tend to correspond to the firmness of the available evidence. Insofar as we are rational, we will drop a belief when we have tried in vain to find evidence for it.    —Quine and Ullian, The Web of Belief

A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence.    —David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

It is characteristic of rational thinkers to respect their evidence. Insofar as one is rational, one is disposed to respond appropriately to one's evidence: at any given time, one's views accurately reflect the character of one's evidence at that time, and one's views manifest a characteristic sensitivity or responsiveness to changes in one's evidence through time. Of course, rationality is no guarantee of correctness. Indeed, in a given case one might be led astray by following one's evidence, as when one's evidence is misleading . But being mistaken is not the same as being unreasonable. To the extent that one respects one's evidence, one is not unreasonable even when one is wrong. [ 9 ]

The foregoing remarks, although bordering on the platitudinous, naturally suggest a substantive model of the norms which govern our practice of belief attribution. According to the model in question, in attributing beliefs to you, I should, all else being equal, attribute to you the belief that p just in case it would be reasonable for you to believe that p given your total evidence. This is the core idea behind one popular version of the Principle of Charity. According to this line of thought, I am justified in drawing inferences about what you believe on the basis of my knowledge of your epistemic situation. Thus, if I know that your evidence strongly suggests that it will rain today , then (all else being equal) I should attribute to you the belief that it will rain today. On the other hand, if I know that your evidence strongly suggests that it will not rain today, then I should likewise attribute to you a belief to that effect. Although on a given occasion a thinker who is generally reasonable might fail to believe in accordance with her evidence, such cases are exceptional. In the absence of any reason to think that a given case is exceptional in this way, one is licensed to draw inferences about the contents of another's beliefs on the basis of information about the character of her evidence. The default assumption is that a person's beliefs are those that it is appropriate for her to hold given the evidence to which she has been exposed.

Above, we noted that in a given case one might be led astray by following one's evidence: even if p is true, one's evidence might misleadingly suggest that p is not true. When one's evidence is misleading, one typically arrives at a false belief by believing in accordance with it. We ordinarily assume that such cases are exceptional. Are there possible worlds in which such cases are the norm? Consider a careful and judicious thinker who consistently and scrupulously attends to his evidence in arriving at his beliefs. In our world, these habits lead to cognitive prosperity—the individual holds a relatively large number of true beliefs and relatively few false beliefs. (Or at least, he fares significantly better with respect to truth and falsity than those who fail to attend to their evidence and instead form their beliefs in a hasty or haphazard manner.) Consider next how the same individual fares in a world that is subject to the machinations of a Cartesian evil demon, a being bent on deceiving the world's inhabitants as to its true character. Although the true character of the world in question differs radically from our own, it is, from the point of view of its inhabitants, utterly indistinguishable, for the Demon takes care to ensure that the courses of experiences that the inhabitants undergo are qualitatively identical to the courses of experiences that they undergo in our non-delusory world. In the world run by the Cartesian Demon, our thinker is no less judicious and no less scrupulous in attending to (what he blamelessly takes to be) relevant considerations than he is in our world. Because of his unfortunate circumstances, however, his beliefs embody a radically false picture of his environment. Granted that the thinker's beliefs about his environment are false, are they any less justified than in our world? Is the thinker himself any less rational? Many philosophers maintain that the thinker's beliefs are equally well-justified and that the thinker himself is equally rational in the two worlds (See e.g., Cohen 1984 and Pryor 2001). Apparently, there is strong intuitive resistance to the idea that a thinker whose underlying dispositions and habits of thought remain unchanged might become less rational simply in virtue of being located in less fortuitous circumstances. As Williamson (2000) has forcefully emphasized, however, embracing the judgement that the thinker is equally rational in ‘the good case’ and ‘the bad case’ tends to push one inexorably towards a conception of evidence according to which one's evidence is exhausted by one's subjective, non-factive mental states. For if rationality is a matter of responding correctly to one's evidence, then the judgement that the thinker is equally rational in the good case and the bad case would seem to require that the thinker has the same evidence for his beliefs in both cases. But ex hypothesi , the only thing common to the good case and the bad case that is a plausible candidate for being the thinker's evidence are his non-factive mental states. Thus, the judgement that the thinker is equally rational in both cases, when conjoined with the view that rationality is a matter of responding to one's evidence in the appropriate way, seems to force the conclusion that the thinker's evidence is limited to his non-factive mental states even in the good case . In this way, the requirement that the thinker has the same evidence in the good case and the bad case seems to encourage what Williamson calls ‘the Phenomenal Conception of Evidence’. [ 10 ]

Consider also how the aforementioned Principle of Charity encourages such a picture of evidence when it is applied to the world run by the Demon. In attributing beliefs to an individual in the bad case, one attributes exactly those beliefs that one would attribute if the same individual were in the good case. For if the Demon's illusions are truly undetectable, failure to detect them hardly seems to constitute a failure of rationality . In attributing commonsense beliefs to the individual in the bad case, one proceeds according to the Principle of Charity: after all, it seems that these are exactly the beliefs that even a perfectly rational (though not infallible) being would have in the circumstances. But if the commonsense beliefs are no less reasonable when held in the bad case, then the individual's evidence for those beliefs must be just as strong in the bad case as in the good case. Indeed, it is natural to describe the bad case as a world in which the thinker's evidence is systematically misleading . The trick to being a good Evil Demon (one might think) is to be effective at planting misleading evidence. Intuitively, the Demon misleads his victims by exploiting their rationality, inasmuch as he trades on the sensitivity of their beliefs to misleading evidence. (Indeed, those who dogmatically cling to favored theories in the face of apparently disconfirming evidence would seem to be relatively less vulnerable to being manipulated by the Demon.) But the Demon misleads by providing his victims with misleading experiences. Hence the temptation to simply identify one's evidence with one's experiences: once again, the phenomenal conception of evidence looms.

As Williamson emphasizes, the insistence that one's evidence is identical in the good case and the bad case effectively rules out many otherwise-attractive accounts of evidence:

That one has the same evidence in the good and bad cases is a severe constraint on the nature of evidence. It is inconsistent with the view that evidence consists of true propositions like those standardly offered as evidence for scientific theories.… For similar reasons [it] does not permit my evidence to include perceptual states individuated in part by relations to the environment. No matter how favorable my epistemic circumstances, I am counted as having only as much evidence as I have in the corresponding skeptical scenarios, no matter how distant and bizarre. Retinal stimulations and brain states fare no better as evidence, for in some skeptical scenarios they are unknowably different too (2000:173).

In view of its apparent consequences for the theory of evidence, the idea that one's evidence is the same in the good case and the bad case warrants further scrutiny. Again, it is uncontroversial that there is a robust distinction between nonculpable error on the one hand and irrationality or unreasonableness on the other. Nonculpable error does not in general make for irrationality, even when such error is relatively widespread and pervasive. Still, it's worth asking just how much weight the distinction in question can bear. Is any amount of nonculpable error about the environment in which one is embedded compatible with perfect rationality? Or rather, at some point, does a sufficient amount of error about one's environment tend to compromise one's ability to form rational beliefs about that environment?

Here is one line of thought for the conclusion that a sufficient level of nonculpable error about one's environment does tend to compromise one's ability to arrive at rational beliefs about that environment. It's plausible to suppose that much if not all of the value that we place on believing rationally depends on a connection between believing rationally and believing what is true (although the precise nature of this connection is no doubt a particularly vexing topic). One might worry that a view according to which even ideal, perfect rationality can coexist harmoniously with a more or less completely mistaken view of one's situation threatens to attenuate the connection between believing rationally and believing truly too far, and to render obscure why the former would be valuable relative to the latter. To put the same point in terms of evidence: plausibly, much if not all of the value of respecting one's evidence consists in the putative link between doing so and believing the truth. Given this, one might worry that a view according to which perfectly following one's evidence is compatible with a more or less completely mistaken view of one's situation threatens to render obscure why following one's evidence would be a good thing to do relative to the goal of having true rather than false beliefs.

This line of thought is not decisive, however. In general, the value of x might consist in its serving as a means to y , even if there are conditions in which relying on x utterly fails to bring about (or even frustrates the achievement of) y . Thus, it might be that the value of a given drug consists in its being the miracle cure for some disease, even though in certain conditions the drug would have the effect of aggravating the disease. Similarly, it might be that we value following our evidence as a means to believing what is true, even though we recognize that there are circumstances such that, were we unfortunate enough to be in them, doing so would hinder or frustrate that goal.

A different tack is pursued by Williamson, who argues at length that we should not accept the idea that one has the same evidence in the good case and the bad case. Central to his argument is the contention that, even if one were to adopt the phenomenal conception of evidence, this would not allow one to vindicate the underlying intuitions that seemed to make its adoption attractive in the first place; hence, the phenomenal conception of evidence is ultimately not well-motivated. As we have seen, it is the desire to preserve the intuition that a sufficiently scrupulous thinker in the bad case can be reasonable in his beliefs (indeed, no less reasonable than a similarly scrupulous thinker in the good case) which seems to rule out any conception of evidence according to which one's evidence might consist of (say) true propositions or facts about the external world. For a thinker in the bad case is not in a position to recognize facts about the external world; he is, however, in a position to recognize facts about his own experiences. The view that one's evidence is limited to one's experiences thus seems to be motivated by the idea that one's evidence, no matter what else is true of it, must be the sort of thing that one is always in a position to correctly take into account, at least in principle. But (it is claimed) one's experiences are the things that one is always in a position to correctly take into account. Williamson argues that this last thought is a mistake: in fact, one is not always in a position to correctly take into account one's experiences, even in principle. Indeed, Williamson argues that there is no non-trivial condition which is such that one is always in a position to know that it obtains. Thus, the thought that evidence might be such that one is always in a position to know what one's evidence is is a chimerical one. To insist that in order for x to be among one's evidence, x must be such that one is always in a position to know whether one's evidence includes x is thus to impose a misguided and unrealizable desideratum on the theory of evidence. In short: ‘ Whatever evidence is, one is not always in a position to know what one has of it’ (2000: 178, emphasis added).

Having rejected the phenomenal conception, Williamson proposes that we take a subject's evidence to consist of all and only those propositions that the subject knows. [ 11 ] Williamson elaborates this simple and straightforward idea with great sophistication; here we focus exclusively on the way in which the resulting theory interacts with the theme that rational thinkers respect their evidence. Of course, one immediate consequence of the view that a subject's evidence consists of his knowledge is that a thinker in the good case and a thinker in the bad case will differ—indeed, differ significantly—in the evidence which they possess. When a thinker in the good case comes to know that there is blood on the knife in virtue of having a visual experience as of blood on the knife, the relevant proposition becomes part of his total evidence. In contrast, when a thinker in the bad case is caused by the Demon to undergo the same experience (or at least, an experience that is qualitatively indistinguishable) and arrives at the same belief, the relevant proposition is not part of his total evidence, for the relevant proposition is not true and hence not known. Inasmuch as the scrupulous thinker in the good case will know far more than the scrupulous thinker in the bad case, the former will have far more evidence for his beliefs than the latter. Given that the two thinkers have the same beliefs, it seems that the thinker in the good case will be significantly more reasonable in holding those beliefs. [ 12 ]

How much of a cost is this? We should distinguish between two different intuitions one might have about a thinker in the bad case. The first intuition is that a thinker in the bad case has exactly the same evidence as a thinker in the good case. Perhaps abandoning this intuition is not much of a cost (if it is any cost at all). A different intuition is the following: when a thinker in the bad case takes his experiences at face value and forms beliefs about the external world in the usual manner, those beliefs are not simply unreasonable, in the way that they would be if, for example, the thinker adopted those same beliefs on a whim, or in the absence of any reason to do so at all. Abandoning this intuition would seem to be a much heavier price to pay. However, it is contentious whether this intuition can be preserved on a view according to which one's evidence consists of one's knowledge. Consider, once again, a thinker in the bad case who is caused by the Demon to have a visual experience as of being in the presence of a bloodied knife. Possessing no reason to doubt that the experience is veridical, the thinker forms the belief that there is blood on the knife in the usual manner. Intuitively, this belief is at the very least better justified than it would be in the absence of the relevant visual experience. On the supposition that one's evidence consists of those propositions that one knows, we can ask: what known proposition or propositions justify this belief, to the extent that it is justified? The proposition that there is blood on the knife is false and therefore not known. Perhaps the thinker's evidence for his belief that there is blood on the knife is the true proposition that (i) it appears that there is blood on the knife or the true proposition that (ii) my experience is as of there being blood on the knife . [ 13 ] However, some philosophers maintain that in typical cases of perception, one does not form beliefs about how things appear to one, or about how one's perceptual experience presents things as being: rather, in response to one's experiences, one simply forms beliefs about the external world itself. [ 14 ] If this is correct, then, given that knowledge requires belief, propositions like (i) and (ii) are not known because they are not believed. Hence, if this model is correct, then, on the view that one's evidence consists only of known propositions, the thinker's belief that there is blood on the knife seems to lack any justification. [ 15 ]

According to the phenomenal conception of evidence, only one's experiences can serve as evidence. According to Williamson's conception of evidence as knowledge, one's experiences are excluded from counting as evidence—at best, one's evidence includes whatever propositions about one's experiences that one knows. Even if one abandons the phenomenal conception of evidence, however, one might hold on to the idea that one's evidence includes one's experiences, inasmuch as one's experiences can and often do make some difference to what one is justified in believing, regardless of whether one forms beliefs about those experiences themselves. A view of evidence that is more liberal than either Williamson's or the phenomenal conception might thus take one's evidence to include both one's experiences and one's knowledge, on the grounds that the beliefs of a rational thinker will exhibit direct sensitivity both to what he knows and to the experiences that he undergoes. The question of whether one's experiences—as opposed to one's beliefs about one's experiences, or one's knowledge of one's experiences—can play a direct role in justifying beliefs about the external world is a much contested one in the philosophy of perception; it will not be pursued further here.

An issue that has recently come to the fore concerns the distinction between first-order evidence and higher-order evidence (Christensen 2010, Feldman 2005, Kelly 2005, 2010, Lasonen-Aarnio 2014). Intuitively, first-order evidence E is evidence that bears directly on some target proposition or hypothesis H . Higher-order evidence is evidence about the character of E itself, or about subjects' capacities and dispositions for responding rationally to E . Suppose that a trained meteorologist carefully surveys the available meteorological data and concludes that it will rain tomorrow . Here, the meteorological data ( E ) is first-order evidence that bears on the hypothesis ( H ), that it will rain tomorrow . Now consider the fact that the meteorologist arrived at the view that it will rain tomorrow on the basis of E . This fact is higher-order evidence, inasmuch as it is evidence about the content and import of the original meteorological data E . In particular, given that the meteorologist is generally competent when it comes to assessing the relevant kind of evidence, the fact that she arrived at the view that H on the basis of E is evidence for the epistemic propositions that E supports H . Moreover, at least in many contexts, the fact that the meteorologist arrived at the view that H on the basis of E will count as evidence, not only for the epistemic proposition that E supports H , but also for the hypothesis itself, i.e., it will rain tomorrow . This seems especially clear in cases in which a third party lacks access to the original meteorological evidence E (or is incompetent to assess that evidence) but does know that the meteorologist arrived at the verdict that it will rain tomorrow on its basis. In these circumstances, it makes sense for the third party to increase his credence in rain tomorrow, once he learns what the meteorologist has concluded. In effect, in these circumstances, one treats the fact that the meteorologist arrived at the belief that it will rain tomorrow as a kind of proxy for the meteorological evidence to which one lacks access, or which one is incompetent to assess (Kelly 2005). Here evidence of evidence (for H ) is itself evidence for H (Feldman 2005). The general lesson is that higher-order evidence sometimes serves as evidence that should make a difference not only to what one believes about the first-order evidence, but also to one's beliefs about the world itself.

Other cases, however, are less clear-cut. For example, suppose that a second trained meteorologist evaluates the available meteorological data E and arrives at her own view about the possibility that it will rain tomorrow. She then learns that the first meteorologist arrived at the view that it will rain tomorrow on the basis of evidence E . Should the second meteorologist count her colleague's opinion as additional evidence for the hypothesis that it will rain tomorrow? Or would doing so be in effect to engage in a kind of illegitimate double counting of the original evidence (Kelly 2005, Matheson 2009)? More generally, in what circumstances, exactly, is evidence of evidence (for some proposition) evidence for that proposition (Fitelson 2012, Feldman 2014)? Questions about the nature and bearing of higher-order evidence are topics of active research.

The situation in which I would properly be said to have evidence for the statement that some animal is a pig is that, for example, in which the beast itself is not actually on view, but I can see plenty of pig-like marks on the ground outside its retreat. If I find a few buckets of pig-food, that's a bit more evidence, and the noises and the smell may provide better evidence still. But if the animal then emerges and stands there plainly in view, there is no longer any question of collecting evidence; its coming into view doesn't provide me with more evidence that it's a pig, I can now just see that it is.    —J.L. Austin, Sense and Sensibilia

‘Not enough evidence God! Not enough evidence!’    —Bertrand Russell, upon being asked what he would reply if, after dying, he were brought into the presence of God and asked why he had not been a believer

If E is evidence for some hypothesis H , then E makes it more likely that H is true: in such circumstances, E confirms H . On the other hand, if E is evidence against H , then E makes it less likely that H is true: E disconfirms H . Verification is the limiting case of confirmation: a piece of evidence verifies a hypothesis in this sense just in case it conclusively establishes that hypothesis as true. At the other end of the spectrum, falsification is the limiting case of disconfirmation: a piece of evidence falsifies a hypothesis just in case it conclusively establishes that the hypothesis is false. It is at least somewhat controversial whether full-fledged verification or falsification in this sense ever occurs. [ 16 ]

Plausibly, there are some propositions whose truth or falsity we grasp in an utterly direct, unmediated way. Consider, for example, simple arithmetical truths such as the proposition that 2+2=4. Traditionally, such truths have been held to be ‘self-evident’; allegedly, they need only to be understood in order to be known. If the truth value of every proposition were transparent in this way, perhaps we would have little or no need for evidence. In contrast, a central function of evidence is to make evident that which would not be so in its absence.

In general, we rely on evidence in cases in which our access to truth would otherwise be problematic. One's recognition that the earth is roughly spherical in shape seems to depend on one's evidence in a way that one's recognition that 2+2=4 does not. Of course, it can be a contested matter whether one's access to truth in some domain is problematic—and thus, whether one is dependent upon evidence for grasping truths about that domain. Common sense holds that we often have unproblematic access to facts about our immediate physical environment via sense perception; perhaps in part for this reason, common sense regards it as at the very least odd, if not simply wrong, to say that one who finds himself face-to-face with what is clearly a pig thereby has strong evidence that the animal is a pig. (Although it would no doubt also be odd to assert that one lacks evidence that the animal is a pig in such circumstances.) In contrast, much traditional epistemology holds that one's access to such truths is always deeply problematic; what is unproblematic, rather, is one's recognition that one's experiences represent the world as being a certain way. Hence, much traditional epistemology construes the relationship between one's experiences and one's beliefs about the physical world on the model of the relationship between evidence and hypothesis. On this model, the fallibility of sense perception is assimilated to the fallibility of non-deductive inference. (The above quotation from Austin is, of course, a protest against the model in question.)

As a general matter, evidence seems to play a mediating role vis-a-vis our efforts to arrive at an accurate picture of the world: we seek to believe what is true by means of holding beliefs that are well-supported by the evidence, and we seek to avoid believing what is false by means of not holding beliefs that are not well-supported by the evidence. The picture is well summarized by Blanshard:

‘Surely the only possible rule’, one may say, ‘is to believe what is true and disbelieve what is false.’ And of course that would be the rule if we were in a position to know what was true and what false. But the whole difficulty arises from the fact that we do not and often cannot. What is to guide us then?… The ideal is believe no more, but also no less, than what the evidence warrants (1974: 410–411).

Indeed, it is plausible to suppose that both the capacity of evidence to justify belief (Section 1) and the fact that rational thinkers respect their evidence (Section 2) depends upon the connection between evidence and truth.

Why should attending to evidence constitute a promising way of pursuing an accurate view of the world? This question is more readily answered on some conceptions of evidence than on others. Thus, consider a theory according to which evidence consists of facts . Given that no true proposition is inconsistent with any fact, one has an immediate rationale for not believing any proposition that is inconsistent with one's evidence, for only propositions that are consistent with one's evidence are even candidates for being true. The same holds for Williamson's conception of evidence as knowledge: inasmuch as any known proposition is true, inconsistency with one's evidence entails inconsistency with some truth. Put the other way around: if evidence consists of facts or known propositions, then no body of evidence rules out any truth. Notice that the same is not true for conceptions of evidence according to which one's evidence consists of one's beliefs, or one's experiences, or propositions of which one is psychologically certain: that a proposition is inconsistent with one of my beliefs, or with the content of one of my experiences, or with a proposition of which I am psychologically certain, does not guarantee that it is false.

Perhaps the root notion of evidence is that of something which serves as a reliable sign, symptom, or mark of that which it is evidence of . In Ian Hacking's phrase, this is ‘the evidence of one thing that points beyond itself’ (1975: 37). Thus, smoke is evidence of fire, Koplik spots evidence of measles, a certain distinctive and off-putting smell evidence of rotten egg. Here, the paradigm would seem to be that of straightforward correlation: the reason why smoke counts as evidence of fire, but not of impending rain, is that smoke is a reliable indicator or symptom of the former but not of the latter. Taken at face value, the idea of evidence as reliable indicator tends to encourage an inclusive picture of what sorts of things are eligible to count as evidence, according to which either mental or non-mental objects, events and states of affairs can qualify as such. For such entities would seem to be perfectly capable of standing in the relevant relation to other objects, events and states of affairs.

Consider the claim that

(1) Koplik spots are evidence of measles.

On what is perhaps its most natural reading, the truth of this claim was an empirical discovery of medical science. At a certain point in time, it was discovered that Koplik spots are a reliable indication of measles—something which was true, presumably, long before the discovery in question. Here, the evidence relation is understood as a relation that either obtains or fails to obtain independently of what anyone knows or believes about its obtaining. [ 17 ] To the extent that one is concerned to arrive at an accurate picture of the world, knowledge of instances of this relation—roughly, knowledge of what bits of the world tend to accompany what other bits of the world—would seem to be exactly the sort of thing which one is seeking. When the evidence relation is construed in this way, investigating it is of a piece with investigating the world itself.

(2) Smoke is evidence of fire

would seem to have the same empirical status as (1), differing chiefly in that it is much more widely known.

When evidence is understood in this way, it is no mystery why attending to evidence is a good strategy for one who is concerned to arrive at an accurate picture of the world: given that Koplik spots are in fact a reliable indicator of measles, it obviously behooves those who are concerned to have true beliefs about which individuals are suffering from measles to pay attention to facts about which individuals have Koplik spots. Similarly, given that smoke is in fact a reliable indicator of fire, those who are concerned to have true beliefs about the presence or absence of fire do well to pay attention to the presence or absence of smoke. Thus, when we understand ‘ E is evidence for H ’ as more or less synonymous with ‘ E is a reliable indicator of H ’, the connection between evidence and truth seems easily secured and relatively straightforward.

Of course, although the presence of Koplik spots is in fact a reliable guide to the presence of measles, one who is ignorant of this fact is not in a position to conclude that a given patient has measles, even if he or she is aware that the patient has Koplik spots. Someone who knows that Koplik spots are evidence of measles is in a position to diagnose patients in a way that someone who is ignorant of that fact is not. In general, the extent to which one is in a position to gain new information on the basis of particular pieces of evidence typically depends upon one's background knowledge. This fact is a commonplace among philosophers of science and has also been emphasized by philosophically-sophisticated historians. [ 18 ]

Suppose that one knows that a particular patient has Koplik spots but is ignorant of the connection between Koplik spots and measles. Moreover, suppose that one's ignorance is not itself the result of any prior irrationality or unreasonableness on one's part: rather, one has simply never had the opportunity to learn about the connection between Koplik spots and measles. In these circumstances, does one have evidence that the patient has measles? Taken in one sense, this question should be answered affirmatively: one does have evidence that the patient has measles, although one is not in a position to recognize that one does. However, the idea that one has evidence in such circumstances seems to sit somewhat awkwardly with the themes that evidence tends to justify belief, and that rational thinkers are sensitive to their evidence. For consider the moment when one first learns that the patient has Koplik spots. Given one's ignorance of the connection between Koplik spots and measles, one is not in any way unreasonable if one fails to become more confident that the patient has measles. Indeed, given one's ignorance, it seems that one would be unreasonable if one did become more confident that the patient has measles upon learning that she has Koplik spots, and that a belief that the patient has measles held on this basis would be unjustified.

This suggests that the notion of evidence in play in statements such as ‘evidence tends to justify belief’ and ‘rational thinkers respect their evidence’ cannot simply be identified with evidence in the sense of reliable indicator. Let's call evidence in the former sense normative evidence, and evidence in the latter sense indicator evidence. Although the normative notion of evidence cannot simply be identified with the indicator notion, we would expect the two to be closely linked, inasmuch as one's possession of normative evidence frequently depends upon one's awareness that one thing is indicator evidence of something else.

Reflection on the role that considerations of background theory play in determining how it is reasonable for one to respond to new information have convinced some that the normative notion of evidence is better understood in terms of a three place-relation rather than a two-place relation. According to this view, judgements of the form ‘ E is evidence for H ’—when this is understood as more or less synonymous with ‘ E tends to make it more reasonable to believe H ’— are typically elliptical for judgements of the form ‘ E is evidence for H relative to background theory T ’. Thus, given that your background theory includes the claim that Koplik spots are a reliable indication of measles, the fact that a particular patient has Koplik spots constitutes normative evidence for you (gives you a reason to believe that) the patient has measles. On the other hand, given that my background theory does not include the claim that Koplik spots are a reliable indication of measles, the fact that the same patient has Koplik spots does not constitute normative evidence for me (give me a reason to believe that) the patient has measles.

The view that the status of E as normative evidence for H can depend upon considerations of background theory immediately raises questions about the status of the background theory itself. Given that one's background theory consists of some set of propositions, which set is it? Is it the set of propositions that one knows? Or rather, the set of propositions that one believes? Or perhaps, the set of propositions that one justifiably believes? It seems that E might count as evidence for H relative to the set of propositions that one believes but not relative to the set of propositions that one knows (or vice versa)—which of these, if either, determines whether E is evidence for H , in the sense that one's possession of E tends to justify one in believing that H is true? The issues that arise here are subtle and delicate; Christensen (1997) is a careful and illuminating discussion.

A note about confirmation theory . Although philosophy had in some sense long been concerned with questions about when evidence makes a theory more likely to be true, the investigation of this relationship reached new levels of systematicity and rigor during the positivist era. The positivists thought of philosophy as ‘the logic of science’; they thus took it to be a central task of philosophy to furnish detailed analyses and explications of fundamental scientific concepts such as explanation and confirmation.

Hempel (1945) and Carnap (1950) each distinguished two different ‘concepts’ of confirmation: the ‘classificatory’ or ‘qualitative’ concept on the one hand and the ‘quantitative’ concept on the other. Roughly, the classificatory concept is employed in the making of yes-or-no judgements about whether a given piece of evidence does or does not support a given hypothesis. Thus, it is the classificatory concept which is in play when one is concerned with judgements of the following form: ‘Hypothesis H is confirmed by evidence E ’. On the other hand, the quantitative concept is employed in making numerical judgements about how much support a hypothesis derives from a given piece of evidence (e.g,. ‘Hypothesis H is confirmed by evidence E to degree R ’). [ 19 ] Formal theories attempting to explicate each of these notions were developed. Hempel (1945) took the lead in attempting to explicate the qualitative concept while Carnap (1950, 1952) concentrated on the quantitative concept. During this period, the philosophical study of the relationship between evidence and theory took on, perhaps for the first time, the characteristics of something like normal science, and became a discipline replete with technical problems, puzzles, and paradoxes, the anticipated solutions to which were viewed as items on the agenda for future research. [ 20 ] Here lie the origins of present-day confirmation theory, as represented by Bayesianism in its protean forms (See, e.g., Jeffrey 1965, 1992, 2004, Horwich 1983, Howson and Urbach 1993) and its rivals (e.g., Glymour's (1980) ‘bootstrapping’ model of confirmation).

Although Carnap's own vision for confirmation theory was ultimately abandoned, [ 21 ] the quantitative approach that he championed proved influential to the subsequent development of the subject. In particular, the emphasis on attempting to understand confirmation in quantitative terms paved the way for the increased use of mathematics—and specifically, the probability calculus—in the philosophical study of evidence. The idea that the probability calculus provides the key to understanding the relation of confirmation is central to Bayesianism, the dominant view within contemporary confirmation theory. An examination of Bayesianism will not be undertaken here. [ 22 ] Instead, we will simply take note of the explication of the concept of evidence which the Bayesian offers. At the outset of the present section, we noted that evidence confirms a theory just in case that evidence makes the theory more likely to be true; evidence disconfirms a theory just in case the evidence renders the theory less likely to be true. The Bayesian takes these platitudes at face value and offers the following probabilistic explication of what it is for E to be evidence for H :

E is evidence for H if and only if Prob( H / E ) > Prob( H ). [ 23 ]

That is, E is evidence for H just in case the conditional probability of H on E is greater than the unconditional probability of H . Thus, the fact that the suspect's blood is on the knife is evidence for the hypothesis that the suspect committed the murder if and only if the probability that the suspect committed the murder is greater given that his blood is on the knife than it would be otherwise.

E is evidence against H if and only if Prob( H / E ) < Prob( H ).

That is, E is evidence against H just in case the conditional probability of H on E is less than the unconditional probability of H . Thus, the fact that the suspect's fingerprints are not on the knife is evidence against the hypothesis that the suspect committed the murder if and only if the probability that the suspect committed the murder is lower given the absence of his fingerprints on the knife than it would be otherwise. Within this probabilistic model, verification (in the sense of conclusive confirmation) would involve bestowing probability 1 on an hypothesis while falsification would involve bestowing probability 0 on it.

This straightforward probabilistic model of evidence and confirmation is an attractive and natural one. Indeed, hints of it are found in Anglo-American law. [ 24 ] The model is not without its critics, however. Achinstein (1983) contends that something can increase the probability of a claim without providing evidence for that claim. For example, the information that seven-time Olympic swimming champion Mark Spitz went swimming increases the probability that Mark Spitz has just drowned; nevertheless, according to Achinstein, the former hardly constitutes evidence that the latter is true. [ 25 ] According to a line of thought in Goodman (1955), the notion of confirmation that is crucial for science is not to be understood in terms of straightforward increase-in-probability. Thus, consider the generalization that All of the change in my pocket consists of nickels . Examining one of the coins in my pocket and finding that it is a nickel undoubtedly increases the probability that the generalization is true, inasmuch as it now has one less potential falsifier. But Goodman contends the relevant observation does not confirm the generalization, inasmuch as the observation should not make one more confident that any of the other, as-yet-unexamined coins in my pocket is itself a nickel. (According to Goodman, although ‘accidental generalizations’ such as ‘All the coins in my pockets are nickels’ can have their probabilities raised by observations, they cannot be confirmed by them, in the way that ‘law-like generalizations’ can be.)

In general, the idea that the probability calculus provides the key to understanding the concept of evidence has found greater favor among philosophers of science than among traditional epistemologists. In the next and final section, we turn to a cluster of themes that have also been much emphasized by philosophers of science, themes which came to the fore as a result of philosophical reflection upon the role that evidence plays within scientific practice itself.

What is creditable … is not the mere belief in this or that, but the having arrived at it by a process which, had the evidence been different, would have carried one with equal readiness to a contrary belief.    —Blanshard, Reason and Belief

It is natural to suppose that the concept of evidence is intimately related to the cognitive desideratum of objectivity . According to this line of thought, individuals and institutions are objective to the extent that they allow their views about what is the case or what ought to be done to be guided by the evidence, as opposed to (say) the typically distorting influences of ideological dogma, prejudice in favor of one's kin, or texts whose claim to authority is exhausted by their being venerated by tradition. To the extent that individuals and institutions are objective in this sense, we should expect their views to increasingly converge over time: as shared evidence accumulates, consensus tends to emerge with respect to formerly disputed questions. Objective inquiry is evidence-driven inquiry, which makes for intersubjective agreement among inquirers. [ 26 ] Thus, it is widely thought that the reason why the natural sciences exhibit a degree of consensus that is conspicuously absent from many others fields is that the former are evidence-driven—and therefore, objective—in ways that the latter are not.

According to this picture, a central function of evidence is to serve as a neutral arbiter among rival theories and their adherents. Whatever disagreements might exist at the level of theory, if those who disagree are objective, then the persistence of their disagreement is an inherently fragile matter, for it is always hostage to the emergence of evidence which decisively resolves the dispute in one direction or the other. Our ability to arrive at consensus in such circumstances is thus constrained only by our resourcefulness and ingenuity in generating such evidence (e.g., by designing and executing crucial experiments) and by the generosity of the world in offering it up.

The slogan ‘the priority of evidence to theory’ has sometimes been employed in an attempt to capture this general theme. However, this slogan has itself been used in a number of importantly different ways that it is worth pausing to distinguish.

First, the claim that ‘evidence is prior to theory’ might suggest a simple model of scientific method that is often associated (whether fairly or unfairly) with Francis Bacon. According to the model in question, the collection of evidence is temporally prior to the formulation of any theory or theories of the relevant domain. That is, the first stage in any properly-conducted scientific inquiry consists in gathering and classifying a large amount of data; crucially, this process is in no way guided or aided by considerations of theory. Only after a large amount of data has been gathered and classified does the scientist first attempt to formulate some theory or theories of the domain in question. On this model, then, evidence is prior to theory within the context of discovery . This model—which Hempel (1966) dubbed ‘the narrow inductivist account of scientific inquiry’—is now universally rejected by philosophers. For it is now appreciated that, at any given time, which theories are accepted—or more weakly, which theories are taken to be plausible hypotheses—typically plays a crucial role in guiding the subsequent search for evidence which bears on those theories. Thus, a crucial experiment might be performed to decide between two rival theories T 1 and T 2 ; once performed, the outcome of that experiment constitutes an expansion in the total evidence which is subsequently available to the relevant scientific community. If, however, the two leading contenders had been theories T 1 and T 3 , a different crucial experiment would have been performed, which would have (typically) resulted in a different expansion in the total evidence. The point that the formulation of hypotheses is often temporally prior to the collection of evidence which bears on their truth (and that this priority is no accident) is perhaps most immediately apparent on Popper's falsificationist model of science (1959), according to which exemplary scientific practice consists in repeatedly attempting to falsify whichever theory is presently most favored by the relevant scientific community. But it is no less true on other, less radical models of science, which (unlike Popper's) allow a role for confirming evidence as well as disconfirming evidence. As Hempel puts the point,

In sum, the maxim that data should be gathered without guidance by antecedent hypotheses about the connections among the facts under study is self-defeating, and it is certainly not followed in scientific inquiry. On the contrary, tentative hypotheses are needed to give direction to a scientific investigation. Such hypotheses determine, among other things, what data should be collected at a given point in a scientific investigation (1966, p. 13). [ 27 ]

A second, quite different, sense of ‘priority’ in which evidence has sometimes been held to be prior to theory is that of semantic priority. According to this view, the meanings of hypotheses that involve ‘theoretical terms’ (e.g., ‘electron’) depend upon the connections between such hypotheses and that which would count as evidence for their truth—typically on such accounts, the observations that would confirm them. The view that (observational) evidence is semantically prior to theories was central to the logical positivist conception of science. On this picture, meaning flows upward from the level of observation; a given theory is imbued with whatever meaning it has in virtue of standing in certain relations to the observational level, which constitutes the original locus of meaning. The picture was gradually abandoned, however, in the face of repeated failures to carry through the kind of theoretical reductions that the picture seemed to demand, as well as appreciation of the point, forcefully emphasized by Putnam [ 28 ] and others, that the meanings of theoretical terms do not seem to change as our views about what counts as confirming evidence for hypotheses in which they occur evolve.

A third and final sense of ‘priority’ in which evidence has often been thought to be prior to theory is that of epistemic priority. On this view, it is not that the task of evidence gathering either is or ought to be performed earlier in time than the task of formulating theories; nor is semantic priority at issue. Rather, the thought is that theories depend for their justification on standing in certain relations to evidence (understood here, once again, as that which is observed), but that observations do not themselves depend upon theories for their own justification. That is: (observational) evidence is prior to theory within the context of justification . This, perhaps, is the interpretation of ‘evidence is prior to theory’ on which the slogan enjoys its greatest plausibility. For it seems that our justification for believing any presently-accepted theory of natural or social science typically does depend upon suitable observations having been made, but that, on the other hand, one can be justified in taking oneself to have observed that such-and-such is the case even if there is at present no available theory as to why such-and-such is the case (and indeed, even if such-and-such's being the case is unexpected or unlikely given the theories that one presently accepts). To the extent that such a justificational asymmetry exists, there would seem to be some truth to the idea that evidence is epistemically prior to theory. [ 29 ] And this sort of priority might seem to be exactly what is required if evidence is to play the role of neutral arbiter among those who come to the table with different theoretical commitments.

The idea of evidence as a kind of ultimate court of appeal, uniquely qualified to generate agreement among those who hold rival theories, is a highly plausible one. Nevertheless, complications with this simple picture—some more serious than others—abound. Above, we took note of the widely-held view according to which the bearing of a given piece of evidence on a given hypothesis depends on considerations of background theory. Thus, two individuals who hold different background theories might disagree about how strongly a particular piece of evidence confirms a given theory, or indeed, about whether the evidence confirms the theory at all. Of course, if the question of who has the superior background theory is itself susceptible to rational adjudication, then this possibility need pose no deep threat to objectivity. Often enough, this will be the case. Suppose, for example, that you treat the fact that

(i) the patient has Koplik spots on her skin

as evidence that

(ii) the patient has measles

while I do not, simply because you know that Koplik spots are typically an effect of measles while I am ignorant of this fact. Here, that you treat (i) as evidence for (ii) while I do not is attributable to the straightforward superiority of your background theory to mine: you possess a crucial piece of medical knowledge that I lack. Presumably, if I were to acquire the relevant bit of medical knowledge, then I too would treat (i) as confirming evidence for (ii). The possibility that those who are relatively ill-informed might differ from those who are better informed in the way that they respond to evidence does not itself cast doubt on the capacity of evidence to play the role of neutral arbiter among theories; clearly, what is needed in such cases is for the worse informed party to become privy to those facts of which they are presently ignorant.

However, a recurrent motif in twentieth century philosophy of science is that the bearing of evidence on theory is mediated by factors that might vary between individuals in ways that do not admit of such rational adjudication. Imagine two eminent scientists, both of whom are thoroughly acquainted with all of the available evidence which bears on some theory. One believes the theory, the other believes some different, incompatible theory instead. Must one of the two scientists be making a mistake about what their shared evidence supports? Perhaps the most natural answer to this question, at least at first blush, is ‘Yes’. A fair amount of twentieth century philosophy of science shied away from this natural answer, however, at least in part because of a growing awareness of just how often eminent, fully-informed and seemingly rational scientists have disagreed in the history of science. [ 30 ] Thus, Thomas Kuhn (1962) would maintain that both scientists might be perfectly rational in holding incompatible theories, inasmuch as rationality is relative to a paradigm, and the two scientists might be operating within different paradigms. Similarly, Carnap (1952) would maintain that both scientists might be rational because rationality is relative to an inductive method or confirmation function, and the two scientists might be employing different inductive methods or confirmation functions. As we have noted, for the contemporary Bayesian, how it is reasonable to respond to a given body of evidence depends upon one's prior probability distribution: the two scientists might thus both be rational in virtue of possessing different prior probability distributions. There are, of course, important differences among these accounts of rationality. But notice that they each possess the same structure: what it is reasonable for one to believe depends not only on one's total evidence but also on some further feature F (one's prior probability distribution, paradigm, inductive method.). Because this further feature F can vary between different individuals, even quite different responses to a given body of evidence might be equally reasonable. On such views, the bearing of a given body of evidence on a given theory becomes a highly relativized matter. For this reason, the capacity of evidence to generate agreement among even impeccably rational individuals is in principle subject to significant limitations.

Why is relativity to a prior probability distribution (paradigm, inductive method) any more threatening to the idea of evidence as neutral arbiter than the previously mentioned relativity to background theory? The difference is this: when I fail to treat Koplik spots as evidence of measles, there is a clear and straightforward sense in which my background theory is inferior to yours. By contrast, proponents of the views presently under consideration typically insist that a relatively wide range of prior probability distributions (confirmation functions, inductive methods, paradigms) might be equally good . For this reason, such views are often criticized on the grounds that they turn the relationship between evidence and theory into an overly subjective affair.

Proponents of such views are not wholly without resources for attempting to alleviate this concern. In particular, many subjective Bayesians place great weight on a phenomenon known as the ‘swamping’ or ‘washing out’ of the priors. Here, the idea is that even individuals who begin with quite different prior probabilities will tend to converge in their views given subsequent exposure to a sufficiently extensive body of common evidence. However, the significance of the relevant convergence results is highly controversial. [ 31 ]

According to the accounts briefly canvassed here, two individuals of impeccable rationality might radically disagree about the bearing of a particular piece of evidence E on a given hypothesis H . Even in such cases, the disputants are not wholly without common ground. For they at least agree about the characterization of the evidence E : their disagreement concerns rather the probative force of E with respect to H . An even more radical challenge to the capacity of evidence to serve as neutral arbiter among rival theories concerns the alleged theory-ladenness of observation . According to proponents of the doctrine of theory-ladenness, in cases of fundamental theoretical dispute, there will typically be no theoretically-neutral characterization of the evidence available. Rather, adherents of rival theories will irremediably differ as to the appropriate description of the data itself. [ 32 ]

The doctrine of theory-ladenness is perhaps best appreciated when it is viewed against the background of the positivist tradition to which it was in large part a reaction. For the positivists, evidence was both epistemically and semantically prior to theory. Moreover, central to the positivist conception of science as a paradigm of rationality and objectivity is the idea that its disputes admitted of rational adjudication by appeal to evidence that could be appreciated by both sides. For these reasons, the positivists often insisted that the fundamental units of evidential significance—observation statements or ‘protocol sentences’—should employ only vocabulary that is within the idiolect of any minimally competent speaker of the relevant language. Ideally then, observation statements should be comprehensible to and verifiable by individuals who possess no specialized knowledge or terminological sophistication. Thus, Carnap recommended ‘blue’ and ‘hard’ as exemplary predicates for observation sentences. [ 33 ] As against this, Hanson insisted that

… the layman simply cannot see what the physicist sees … when the physicist looks at an X-ray tube, he sees the instrument in terms of electrical circuit theory, thermodynamic theory, the theories of metal and glass structure, thermionic emission, optical transmission, refraction, diffraction, atomic theory, quantum theory and special relativity (1961:19).

But what holds for the physicist and the layman holds also for two physicists with sufficiently different theoretical commitments. Thus

To say that Tycho and Kepler, Simplicius and Galileo, Hooke and Newton, Priestly and Lavoisier, Soddy and Einstein, De Broglie and Born, Heisenberg and Bohm all make the same observations but use them differently is too easy. This parallels the too-easy epistemological doctrine that all normal observers see the same things in x , but interpret them differently. It does not explain controversy in research science (1961:13).

The extent to which observation is theory-laden remains a contested matter. [ 34 ] To the extent that evidence which bears on a theory does not admit of a neutral characterization among those with sufficiently different theoretical commitments, this threatens to limit the ability of such evidence to successfully discharge the role of neutral arbiter in such cases. Still, whatever concessions to the proponents of theory-ladenness might be in order, the significance of the doctrine that they defend should not be overstated. For in any case, it seems undeniable that theories sometimes are discredited by the emergence of evidence which is taken to undermine them—even in the eyes of their former proponents. [ 35 ] Let's assume then that evidence sometimes does successfully discharge the function of neutral arbiter among theories and is that which secures intersubjective agreement among inquirers. What must evidence be like, in order for it to play this role? That is, given that evidence sometimes underwrites intersubjective agreement, what constraints does this place on answers to the question: what sorts of things are eligible to count as evidence?

Above, we noted that the traditional epistemological demand that one's evidence consist of that to which one has immediate and unproblematic access—and indeed, that one's evidence must be such that one can appreciate it (at least it in principle) even when one is in the most dire of epistemic predicaments—has often encouraged a phenomenal conception of evidence, according to which one's evidence is limited to one's experiences or sense data. On this picture, evidence consists of essentially private mental states, accessible only to the relevant subject. This picture of evidence stands in no small measure of tension with the idea that a central function of evidence is to serve as a neutral arbiter among competing views. For it is natural to think that the ability of evidence to play this latter role depends crucially on its having an essentially public character, i.e., that it is the sort of thing which can be grasped and appreciated by multiple individuals. Here, the most natural contenders would seem to be physical objects and the states of affairs and events in which they participate, since it is such entities that are characteristically accessible to multiple observers. (I ask what evidence there is for your diagnosis that the patient suffers from measles; in response, you might simply point to or demonstrate the lesions on her skin.) On the other hand, to the extent that one's evidence consists of essentially private states there would seem to be no possibility of sharing one's evidence with others. But it is precisely the possibility of sharing relevant evidence which is naturally thought to secure the objectivity of science. Indeed, it has often been held that inasmuch as the objectivity of science is underwritten by the fact that science is evidence driven, it is the public character of scientific evidence which is crucial. On this view, it is a central methodological norm of science to eschew as inadmissible (e.g.) any alleged episodes of incommunicable insight in considering whether to accept or reject a claim. The theme of the essentially public character of scientific evidence has been prominent from the earliest days of modern science—it was championed, for example, by Robert Boyle, founder of the Royal Society, who insisted that the ‘witnessing’ of experiments was to be a collective act [ 36 ] —and has remained so up until the present day. Unsurprisingly, the theme was taken up by philosophers of science with gusto. Thus, Hempel required that ‘all statements of empirical science be capable of test by reference to evidence which is public, i.e., evidence which can be secured by different observers and does not depend essentially on the observer’ (1952: 22). The idea was echoed by other leading positivists (see, e.g., Feigl 1953) as well as by Popper (1959). More recently, in the course of reviewing ‘some of the things objectivity, and specifically scientific objectivity, has been thought to involve’, Peter Railton singles out the idea that

… objective inquiry uses procedures that are intersubjective and independent of particular individuals and circumstances—for example … it makes no essential use of introspective or subjectively privileged evidence in theory assessment (1985: 764).

In short, it is not simply that the conception of evidence gleaned from exemplary scientific practice differs from the conception of evidence that traditional epistemology seemed to demand (as would be the case if, for example, one was somewhat more inclusive than the other). Rather, what seemed to be one of the characteristic features of scientific evidence, viz. its potential publicity, is the exact contrary of one of the characteristic features of evidence as construed by much traditional epistemology, viz. its privacy. Such a tension was bound to generate a certain amount of dissonance. One historically noteworthy manifestation of this dissonance was the protracted debate within the positivist tradition over the nature of ‘protocol sentences’. Here, Carnap's odyssey is perhaps the most illuminating. Early in his philosophical career, Carnap, under the influence of Russell and Ernst Mach (and through them, the tradition of classical empiricism) took sense data as the ultimate evidence for all of our empirical knowledge. (Indeed, his early work Der Logischer Aufbau der Welt (1928) is largely devoted to the Russellian project of ‘constructing’ the external world out of sense data.) During this period, Carnap maintained that the protocol sentences that serve as the ‘confirmation basis’ for scientific theories refer to sense data or (to be more precise) ‘the sensing of sense data’. However, under the influence of both Popper and Otto Neurath, Carnap ultimately abandoned this view of protocol sentences in favor of one on which such sentences refer not to private mental events but rather to public objects and states of affairs. As recounted in his philosophical autobiography, the primary motivation for this change of heart was the growing conviction that the conception of evidence as private mental states rendered it inadequate to ground the intersubjectivity and objectivity of science. [ 37 ] In this area as in others, the evolution of Carnap's own views was crucial to the evolution of the views of the Vienna Circle as a whole. The episode was well-recounted years later by Ayer:

At the outset … the prevailing view was that these [observation] statements referred to the subject's introspectible or sensory experiences … [I]t was held, following Russell and ultimately Berkeley, that perceiving physical objects was to be analyzed in terms of having sensations, or as Russell put it, of sensing sense data. Though physical objects might be publicly accessible, sense data were taken to be private. There could be no question of our literally sharing one another's sense data, any more than we can literally share one another's thoughts or images or feelings … [T]his conception of elementary statements was exposed to attack on various grounds.… [T]he most serious difficulty lay in the privacy of the objects to which the elementary statements were supposed to refer.… Because of such difficulties, Neurath, and subsequently Carnap, rejected the whole conception of elementary statements. They argued that if elementary statements were to serve as the basis for the intersubjective statements of science, they must themselves be intersubjective. They must refer, not to private incommunicable experiences, but to public physical events (1959: 17–20).

Inasmuch as it is the distinctive function of protocol sentences to report one's evidence, a view about what sorts of contents a protocol sentence might have is in effect a view about what sorts of things can count as evidence. To abandon a view according to which the subject matter of any protocol sentence concerns the ‘private incommunicable experiences’ of some particular individual is in effect to abandon a version of the phenomenal conception of evidence. To adopt in its place a view according to which the subject matter of any protocol sentence concerns ‘public physical events’ is thus a particularly radical shift, inasmuch as this latter view seems to entail that only public physical events can count as evidence—and in particular, that experiences, formerly taken to exhaust the category of evidence, are ineligible to count as such. [ 38 ]

Underneath the positivists' changing views about the nature of protocol sentences, however, lay a fundamental assumption that they never questioned. The assumption in question is the following: that there is some general restriction on the subject matter of a sentence if that sentence is a potential statement of one's evidence. This assumption was explicitly rejected by Austin:

It is not the case that the formulation of evidence is the function of any special sort of sentence.… In general, any kind of statement could state evidence for any other kind, if the circumstances were appropriate.… (1962: 116; emphases his).

According to the alternative picture sketched by Austin, there are, indeed, circumstances in which one's having knowledge that things are a certain way depends upon one's having ‘phenomenal’ evidence provided by the fact that is how things look , seem , or appear . Traditional epistemology errs, however, in thinking that this is the general case. Indeed, there are circumstances in which the fact that things are a certain way constitutes one's evidence for judgements about how they look, seem or appear. [ 39 ]

Inasmuch as he denies that there are any general restrictions on the subject matter of an evidence statement, Austin's way of thinking about evidence is considerably more liberal or inclusive than that of much of the tradition. In this respect, his account of evidence resembles Williamson's (2000) later theory. As we have seen, Williamson holds that one's evidence consists of everything that one knows. In particular, one's evidence is not limited to one's knowledge of one's experiences, nor is it limited to one's observational knowledge—one's evidence also includes any theoretical knowledge that one might possess (p. 190).

On such liberalized views, although one's evidence is not limited to one's introspectively arrived at knowledge of one's experiences, it includes everything that one knows about one's experiences on the basis of introspection. In this respect, such views are incompatible not only with the phenomenal conception of evidence but also with views that would rule out the objects of introspection as evidence on the grounds that the objects of introspection lack the objectivity and publicity that is characteristic of genuine evidence. However, it is dubious that any view on which evidence plays a role in justifying belief can consistently observe a constraint which would preclude the objects of introspection from counting as genuine evidence. Goldman (1997) argues that any such constraint is inconsistent with the introspectionist methodology employed in various areas of contemporary cognitive science and that this undercuts ‘the traditional view … that scientific evidence can be produced only by intersubjective methods that can be used by different investigators and will produce agreement’ (p. 95).

Reflection on examples drawn from more homely contexts also casts doubt on the idea that all genuine evidence is in principle accessible to multiple individuals. When one has a headache, one is typically justified in believing that one has a headache. While others might have evidence that one has a headache—evidence afforded, perhaps, by one's testimony, or by one's non-linguistic behavior—it is implausible that whatever evidence others possess is identical with that which justifies one's own belief that one has a headache. Indeed, it seems dubious that others could have one's evidence, given that others cannot literally share one's headache.

Here then we see another context in which theoretical demands are placed on the concept of evidence that seem to pull in different directions. On the one hand, it is thought central to the concept of evidence that evidence is by its very nature the kind of thing that can generate rational convergence of opinion in virtue of being shared by multiple individuals. This encourages the idea that any genuine piece of evidence can in principle be grasped by multiple individuals; anything which cannot be so grasped is either not genuine evidence or is at best a degenerate species thereof. On the other hand, evidence is taken to be that which justifies belief. And it seems that many of the beliefs which individuals hold about their own mental lives on the basis of introspection are justified by factors with respect to which they enjoy privileged access. Notably, the positivists' embrace of the idea that protocol sentences refer exclusively to publicly-observable physical objects and events was accompanied by an embrace of behaviorism in psychology. [ 40 ] It is characteristic of behaviorism to denigrate the idea that the deliverances of introspection can constitute genuine evidence; on this combination of views then, the thesis that all evidence consists of that which can be shared by multiple observers is upheld. For those who reject behaviorism, however, the idea that at least some evidence does not meet this condition is a more difficult one to resist.

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• –––, 2005. ‘How Probabilities Reflect Evidence,’ Philosophical Perspectives , Volume 19, Oxford: Blackwell: 153–178.
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• –––, 2008. ‘Evidence: Fundamental Concepts and the Phenomenal Conception,’ Philosophy Compass , 3(5): 933–955.
• –––, 2010. ‘Peer Disagreement and Higher Order Evidence,’ in Feldman and Warfield (eds.) Disagreement , Oxford: Oxford University Press: 111–174.
• –––, 2014. ‘Evidence Can Be Permissive,’ in Steup, Turri, and Sosa (eds.) Contemporary Debates in Epistemology , 2nd edition. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers: 298–313.
• Kim, Jaegwon, 1988. ‘What is Naturalized Epistemology?’ in James Tomberlin (ed.) Philosophical Perspectives 2, Epistemology , Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview Publishing Co: 381–405.
• Kronz, Frederick, 1992. ‘Carnap and Achinstein on Evidence,’ Philosophical Studies , 67: 151–167.
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confirmation | epistemology: Bayesian

Acknowledgments

For help in the preparation of this entry, I am grateful to Richard Feldman, Gilbert Harman, Nico Silins, Timothy Williamson, and especially, Sarah McGrath.

Copyright © 2014 by Thomas Kelly < tkelly @ princeton . edu >

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Library of Congress Catalog Data: ISSN 1095-5054

Cornell Law Review

Truth, reason, justice, and evidence law.

Talia Fisher

Anny and Paul Yanowicz Professor of Human Rights, Tel Aviv University Faculty of Law and visiting fellow at Harvard Law School’s  Program on Behavioral Economics and Public Policy (2023).

This Essay addresses the most fundamental jurisprudential question underlying the institution of evidence law: it explores the justifications for subjecting legal fact‑finding to the regulation of evidence rules.  This issue has been at the center of evidence law scholarship since the days of Bentham’s Rationale of Judicial Evidence, which advocated a naturalistic approach to legal fact‑finding and launched an attack against exclusionary rules.  Bentham’s approach came to be known as “Free Proof” and its followers included well‑known evidence law scholars, such as Wigmore, Thayer and Cross.  To this day, free proof remains both a normative ideal and a practical reality, enjoying support in both academic and judicial circles.  American trial judges routinely deviate from rules of evidence, when they sit without a jury, and evidence doctrine is continuously gravitating away from rules of admissibility.  Against the background of the gradual vanishing of the institution of evidence law from American courtrooms, this Essay will make the case for the regulation of legal fact‑finding and against free proof.  In so doing it will also unravel the different theoretical perspectives through which the institution of evidence law is viewed and provide a mapping of current evidence law scholarship.

To read this Essay, please click here: Truth, Reason, Justice, and Evidence Law .

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Part Four: Evaluating the Truth of the Premises

Chapter Nine: How to Think About Truth

For to say of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, is false. And to say of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not, is true. —Aristotle, Metaphysics

TRUTH , n. An ingenious compound of desirability and appearance. —Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary

• Objectivity and Truth
• Probability, Evidence, and Truth
• Self-Evidence
• Experiential Evidence
• Strategies for Evaluating Premises

This chapter provides an introduction to one of the central merits of arguments: the truth of premises. In a way, the entire book is about truth, since it aims to offer guidance, by way of good reasoning, for anyone who wishes to know the truth. But the point of this chapter is more specific: it aims to provide detailed practical directions for thinking about whether premises are true.

Remember—it takes only one false premise to render any argument unsound. [1]  A false premise doesn’t guarantee that the conclusion is false, since anyone can concoct a bad argument for a true conclusion. But if the unsound argument is the best reason you have for that conclusion, then it does guarantee that you have no good reason to accept the conclusion as true.

9.1 Objectivity and Truth

9.1.1 two laws of truth.

There are two venerable so-called laws of truth which serve us well for practical purposes. One of them, the law of noncontradiction, says that no statement is both true and false. It follows from this that truth is objective and absolute—there cannot be any statement, for example, that is true for you but false for me. Its flip side is the law of the excluded middle, which says that every statement is either true or false. It follows from this that there is no middle ground between the true and the false. Truth-values are evaluations—like true and false —that can be given of how well a statement fits with the world. (In the same way, moral values include evaluations—like good and evil —that can be given of, say, actions; and aesthetic values include evaluations—like beautiful and ugly —that can be given of, say, paintings). Another way of stating the law of the excluded middle is to say there are exactly two truth-values—namely, true and false —with nothing in the middle.

Why, then, is it so commonly asserted that truth is relative, that “what is true for you may be false for me”—a remark that seems to violate the law of noncontradiction? According to one poll, 62 percent of American adults believe that “there is no such thing as absolute truth.” The proportion rises to 74 percent for those ranging in age from 18 to 25. [2]

Should this be interpreted as flagrant disregard for the law of noncontradiction? Probably not. The survey response provides a good opportunity to apply the principle of charity; these apparent denials of absolute truth are often used as a convenient shorthand for a variety of other related and reasonable expressions, including these:

What you believe to be true I may believe to be false. What works in your life may not work in mine. The way you see things may not be the way I see things. The evidence available to you may not be available to me. What is reasonable for you may not be reasonable for me. Neither one of us is in the position to decide the truth for everyone everywhere always.

These paraphrases not only are fully harmonious with the law of noncontradiction, but also are absolutely true.

As Aristotle says, a true statement is one that says of what is that it is and of what is not that it is not. What is may appear to you to be different from the way it appears to me. And you may desire it to be different from the way I desire it to be. But this can’t make what is be two different ways at the same time; it can be only the way it is. When Ambrose Bierce writes satirically of “an ingenious compound of desirability and appearance” it is not really truth that he refers to (and he knows it) but what is often believed to be the truth.

Two Practical Laws of Truth

• Law of noncontradiction —no statement is both true and false.
• Law of excluded middle —every statement is either true or false.

9.1.2 Ambiguity Rather than Relative Truth

Some statements appear to violate these laws even though, on closer inspection, they do not. Consider the following:

Today is July 9. My name is David Carl Wilson. A train station is one mile from here. Chocolate ice cream tastes bad.

When I express these words here and now the statements are true. But when you express them at a different place and time, the statements are probably false. Does this mean they are both true and false or, perhaps, that they are neither?

No. In each case there are two different statements, one true, the other false. We are tempted to think otherwise only because the statements can be referentially ambiguous (to make use of terminology from Chapter 5). When I say today on July 9, it refers to July 9—thus, it can be disambiguated with the true statement Today, July 9, is July 9. But when you say it on November 18, it refers to November 18, and would be properly disambiguated by the false statement Today, November 18, is July 9. My name is David Carl Wilson and A train station is one mile from here are similar. The referents of my and here   would change with a change of speaker and location; when disambiguated, it would become clear that the statement with a different referent is a different statement.

Chocolate ice cream tastes bad is a trickier case. When I say it now it is true, but I probably mean to allow that it could be false when you say it or even when I say it next month. (If I mean instead that it tastes bad always and for everyone—and that you’re just mistaken if you think it tastes good—then I may have a strange view, but there is no apparent lack of objectivity to explain away.) But the statement includes no expression that changes its referent when expressed by a different person or at a different time or in a different place. This is because such an expression is implicit; what I am really saying is Chocolate ice cream tastes bad to me now, which can be made even clearer as Chocolate ice cream tastes bad to David Carl Wilson on July 9.  So when you say it, or when I say it next month, it really is a different statement with potentially a different truth-value. The same thing is usually true of any other sentence including a subjective verb such as tastes, looks, smells, feels, or sounds.

EXERCISES Chapter 9, set (a)

Paraphrase each statement to eliminate the appearance that its truth is relative. (You do not need to make the statement true; simply eliminate any possibility of referential ambiguity.)

Sample exercise. My state is one of the biggest in America.

Sample answer.  California is one of the biggest states in America.

• Harleys are the best-sounding bikes on the road.
• My brother is shorter than I am.
• Last year our country enjoyed a boom in the stock market.
• The home team is enjoying a winning season.

9.1.3 Some Cases in Which You Can’t Decide

I have described the two laws of truth as “useful for practical purposes”—not as necessary, inviolate, and unbending. This is because language is not always law-abiding. The ordinary folks who constantly use language in new and serviceable ways seldom get a note from their logician first. The result is that there are some interesting and puzzling cases in which it is at least conceivable that a statement is both true and false, or that it is neither true nor false. And in each case, there is not any simple and uncontroversial way of settling the matter (though in none of these cases is there any worry about whether truth is objective).

• Robert is bald. (Imagine that Robert is exactly in the border area between bald and not bald.)
• Hans is a Kraut. (Imagine that it is true that Hans is German, but false that Hans is deserving of disparagement on that count.)
• This sentence is false. (Just think about it!)
• Hercules cleaned the Augean stables. (It isn’t clearly true, since Hercules didn’t even exist, but it also seems mistaken to say it is false, since it is certainly truer than, say, Hercules cleaned the Augean stables using power tools. )

Sometimes there is a well-defined fictional world that a character such as Hercules inhabits; in those cases, the best strategy is to evaluate premises like Hercules cleaned the Augean stables according to whether they are true or false in their fictional world. Otherwise, in the fairly unusual instances when statements like these four appear as premises, it is best to evaluate them as can’t decide, with an explanation.

Generally, as we will see, when you evaluate a premise as can’t decide it will be because the evidence you have is more or less evenly balanced; if you were able to collect more evidence, you would be able eventually to settle the question. But it is at least conceivable in these four cases that the reason for evaluating a premise as can’t decide is that there is no fact of the matter—perhaps the statement is neither true nor false, or both true and false, and thus there is no choice to be made regardless of how much evidence you go on to collect. (On this option, indeterminate could actually be a third truth-value, between truth and falsity. ) Fortunately, given our practical aims in this text, we don’t need to decide why we can’t decide in these sorts of cases.

9.2 Probability, Evidence, and Truth

What makes a statement true is the way the world is; and it is always possible for me to make a mistake about the way the world is. This is because the world is one thing, while my judgment about the world is something else—and as the ancient proverb says, there is many a slip ‘twixt the cup and the lip. Many things can go wrong in that gap between the world and my judgment about it, no matter how tiny the gap might be. I may have poor evidence. I may be subject to wishful thinking. I may be inattentive. I may be fooled. Thus, it is ordinarily better to avoid evaluating premises with the unmodified adjectives true and false and to prefer expressions such as probably true and probably false (or even, in the strongest cases, certainly true and certainly false, assuming that by this we mean extremes in probability).

9.2.1 Probability as a Measure of Evidence

But what exactly is meant here by probably ? There are at least three different and legitimate notions of probability. The one that we are most concerned with in this text is epistemic probability . which is the likelihood that a statement is true, given the total evidence available to you—that is, given all of your background beliefs and experiences. ( Epistemic means having to do with knowledge. ) This is the notion of probability that should be used in your evaluation of premises. To say in your evaluation that a premise is probably true is just to say that you have fairly good evidence for its truth.

Unlike truth, epistemic probability always comes in degrees. It ranges along a continuum that can be expressed either colloquially (ranging from certainly true to certainly false ) or quantitatively (ranging from 1 to 0, respectively). Here are some examples:

Degrees of Epistemic Probability

Although it can sometimes be useful to express these probabilities quantitatively, doing so is likely to convey a false sense of precision. I might be able to tell the difference between beliefs with epistemic probabilities of .6 and .9 (that is, those that are somewhat probable and those that are very probable), but I doubt that I could discriminate between a .84 and a .85 belief. So I will rely chiefly on the less precise—but less misleading—colloquial expressions.

Epistemic probability, again unlike truth, has a very definite relative component. It is relative to you. It is your evidence— your background beliefs and experiences—that determine whether a statement is epistemically probable for you. There is widespread agreement about epistemic probabilities among many people regarding many statements. This is because we share such a wide range of background beliefs and experiences. Anyone with a rudimentary understanding of U.S. geography, for example, would assign a very high epistemic probability to this statement:

Alaska is larger than Rhode Island.

But consider this statement:

Minnesota is larger than Oregon.

I would have to say that I can’t decide (or that it has an epistemic probability of about .5). My meager evidence does not point clearly in either direction. But there are others (the current governors of the two states, for example, or those who are interested enough to Google it) who have evidence for its truth or falsity which is every bit as strong as the evidence most of us share regarding the statement about Alaska and Rhode Island. For them, it is either almost certainly true or almost certainly false (that is, it has an epistemic probability either close to 1 or close to 0).

It is important to add that epistemic probability has an objective component as well. Given the evidence that you have, there is nothing relative about how probable it makes the premise. There is a fact of the matter about how probable it is—regardless of whether you assess its probability correctly or not. In this way, epistemic probability is like the strike zone in baseball. A pitched ball is in the strike zone if it is over home plate and between the knees and arms of the batter. The strike zone is relative to the batter because a shorter batter or a batter who crouches will have a smaller strike zone. But it also has an objective component. Given the size and stance of the individual batter, there is an objective fact about whether the ball is in the zone—regardless of whether the batter assesses it correctly or not.

EXERCISES Chapter 9, set (b)

Provide two statements to which most people would assign the following measure of epistemic probability.

Sample exercise. Certainly false.

Sample answer. Two and two are five. The United States has 100 states.

• Certainly true.
• Probably true.
• Can’t decide.
• Probably false.
• Certainly false.

9.2.2 Probability as a Measure of Confidence

There is a second notion of probability, one that is not necessarily connected to evidence. Suppose you say, “I’m probably going to win the lottery, even though I realize that everything points against it.” You are acknowledging that the evidence is bad and thus that the epistemic probability of your winning is low. In this case, to say that you will probably win is to say merely that you have confidence you will win. You are not describing the strength of your evidence but the strength of your confidence, that is, the strength of your belief.

This is sometimes termed subjective probability and may be roughly defined as the amount of confidence you have that a given statement is true. Like epistemic probability, it is a matter of degrees and can also be expressed in colloquial terms ranging from certainly true to certainly false or in quantitative terms ranging from 1 to 0. But, unlike epistemic probability, it is relative to you; there is no fact over and above your level of confidence.

If we are intellectually honest—if our aim is to know the truth regarding the questions we care about—then we will endeavor to match subjective probability to epistemic probability. That is to say, we will aim to have the amount of confidence in a statement’s truth that is warranted by the total available evidence. When we succeed, our evaluations of probability will at the same time indicate both epistemic and subjective probability. This frequently does not happen. Even when my evidence for a belief remains the same from today to tomorrow, my mood about it may change. In Chapter 1 much was said about cases in which we adopt and support beliefs with little regard for the evidence—sometimes because of our innocent misuse of shortcuts in reasoning, sometimes because of bad motives. The problem in those cases can now be stated in another way—as the problem of mismatch between the subjective and epistemic probabilities.

The importance of matching subjective with epistemic probability, however, should not tempt you to make certain mistakes. Note, for example, that if I find that my confidence outstrips my apparent evidence—if, for example, I have a hunch that you are a decent human being despite my inability to say exactly why—this is not necessarily an indicator of bad reasoning or dishonesty on my part. It may mean there is some good reason submerged within my total evidence that I have not yet been able to put my finger on—I sense a reason is there, but it isn’t vivid enough for my thinking to have quickly turned it up. Hunches can go in either direction, however—they may be caused by still-subconscious evidence, or they may be caused by wishful thinking. There is no formula for telling the difference; continued cultivation of the intellectual virtues is the only way to get better at doing so.

Another mistake to avoid is the assumption that I must act with tentativeness if my belief is tentative—that is, if my belief is only slightly probable (whether epistemically or subjectively). Consider the statement My child is at the bottom of the pool. If both my evidence and my confidence are only slightly greater than .5 that this is true, it surely does not follow that I should be tentative as I dive in to rescue what may be my child. In short, when it comes to beliefs about the way the world is, confidence about how the belief translates into action must be distinguished from confidence in the belief itself. [3]

EXERCISES Chapter 9, set (c)

For each of these statements, describe a way in which your own epistemic and subjective probabilities might differ.

Sample exercise. The Yankees will win the World Series this year.

Sample answer. The epistemic probability might be in the area of “somewhat probable that this is false,” since the evidence suggests that they are one of the best teams, but only one of the teams will get through every round of the playoffs and end up on top. But the subjective probability might be very high—I may strongly believe it strictly because I am a lifelong Yankee fan.

• The proposed law eliminating a state sales tax will pass.
• Napoleon was the greatest military leader of all time.
• The professor was biased against me when he graded my paper.
• It won’t rain today.
• Even though I’m only three months pregnant, I can just tell this baby is going to be a boy.
• My nephew is the best candidate for the position I’m now hiring for.
• My car can go a long way after the gas gauge is on empty.
• I don’t have a cold, just allergies.

9.2.3 Probability as a Measure of Frequency

There is a third notion of probability—one that occurs often in science, and that differs from the others in that it is entirely objective. Suppose I say, “50 percent of all fair coin tosses come up heads, so there is a .5 probability that this coin toss will come up heads.” I am talking about frequency probability , which may be roughly defined as the likelihood that a specific thing has a property, based on the frequency with which all things of that sort have the property. The probability statement in the example ( There is a .5 probability that this coin toss will come up heads ) is based on a frequency statement about how frequently fair coin tosses do come up heads ( 50 percent of all fair coin tosses come up heads ). [4] This is why it is called frequency probability. And because these frequencies are said to occur in the world, independently of our beliefs about them, frequency probability is entirely objective.

Determining the objective facts does involve us subjectively; I try to establish the epistemic probability of a certain frequency probability—that is, I rely on evidence that a certain sort of thing occurs in the world with a certain frequency. But the truth of a typical statement about frequency has nothing to do with whether anyone believes it, has evidence for it, or makes any judgment about it; so this is an entirely objective notion. (Frequency probability is introduced here solely to contrast it with subjective and epistemic probability. We will not need to otherwise refer to it until Chapter 13, when we cover frequency syllogisms.)

Types of Probability

9.3 Self-Evidence

Because your evaluations must be expressed in language, you will typically support your beliefs by referring to other beliefs of yours. Recall sample evaluations we have already done. Why do I think, for example, that the sentence Not many people are qualified to work as lifeguards is probably true? Because of another belief of mine— Lifeguards must be in excellent physical shape, must be able to swim well, and must have extensive training. And why do I believe that the sentence If air sacs in birds play a role in their breathing, then carbon monoxide introduced into the air sacs will kill them is probably true? Because of another belief of mine— Carbon monoxide interferes with the ability of blood to carry life-sustaining oxygen.

You are making use of inferential evidence when you support a belief by another belief, since you are saying that you infer one from the other. But you have more than inferential evidence available to you when you consider your evidence. If you had only inferential evidence, then ultimately all of your beliefs would be supported only by one another—and they would together be as well supported as a castle in the clouds. You also have noninferential evidence —that is, you can appeal to something other than your beliefs in support of your beliefs. Noninferential evidence may be divided into two categories: self-evidence and experiential evidence. (Of course, you will be able to express even your non-inferential evidence only as beliefs; but since they are beliefs about self-evidence and experiential evidence, that is enough to bring the castle down out of the clouds and put it on firm ground.)

9.3.1 Self-Evidence and Definition

Suppose you have the easy task of evaluating the following premise:

All bachelors are unmarried.

In most contexts, you do not have to think very hard about why you believe that a premise like this is true. There seems to be no need, for example, to think about what other beliefs lead you to believe this or to look for experiential evidence—to interview bachelors, for example, to find out whether they are married. You can see that it is simply true by definition. Suppose, alternatively, the premise had been this:

Some married men are bachelors.

You might, for similar reasons, say that you can see that it is false by definition.

The evidence we have in these cases is self-evidence , since within the statement itself is found the most important evidence bearing on its truth or falsity—namely, the evidence of the meanings of the words themselves. [5] A statement that can be seen to be true or false by definition may be described as self-evidently true or false. In self-evidently true or false statements, if you understand what the words mean you ordinarily need no other evidence to make a reasonable decision about truth or falsity.

Shakespeare illustrates this when he has Hamlet tell his friends that he brings “wonderful news,” namely that “there’s ne’er a villain dwelling in all Denmark, but he’s an arrant knave.” Horatio answers, “There needs no ghost, my Lord, come from the grave to tell us this.” In other words, to say that all villains are knaves is self-evidently true to all those who understand the words villain and knave. Self-evidence, however, like all other evidence, is relative to the person; if villain and knave are not included in your vocabulary, Hamlet’s statement will nevertheless be true, but its truth will not be evident to you.

There is much to keep in mind, however, before blithely judging premises to be self-evidently true or false. The term self-evident easily lends itself to abuse; Ambrose Bierce defined it as “evident to one’s self and to no one else.” The point is to avoid using it as another way of saying “it is obvious to me.” Even if something is obvious to you, the purpose of your evaluation is to provide the reasons why it is obvious to you. And only one such reason may be that it is self-evident.

The most famous use of the expression is in the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. . . .” But Thomas Jefferson’s use here—while entirely appropriate for that context—is broader than the use recommended for your evaluations. Jefferson might be described as appealing not to definitional but to conversational self-evidence (that is, he appeals to what is evident to ourselves ). Jefferson’s conviction that all men are created equal was not based on his understanding of the meanings of terms such as men, created, and equal. His point was that it was evident to all participants in the conversation—to the writers and to the intended audience—that all men are created equal; given this agreement, for the purposes of the conversation there was no need to provide any supporting reasons. This is a perfectly good way to use the expression, but we will use it more narrowly.

Likewise, exercise caution before you judge a premise to be self-evidently false. Consider again the preceding simple example:

It would be extremely unusual for someone to make such an obvious mistake. Thus, it provides an especially important opportunity to apply the principle of charity. Is there some clue in the context to suggest, for example, that the arguer is using bachelor or married metaphorically or as shorthand for something else? Maybe the context suggests that the arguer simply means that some married men behave like bachelors. If that proved to be the case, then rather than calling the premise self-evidently false, it would be preferable to paraphrase it charitably and grant that it is almost certainly true—based, perhaps, on your own experience of the behavior of some married men.

This doesn’t mean you will find no self-evidently false statements. The great actor John Barrymore once received a call from the secretary of one of Hollywood’s most important producers. “I am speaking for Mr. Laskin, who wants you to attend an important party he is giving tomorrow,” said the other voice imperiously. “And I,” said Barrymore, “am speaking for John Barrymore, who has a previous engagement which he will make as soon as you have hung up.” There is no problem in understanding Barrymore’s reply to be self-evidently false. The context shows that he meant it to be so, since he clearly meant to return Mr. Laskin’s insult. [6]

EXERCISES Chapter 9, set (d)

For each premise, state whether it is self-evidently true, self-evidently false, or neither.

Sample exercise. Abraham Lincoln was president of the United States.

Sample answer. Neither.

• Squares have four sides.
• Mammals are larger than insects.
• Milk is white.
• The future lies before us.
• My mother is one of my parents.
• Instruction at the beginning of a Robert Schumann composition: “To be played as fast as possible.” Instruction a few measures later: “Faster.” Consider the statement: The second instruction can be followed.
• Former NBA star Charles Barkley published an autobiography titled Outrageous. Asked about a particular remark he made in it, he replied, “I was misquoted.”
• In Tom Sawyer Abroad, Mark Twain has Huck Finn report: “They was all Moslems, Tom said, and when I asked him what Moslems was, he said it was a person that wasn’t a Presbyterian. So there is plenty of them in Missouri, though I didn’t know it before.” Suppose the premise is this: Moslems are, by definition, any persons who are not Presbyterians.

9.3.2 Stipulative Definitions

When we say that a statement is seen to be true by definition, or that it is self-evidently true, we are normally assuming that the words in the statement are being used in a standard way. On some occasions, however, an arguer will decree a nonstandard definition for a term; in such a case, the arguer is using a stipulative definition .

Stipulative definitions can be quite useful. They are sometimes used to add precision to a discussion; in an argument about poverty, the arguer might say, “By poor I mean a family of four that earns less than $12,000 per year.” On other occasions, new words are introduced and defined by stipulation, usually for picking out a notion for which we have no handy term; “By blik, ” the philosopher R. M. Hare has said, “I refer to the theoretical framework one uses to interpret the world.”

Premises that stipulate a definition are certainly entitled to be evaluated as self-evidently true, since they are, by stipulation, true by definition. But they do present opportunities for committing the fallacy of equivocation. Suppose after stipulating the preceding definition for poor, I say, “So quit claiming to be poor; you earn almost $13,000 a year for your family.” The conclusion has to do with someone’s real-world concern about being poor; as such, it uses poor in its normal sense, which involves not only yearly earnings but also how many people are supported by the earnings, the other financial resources the family has, and the necessary expenses of the family. But the premise uses it in the more precise, stipulated sense. So the meaning of the term poor has shifted between premise and conclusion, and this means the argument commits the fallacy of equivocation. As described in Chapter 5, the ambiguity should be eliminated in the clarifying process.

A newspaper story seeking to determine the greatest athletes of all time includes the following argument:

Defining athletic greatness as the ability to prove it in at least two highly competitive areas, Babe Ruth was number one. As a pitcher he was a World Series winner, and as a hitter he revolutionized the game. He was the greatest of them all.

One premise of this argument is found in the first sentence, which might be paraphrased as follows:

1. Athletic greatness is to be defined as the ability to prove it in at least two highly competitive areas.

But (skipping the remainder of the argument) the conclusion is this:

• ∴ Babe Ruth was the greatest athlete.

Since 1 is a stipulated definition, C is supported only if “greatest athlete” is used there in the same stipulated, nonstandard way as in 1. To avoid equivocation, it should be disambiguated something like this:

• ∴ Babe Ruth did more than anyone else to prove his athletic ability in at least two highly competitive areas.

Once paraphrased, the question whether he was the greatest athlete (in the standard, non-stipulative sense of the term) remains unanswered by the argument. The argument may now be seen to commit a second argument-based fallacy—the fallacy of missing the point.

EXERCISES Chapter 9, set (e)

Create an argument that commits the fallacy of equivocation due to a stipulative definition.

Sample exercise. Term: fish. Argue that you did not exceed the limit on fish.

Sample answer. Trout are too wonderful to be considered mere fish. I do not include trout in the definition of fish. So, Mr. Ranger, you can’t cite me for exceeding the limit of 12 fish, since I have 4 bass and 11 trout.

• Term: gift. Argue that you did not forget to give your friend a birthday gift since you did leave a voice mail.
• Term: music. Argue that your friend’s “Chopsticks” rendition on the piano is not music.
• Term: steal. Argue that by shoplifting a bar of candy you were not stealing.
• Term: dependent. Argue that you can claim four dependents on your federal tax return since you have a cat and three still-uncaught mice.

9.4 Experiential Evidence

So far we have covered two broad categories of evidence that you will find relevant in putting together the evaluation of a premise. First, there is inferential evidence—that is, other beliefs of yours from which you can infer your evaluation. Second, there is noninferential evidence of a sort that we have termed self-evidence; this is the evidence found in the meanings of terms themselves. But there is another important category that is also noninferential in nature. It is experiential evidence , the evidence provided by sense experience.

9.4.1 What You Have Directly Observed

The most obvious experiential evidence is that which you have observed—what you have seen, heard, smelled, tasted, or touched. Suppose an arguer uses the following premise:

1. All swans are white.

In your evaluation of this premise you might be fully entitled, on the basis of your observations—that is, your sense experience—to say this:

Premise 1 is almost certainly false because I personally saw a black swan at the local zoo.

These sorts of appeals to observation are natural, intuitive, and legitimate. There are, however, three important questions that you should ask when you make such appeals to observation.

The first question is How reliable was your observation, given the circumstances? Perhaps you are not particularly skilled at identifying swans. Or perhaps the lighting was bad, you had a poor viewing angle, you had left your glasses in the car, or the swan had just emerged from the mud. Any of these circumstances would make your observation less than reliable, and if you were aware of the undermining circumstances you should have had less confidence in the observation and, on that basis, should have adjusted the probability in your evaluation.

The second question is How reliable is your memory of the observation? Observations that you appeal to as evidence are ordinarily observations that you remember, not observations that are occurring at that moment. If you just a moment ago made the observation, your memory is probably highly reliable. But you depend on many observations that you made days, weeks, and years ago. Time presents opportunities for memories to fade and to be unconsciously revised—all the more likely if wishful thinking or someone else’s suggestion is prompting you to remember one way rather than another. We are all familiar with this phenomenon, and scientific research has confirmed it. As for the black swan, chances are that your memory is serving you well. But you may have reason to consider it less reliable if I said to you, “After all, it was a couple of years ago. And haven’t you conveniently forgotten that you argued heatedly with me at the time, since I was insisting that it was just an odd-shaped piece of wood protruding from the water?”

The third question is How probable would your belief be had you not made the observation? A slightly more technical way of putting exactly the same thing is to ask what the prior probability of the belief is. (In this case, prior simply means independent of the observation ; and it is epistemic probability that is referred to.) The higher the prior probability of the observation, the more reliable it is. Thus, the more likely it is that there is a black swan at the zoo, independent of your having observed it, the more you can trust your observation of it to be reliable. Suppose you read a feature story in the local newspaper that comments on the pride the zoo takes in its collection of five white swans, the only swans it has ever had for the last 10 years. This would significantly reduce the prior probability that there is a black swan and would render your observation somewhat less reliable. It would not mean that you didn’t see one—the news account could have been mistaken, or a black swan may have stopped over for a visit on the day you were there. But it would mean that a single observation has only limited evidential weight.

If someone tells you that a car is coming down the road, you accept it with no question. If someone tells you that several frogs flying on lily pads are coming down the road, you may suggest they take another look. Consider the observations, contained in the following Los Angeles Times account, that some have made on the Willcox Playa, a remote and eerie expanse of desert in southern Arizona:

Most stunning are the Playa’s endless mirages. Everyone sees them. Everyone swears by them—buildings rising from the shimmering horizon, trucks speeding along upside down, groups of people dancing. Pete Cowgill, former outdoor writer for the Arizona Daily Star, once saw a Southern Pacific train chugging across the Playa. As he watched, the engine disappeared into the earth. The next car followed it, then the next, and the next. “One by one, about a hundred cars flat disappeared,” says Cowgill. “It was the most fascinating non-sight I ever saw.”

On the desert and far from any railroad tracks, the prior probability that a train will pass by—and disappear into the earth—is virtually nil. Seeing it was not reason enough for Cowgill to believe it and should not have been. In short, the more preposterous the belief—that is, the lower its prior probability—the stronger the evidence needed to support it. As Sherlock Holmes says in The Valley of Fear:

I ought to know by this time that when a fact appears opposed to a long train of deductions, it invariably proves to be capable of bearing some other interpretation.

And this applies even if what is opposed to the long train of deductions is a long train of Southern Pacific rail cars.

Three Questions to Ask of Any Observation

• How reliable was your observation, given the circumstances?
• How reliable is your memory of the observation?
• How probable would your belief be had you not made the observation?

EXERCISES Chapter 9, set (f)

Propose a way in which the described observation might be unreliable, and explain why.

Sample exercise. You recall that your older brother was at your 10th birthday party.

Sample answer. Your parents and brother all remember that he was away at camp that year. This means that there is a very low prior probability that he was there.

• You hear someone blowing a whistle.
• You remember hearing someone blowing a whistle.
• You see your mother at the bus station.
• You see the president of the United States at the bus station.
• You remember your professor saying that there would be no final exam.
• You remember your professor saying there would be a final exam.
• You feel a spider on your neck.

9.4.2 What Authorities Have Reported

Reports from authorities make up one important part of your experience. (They are part of your experience because the reports are themselves something that you see or hear.) An authority is simply someone who is presumed to be in a better position than you to know the truth about the premise in question. This superiority may be due to either special ability or special access. A scientist or expert may have special ability to evaluate certain information; an eyewitness or a journalist may have special access to certain information.

As noted in Chapter 8, appealing to authority should be scrupulously avoided in circumstances where you are just as capable as anyone else of thinking through a view. In such cases, appealing to authority merely promotes intellectual timidity and can undermine the virtue of intellectual honesty. But we are quite right to rely on the authoritative reports of others for vast numbers of our beliefs, including most of our beliefs about science, history, and current affairs. There are two questions that you should ask to be sure that your use of authority is appropriate.

The first question is, How reliable is the authority’s report, given the circumstances?

A variety of circumstances can undermine the reliability of an authority’s report. A witness’s memory can be subject to “creative” forces of which the witness is unaware. Or an expert might be an expert—but on a different topic. But perhaps the most important undermining circumstance is conflict of interest. It would ordinarily be in the best interest of most authorities to be reliable. But that interest can be overridden by other competing interests. This can be a problem for journalists, for example. One media critic, David Shaw of the Los Angeles Times, identifies what he calls several “basic flaws in the way the contemporary news organizations function.” They include the following: “Pack journalism. Laziness. Superficiality. Cozy relationships with prosecutors. A competitive zeal that sends reporters off in a frantic search to be first with the latest shocking allegation, responsible journalism be damned. A tradition that often discourages reporters from raising key questions. . . .”

Like journalists, trained experts can also be rendered less than reliable due to overriding interests. Note, for example, this brief item from the Chronicle of Higher Education :

The spring sale catalog from LSU Press includes ads for a collection of essays by Cleanth Brooks and one by Louis Rubin. The blurb for the Brooks collection calls him “our best critic” and continues, “These essays are vintage Brooks.” The blurb for Rubin’s book calls him “one of the very best of our literary critics” and goes on to affirm that “these essays are vintage Rubin.” Curiously, the commendation for Brooks comes from the pen of Rubin, whose commendation comes from—you guessed it—Brooks.

This provides no reason to think that either Brooks or Rubin is deceiving us; but they do apparently have a conflict of interest, and thus we should have more to go on than their reports if we are to confidently believe that either of them is “among our best critics.”

The second question is, How probable would the statement be if you had no report from the authority? As in the last section, a more technical way of putting this is to ask what the prior probability of the statement is, where prior simply means supposing you had no report from the authority. If a normally reliable witness reports seeing green men come out of a spaceship or Elvis come out of a deli on Broadway, that should not be enough to persuade us. If a normally reliable scientist reports success in building a perpetual motion machine or in achieving cold fusion in a tabletop apparatus, we should reserve judgment until additional evidence is amassed. Improbable things often do turn out to be true. But the more improbable it is, the less ready we should be to accept it solely on the report of an authority.

Sometimes a report will reach you after passing through a chain of authorities. Your friend may tell you that she heard on the news that a scientist has made a certain new discovery. Every link in the chain—your friend, the newscaster, and the scientist—must be reliable; and the more improbable the discovery, the more reliable each must be. And note that there are probably other links that you do now know about—the individuals or services, for example, who got the information from the scientist and passed it on to the newscaster. Those links must also be reliable.

Two Questions to Ask of Any Presumed Authority

• How reliable is the authority, given the circumstances?
• How probable would the statement be if you had no report from the authority?

EXERCISES Chapter 9, set (g)

Identify the authority and the claim supported by the authority in each of the passages below. State what makes the authority less than perfectly reliable.

Sample exercise. Philadelphia lawyer Jay Lambert recalls a tough medical malpractice case against his client, a neurosurgeon, eight years ago. Lambert was fretting over a damaging report filed by an opposing “expert.” On the eve of trial, Lambert called a contact in the expert’s hometown and hit pay dirt. It seems the expert wrote the report but was in a federal penitentiary—where he was doing time for falsifying medical reports. — Forbes

Sample answer.  The medical expert filed a report showing that Lambert’s client might well be guilty. But his reliability as a medical expert is questionable, given that he has been convicted of falsifying medical reports.

• A network news program advertises that their exclusive interview with the president will definitively settle the latest White House scandal.
• A large corporation announces that, overall, employees have benefited from the latest round of downsizing.
• The National Golf Foundation (which in part exists in order to promote golf) has projections which show that the country’s golf boom will require more than 300 new courses a year for the next several years.
• A young doctor listened intently to a panel of distinguished physicians discuss advances in hypertension treatment at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Family Physicians. By the end of the three-hour presentation, he was thinking seriously about switching some of his hypertensive patients to a drug called a calcium channel blocker, which was much discussed at the presentation. The pharmaceutical company G.D. Searle sponsored the seminar, as the young physician knew. But he didn’t realize that Searle—which was then running a promotional campaign for Calan, one of several calcium channel blockers—had carefully picked speakers who were well-known advocates for this class of drugs. — Consumer Reports
• An unemployed Texas salesman on Monday claimed that his father was one of three people who killed John F. Kennedy. Ricky Don White contends that his father joined the Dallas police department in September 1963 to carry out the assassination. He said his father, Roscoe White, was one of three CIA operatives who fired the shots. He said that his father also killed Dallas police officer J. D. Tippet about an hour after the assassination. Tippet’s killing has long been blamed on Oswald. White said that his father served in the Marines with Oswald. He made his claims during a news conference at the JFK Assassination Information Center, a privately run group that researches various assassination theories. White acknowledged that he has tried to sell a book or movie on his theory. —Associated Press

Two Kinds of Evidence

• Inferential evidence
• Self-evidence
• Experiential evidence

9.5 Strategies for Evaluating Premises

To evaluate the truth of a premise is to consider its epistemic probability—that is, to consider the quality of your evidence for it. How should you describe this evidence in the relevant portion of your evaluation of the argument?

9.5.1 The Reasonable Objector over Your Shoulder

In evaluating premises, try not to focus on what others—say, your peers or professors—expect you to believe or what beliefs they might find impressive. A much better place to start is by asking yourself what you actually do believe, more or less instinctively, about the premise, and what your actual evidence seems to be for that belief. And be sure that what you settle on is a real reason and not merely a restatement of the premise in slightly different words (nor a restatement of the denial of the premise, if you take it to be false).

As you think about the premise, remember the strategy of writing your evaluation as though there is a reasonable objector looking over your shoulder. Thus, you must satisfy someone who has roughly the same evidence that you have and who possesses the intellectual virtues of honesty, critical reflection, and inquiry. This may help you to keep the intellectual virtues in the forefront of your mind, in ways such as this:

• Exhibit critical reflection by asking what your evidence is, whether it supports your belief, and whether either your evidence or your belief can be improved.
• Exhibit inquisitiveness by seeking more evidence if it is meager (and withhold judgment if there is no opportunity to seek further evidence).
• Exhibit intellectual honesty by insuring that your chief objective in evaluating this premise is to know whether it is true or false regardless of your prejudices. Try to identify your own biases and habitual modes of thinking, and watch for them as you evaluate your evidence.

In your evaluation of every premise, you will provide your judgment and your defense of that judgment. Given that you will be doing this with a reasonable objector over your shoulder, you should also be prepared to provide, where necessary, a brief response to reasonable objections that might be raised. To the premise All swans are white, for example, we’ve already seen the following sample evaluation:

Premise 1 is almost certainly false, since I personally saw a black swan at the local zoo.

But black swans are rare; since the prior probability of your sighting is quite low, a reasonable objector is likely to object that it is best to remain unpersuaded until stronger evidence comes along. Your evaluation is much stronger if you anticipate that objection and deal with it in advance; here is one way you might do that:

Premise 1 is almost certainly false, since I personally saw a black swan at the local zoo. I realize, of course, that they are quite rare; so I made a special effort to be sure that I got a good look and wasn’t being misled in any way. I checked with others around me and they agreed that they also saw a black swan.

At this point, the objector would probably have to be unreasonable to continue to object.

Or consider the premise If air sacs in birds play a role in their breathing, then carbon monoxide introduced into the air sacs will kill them. Our sample evaluation goes something like this:

Premise 1 is probably true, since carbon monoxide interferes with the ability of blood to carry life-sustaining oxygen.

How might a reasonable objector find fault with this? One sensible objection might be that nothing has been said here about how much carbon monoxide it takes to have this effect, nor how much is being administered to the birds. It might be better to say can’t decide, due to the limited information. You have two choices at this point: concede that the objector has a good point (as always, since by definition the objector is reasonable!) and revise your judgment to can’t decide, or revise your defense slightly, as follows:

Premise 1 is probably true, since carbon monoxide interferes with the ability of blood to carry life-sustaining oxygen. This, of course, is based on the assumption that the scientist who is conducting the experiment is competent enough to know how much carbon monoxide is required and to introduce at least that much into the air sacs.

This seems to be a reasonable assumption and should satisfy the objector.

Let’s look at one more example, the premise Not many people are qualified to work as lifeguards. The sample evaluation is this:

Premise 1 is almost certainly true, since lifeguards must be in excellent physical shape, must be able to swim well, and must have extensive training—qualifications that are rare.

I can’t think of a reasonable objection to this defense and thus would leave the evaluation as it is.

These guidelines apply to any judgment you have about the premise—even if it is can’t decide. When you cannot decide, explain why you cannot decide. Chances are it will be because the evidence—whether there is a lot or a little—is balanced. In these cases, state the best reason you can come up with on each side. Don’t feel that you must force a decision, but don’t use cannot decide as an excuse for not thinking. When you do use it, be sure to show that you have thought carefully about it.

EXERCISES Chapter 9, set (h)

For each of the evaluations of a premise below, augment it by providing a response to an objection that might be posed by a reasonable objector over your shoulder. (In your augmentation, continue to agree with the evaluation already presented.)

Sample exercise. Premise: All triangles have 180 degrees. Evaluation: The premise is almost certainly true, since it is self-evident. This is just what we mean by the word triangle.

Sample answer. Add the following: It might be objected that in real life, we grant that triangles do exist even though perfect triangles don’t exist; the fact that a man-made or natural object is off imperceptibly doesn’t mean that it isn’t a triangle. This is a reasonable objection, and means I must add that the premise is only true on the charitable, and thus reasonable, assumption that it is talking about geometry and not real life.

• Premise: Taxes will continue to rise during our lifetime. Evaluation: This is probably false, since there is a rising tide of opinion that government is growing too big, taking too much of our income, and not using it responsibly. The politicians will get the message.
• Premise: James Cameron’s Titanic is one of the best movies ever made. Evaluation: This is almost certainly false. A good script is necessary for a good movie, and just about everyone agrees that the script for this movie is extremely weak.
• Premise. Large cities provide a higher quality of life than small towns. Evaluation: This is probably true. Cultural opportunities make a huge contribution to quality of life, and large cities far outweigh small towns in this regard.
• Premise: Most of the wealth created in America in this millenium has been from high technology. Evaluation: This is probably false. Lists of the wealthiest people in America are full of people who made their money in the stock market (like Warren Buffet), in retailing (like Jeff Bezos), and in entertainment (like Oprah Winfrey).

9.5.2 Thinking Backward and Thinking Ahead

As you consider your evidence, one natural strategy is to think backward—to look for what seems to have led you to believe or disbelieve the premise. Almost all of the examples provided so far have been of this sort. Why do I believe that all triangles have 180 degrees? I think back and recall that I learned it as a definition in high school geometry. Why do I not believe that all swans are white? Because I think back to my sighting of a black swan at the zoo. Other examples are easy to come by. Suppose you clarify an argument that has the following premise:

1. For any liquid, its freezing and melting temperature is the same.

Plausible though this may be, you realize that it is probably false on thinking back and recalling a magazine article you once read. You might then evaluate it in this preliminary way:

Premise 1 is probably false. Science News, which is normally a very reliable publication on matters of science, recently carried a story about the discovery of fish that live in very cold waters; their blood has a very low freezing temperature, even though, once frozen, the melting temperature is far higher.

In this way, by thinking backward you are able to appeal to a reliable authority.

But another useful strategy is to think ahead. This second strategy can take one of two forms. One way of doing this is to assume that the premise is true and see if anything obviously false follows from it; if so, that would show the premise to be false. Suppose, for example, the premise is this:

1. The meaning of any word is the thing that it picks out in the world.

This might seem superficially plausible. But you might arrive at the following evaluation:

Premise 1 is very probably false. It entails, for example, that the word unicorn has no meaning; for there are no unicorns, and thus the word picks out nothing in the world. But this is absurd—it is self-evidently false. The word unicorn is obviously meaningful, otherwise we wouldn’t know how to check and see whether there were any unicorns.

In this example, by thinking ahead you have run into a consequence that is self-evidently false; for by understanding the very meaning of the term, you understand that the word unicorn is meaningful.

Another way of doing this is to assume that the premise is false and see if anything obviously false follows from that ; if so, then that would show the premise to be true. Suppose, for example, there is a premise such as this:

4. It is sometimes morally acceptable to break the law.

Your preliminary evaluation might be as follows:

Premise 4 is very probably true. Assume it is false. This would mean that it is never morally acceptable to break the law. But this would mean that you would be morally obligated to obey the speed limit even if driving faster would save someone’s life. But this is absurd. Since this absurdity results from assuming that the premise is false, the premise is very likely not false.

These two forward-thinking strategies search for implications that are absurd, concluding that the assumption that led to the absurdity must be rejected. Because they attack the assumption indirectly, via its implications, they are known as indirect arguments . They are also known as reductio ad absurdum arguments, since they aim to reduce the assumption to absurdity.

Such arguments can be effective but should be used with care. It is always possible that the absurd implication is produced not by the falsity of your assumption about the premise, but by some other false assumption that you are implicitly making. In the first case, for example, someone might argue that the mistake doesn’t lie in the premise The meaning of any word is the thing that it picks out in the world, but in this additional assumption: The word “unicorn” picks out nothing. Perhaps there really are unicorns (and thus the word picks out unicorns). Or, safely assuming that there are no unicorns, perhaps it picks out the idea of unicorns; in that case it does pick out something, so it is meaningful. This sort of mistake—failing to blame a false secondary or implicit premise—is common enough that it long ago earned a name of its own: the fallacy of non causa pro causa (i.e., the absurdity is not caused by the cause that is set forth ).

Note that the practice of assuming there is a reasonable objector over your shoulder applies to indirect arguments as well. And you should be prepared for the possibility that your reasonable objector will accuse you of committing the fallacy of non causa pro causa. Return to the premise The meaning of any word is the thing that it picks out in the world. The evaluation, as it now stands, is as follows:

Premise 1 is very probably false. It entails, for example, that the word unicorn has no meaning because there are no unicorns, and thus the word picks out nothing in the world. But this is absurd—in fact, it is self-evidently false. The word unicorn is obviously meaningful, otherwise we wouldn’t know how to check and see whether there were any unicorns.

But it is stronger if you append the following sentences to it:

It might reasonably be objected, however, that the word unicorn does pick out something—namely the idea of unicorns (and thus, the fault would lie in the assumption that it does not pick out anything; the fault would not lie in Premise 1). But this objection cannot be right, because the objector would then have to admit that there are indeed unicorns in the world—since the objector says that unicorn means idea of unicorn, and the idea indeed exists even though unicorns do not.

Again, in this way you identify what is probably the weakest part of your defense and convince yourself (by convincing the reasonable objector over your shoulder) that your indirect argument is successful after all.

Indirect Arguments (“Thinking ahead”)

• Assume the premise is true and show that this leads to an absurd consequence. This shows the premise is false.
• Assume the premise is false and show that this leads to an absurd consequence. This shows the premise is true.

EXERCISES Chapter 9, set (i)

For each premise, provide an evaluation that uses an indirect argument. Where relevant, respond to the reasonable objector over your shoulder.

Sample exercise. No one who has broken the law should be allowed to serve on a jury.

Sample answer. This is certainly false. Assume it’s true. It would follow that juries would no longer exist, since virtually everyone has broken the law at some time (even if only by speeding or jaywalking.) It might be reasonably objected that, in practice, this wouldn’t happen, since there would have to be a way of establishing that someone broke the law before you could exclude the person from a jury. This turns out to be a weak objection, however, since one way of establishing it would be to ask them. Most people would probably admit to it if it meant getting out of jury duty.

• Some males are unmarried. (Assume it is false.)
• People can do whatever they decide they want to do. (Assume it is true.)
• To become a millionaire requires more than just intelligence. (Assume it is false.)
• The only painting that should be counted as art is painting that literally represents the world, such as portraits and landscapes. (Assume it is true.)

9.5.3 Fallacies and Truth

Sometimes false beliefs are branded as fallacies. In Aristotle to Zoos, for example, P. B. and J. S. Medawar write,

It is a popular fallacy that chewing gum regains its flavor if removed from the mouth and parked, say, under a chair. What is regained is not the flavor but the ability to taste the flavor as sensory adaptation wears off.

This is not a misuse of the term; a fallacy, recall, is an easy-to-make intellectual mistake, and there are many mistakes about truth (such as believing that chewing gum regains its flavor overnight) that are easy to make.

But although this is not a misuse of the term, it is not helpful in evaluating the premise. To say the premise Chewing gum regains its flavor overnight commits the fallacy of believing that chewing gum regains its flavor overnight is simply to say that the premise is false (note that the terms fallacy and false are closely related) and that a lot of people think it is true. It does not tell us anything about why people make the mistake, which is what it must do if it is to be useful in an evaluation. The other uses of the term fallacy that we look at in this text are generic. They tell us something about why an argument has gone wrong, regardless of the subject matter of the argument. The fallacy of equivocation, for example, can occur in any argument where the meaning of a word might shift—which is to say, in any argument. It can occur in an argument about gum (which might shift from chewing gum to the flesh under the teeth ); and—to simply reverse the word—it can occur in an argument about a mug (which might shift from a cup to a face —reaffirming the many slips ‘twixt cup and lip). When we identify such a fallacy we are saying that the argument has gone wrong, in part, because of such a shift.

Since the point of your evaluation of each premise is to defend your judgment in a way that would satisfy the reasonable objector over your shoulder, it is best to skip the unhelpful step of accusing a premise of committing a fallacy. Instead, go straight to the explanation of why you believe it to be false. No need to bother saying, for example, that the belief commits the fallacy of believing that chewing gum regains its flavor overnight. Better simply to say that the premise is almost certainly false, and that the reasonable objection that our experiences support the premise—since the gum always does taste better the next morning—is explained by a change that occurs in our sense of taste (due to sensory adaptation) and not by any change in the gum. [7]

9.6 Summary of Chapter Nine

Although people often reasonably disagree about the truth of a premise, that does not mean that what is true for one person may be false for another. Truth has to do with whether a belief fits with the world. It is not relative to the believer. This is consistent with the law of noncontradiction, which says that a statement cannot be both true and false, and with the closely related law of the excluded middle, which says that it must be either true or false. These two laws are valuable practical guidelines in thinking about truth.

Evidence, however, is relative to the believer; so evaluations of premises must be made in shades of gray. The best you can hope for is to evaluate a premise’s epistemic probability—that is, how strong your evidence is for its truth or falsity—using expressions such as probably true and probably false. One alternative notion of probability, subjective probability, is simply a measure of how much confidence you have in the truth of a belief; you should attempt to match your subjective with your epistemic probability.

Some of your evidence will be found in other beliefs of yours—that is, it will be inferential. But some of it—self-evidence and experiential evidence —will be noninferential. Self-evidence is what you have when the premise itself, by virtue of the very meanings of the words, provides you with all the evidence you need to make a reasonable judgment. Experiential evidence is what is provided by the observations that you make with any of your five senses. One important category of experiential evidence is reports that you hear or read from authorities who have special access to information or special abilities to evaluate it.

For any experiential evidence, it is important to be aware of circumstances that might undermine its reliability. It is also important that you require more evidence whenever the prior probability of your belief is extremely low.

In preparing your evaluation, ask yourself what you really think, both about the premise and about your evidence for or against it. You might do this by thinking backward about how you arrived at your belief or by thinking ahead to see whether you can produce an indirect argument. As you do so, keep in mind the intellectual virtues of honesty, critical reflection, and empirical inquiry. Then present your evaluation for each premise by stating your belief, your evidence for that belief, and, if there is a reasonable objection, a brief response to it as though there is a reasonable objector over your shoulder.

9.7 Guidelines for Chapter Nine

• For practical purposes, assume that no statement is both true and false and that every statement is either true or false.
• If it looks as though the truth-value of a statement will be different depending on who expresses it, it is usually because the statement is referentially ambiguous. Look for the ambiguous term, which may be implicit, and eliminate the ambiguity before evaluating its truth.
• The rare statements that appear to violate the two laws of truth, yet do not merely suffer from a referential ambiguity, should be evaluated as can’t decide, with an explanation.
• Evaluate premises according to their epistemic probability—that is, according to how strong your evidence is for their truth or falsity—using expressions such as probably true and probably false.
• Aim to match your subjective and epistemic probabilities—that is, to have the amount of confidence that is warranted by the evidence.
• If a premise can charitably be seen to be almost certainly true or false solely on the basis of your understanding of the meanings of the words within it, evaluate it as self-evidently true or false.
• Stipulative definitions, in which the arguer offers a revised or new definition for a term, may be considered self-evidently true. But be sure that arguments with such definitions do not commit the fallacy of equivocation.
• Observations made by any of your five senses can provide powerful evidence in evaluating your beliefs. Be on the alert, however, for circumstances that can weaken them.
• Reports of authorities can provide powerful evidence in evaluating beliefs. Be on the alert, however, for circumstances that can weaken them.
• For each premise, state your judgment, your defense of the judgment, and, where relevant, a brief response to any objections that might be posed by a “reasonable objector over your shoulder.”
• Ask yourself what you really think about the premise and your evidence for or against it. You might do this by thinking backward about how you arrived at your belief or by thinking ahead to see whether you can produce an indirect argument (though you should avoid the fallacy of non causa pro causa in doing so). As you do so, keep in mind the reasonable objector over your shoulder.
• Instead of accusing any premise of committing a fallacy, focus on explaining why you believe the premise to be false.

9.8 Glossary for Chapter Nine

Authority —someone who is presumed to be in a better position than you to know the truth about a statement. This superiority may be due to either special ability (as with a scientist or expert) or special access (as with an eyewitness or a journalist).

Epistemic —having to do with knowledge.

Epistemic probability —the likelihood that a statement is true, given the total evidence available to you—that is, given all of your background beliefs and experiences. This is the notion of probability that should be used in your evaluation of premises. To say that a premise is probably true is, then, just to say that you have fairly good evidence for its truth.

Experiential evidence —evidence provided by sense experience—that is, that which is seen, heard, touched, smelled, or tasted. It is one kind of noninferential evidence.

Fallacy of non causa pro causa —the mistake in an indirect argument of relying on a secondary assumption—often implicit—that is false, so that it is really the secondary assumption that should be blamed, not the assumption blamed by the arguer. (It literally means that the absurdity is not caused by the cause that is set forth. )

Frequency probability —the likelihood that a specific thing has a property, based strictly on the frequency with which all things of that sort have the property.

Indirect argument —an argument that shows a statement is false by showing that it leads to an absurd consequence. This is sometimes, alternatively, used to show that the negation of the statement is true (which amounts to the same thing as showing that the belief itself is false). Sometimes also called a reductio ad absurdum argument or, for short, reductio.

Inferential evidence —beliefs that are appealed to in support of another belief (which is inferred from them).

Law of the excluded middle —every statement is either true or false. It follows from this that there is no middle ground between the true and the false.

Law of noncontradiction —no statement is both true and false. It follows from this that truth is objective and absolute—there cannot be any statement, for example, that is true for you but false for me.

Noninferential evidence —things other than beliefs that are appealed to in support of a belief. This includes self-evidence and experiential evidence.

Prior probability —the epistemic probability of a belief independent of (i.e., prior to) a specified piece of evidence. When considering, for example, the prior probability of something you heard, its prior probability is simply how probable it would be if you had not heard it.

Self-evidence —evidence that comes from understanding the very meanings of the words themselves in a statement. Statements that are self-evidently true or false can be seen to be true or false largely by virtue of understanding the words of the statement. Philosophers sometimes refer to these statements as analytic a priori statements; they are also sometimes described as statements that are seen to be true or false by definition.

Stipulative definition —a nonstandard definition for a term, decreed by a speaker or writer for some specific use.

Subjective probability —the degree of confidence you have that a given statement is true. It is entirely relative to the believer; there is no fact of the matter over and above the believer’s level of confidence.

Truth-values —evaluations, like true and false, which can be given of how well a statement fits with the world.

• There is one exception. Some arguments have “throwaway premises” that should not be included in the clarification because they make no logical contribution to the argument. If one of these is false, it is not in the clarification so it doesn’t make the argument unsound (so, excluding it is an application of the principle of charity). Suppose someone argues as follows: All men are mortal; Socrates is a man; Socrates is fat; and thus Socrates is mortal. You would not include Socrates is fat in your clarification, so it doesn’t matter whether it is true or false. ↵
• Poll conducted by the Barna Research Group. It does not say whether those polled believed it to be absolutely true that there is no absolute truth. ↵
• Some theorists have tried to make subjective probability more scientific—to move it from the vague and hidden realm of inner moods to the measurable realm of external behavior—by spelling it out in terms of betting behavior. Consider these two statements: Sitting Pretty will win the third race. Harvest Moon will win the third race. The subjective probability of the first statement would be higher than the second if and only if I were willing either to bet more money or to take longer odds on Sitting Pretty. The same principle would apply to any belief (say, It is wrong to tell a lie ). This approach ultimately does not completely work, for there are many reasons that my betting behavior might not reflect my actual confidence level. For example, if I strongly believed it was wrong to bet, then I would probably not bet any money on the statement It is wrong to bet, even though it would have a high subjective probability! But is does nicely illustrate how it is that our subjective probability has much more influence on behavior than does epistemic probability—and, thus, the importance of matching them. ↵
• Frequency statements used for this purpose are sometimes called base rates . ↵
• Philosophers sometimes refer to such statements as analytic a priori. ↵
• It is also possible to have a self-evidently false pair of premises. If two premises are contradictory, you know that at least one of them is false even if you don’t know which. ↵
• Philosophers have not been reluctant to brand certain beliefs as fallacies. G. E. Moore, to cite a famous example, coined the term naturalistic fallacy to describe the belief that moral properties (such as goodness ) are ultimately nothing more than certain natural properties of the world (such as the amount of pleasure the “good” thing provides). But, as you might expect, other philosophers think this is no mistake at all, and thus no fallacy. As in other cases, it would be more helpful to focus on why he thinks the belief is false rather than to be told that it is a fallacy. ↵

No statement is both true and false. It follows from this that truth is objective and absolute—there cannot be any statement, for example, that is true for you but false for me.

Every statement is either true or false. It follows from this that there is no middle ground between the true and the false.

Evaluations, like true and false, which can be given of how well a statement fits with the world.

The likelihood that a statement is true, given the total evidence available to you—that is, given all of your background beliefs and experiences. This is the notion of probability that should be used in your evaluation of premises. To say that a premise is probably true is, then, just to say that you have fairly good evidence for its truth.

Having to do with knowledge.

The degree of confidence you have that a given statement is true. It is entirely relative to the believer; there is no fact of the matter over and above the believer’s level of confidence.

The likelihood that a specific thing has a property, based strictly on the frequency with which all things of that sort have the property.

Beliefs that are appealed to in support of another belief (which is inferred from them).

Things other than beliefs that are appealed to in support of a belief. This includes self-evidence and experiential evidence.

Evidence that comes from understanding the very meanings of the words themselves in a statement. Statements that are self-evidently true or false can be seen to be true or false largely by virtue of understanding the words of the statement. Philosophers sometimes refer to these statements as analytic a priori statements; they are also sometimes described as statements that are seen to be true or false by definition.

A nonstandard definition for a term, decreed by a speaker or writer for some specific use.

Evidence provided by sense experience—that is, that which is seen, heard, touched, smelled, or tasted. It is one kind of noninferential evidence.

The epistemic probability of a belief independent of (i.e., prior to) a specified piece of evidence. When considering, for example, the prior probability of something you heard, its prior probability is simply how probable it would be if you had not heard it.

Someone who is presumed to be in a better position than you to know the truth about a statement. This superiority may be due to either special ability (as with a scientist or expert) or special access (as with an eyewitness or a journalist).

An argument that shows a statement is false by showing that it leads to an absurd consequence. This is sometimes, alternatively, used to show that the negation of the statement is true (which amounts to the same thing as showing that the belief itself is false). Sometimes also called a reductio ad absurdum argument or, for short, reductio.

The mistake in an indirect argument of relying on a secondary assumption—often implicit—that is false, so that it is really the secondary assumption that should be blamed, not the assumption blamed by the arguer. (It literally means that the absurdity is not caused by the cause that is set forth. )

A Guide to Good Reasoning: Cultivating Intellectual Virtues Copyright © 2020 by David Carl Wilson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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16 The Socratic Concept of Truth

• Published: February 2005
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This essay explores the question of why Socrates practiced the elenctic method. It argues that the elenchus is a method that generally leads to truth, and suggests that Socrates was convinced that he himself would gain in wisdom and clarity from elenctic exchanges with others, even if they were not as wise as he. People mean what others can take them to mean; to learn what we mean is to learn what others we talk with mean. The understanding of others, agreeing with them on basic concepts, clarity about what we mean, come — to the extent that they do — together. The elenchus is a model of our only method for promoting these ends.

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Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

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Exploring Free Speech and Persuasion with Nothing But the Truth

• Resources & Preparation
• Instructional Plan
• Related Resources

After reading the novel Nothing But the Truth , students discuss the protagonist Phillip and his right to free speech as well as their own rights. Students examine various Websites to research First Amendment rights, especially as they relate to the situation in the novel. After their research, students compose a position statement regarding their opinion of whether Philip's rights were violated then work with small groups to strengthen their statements and supporting evidence. Groups present position statement and supporting evidence to the whole class and debate Philip's civil rights as a culminating activity.

Featured Resources

Persuasion Map : Use this online tool to map out and print your persuasive argument. Included are spaces to map out your thesis, three reasons, and supporting details.

From Theory to Practice

In "Writing to Think Critically: The Seed of Social Action", Randy Bomer states that "one of the goals many writing teachers share is that of enabling students, usually rendered voiceless in the world at large, to speak for social change in their writing" (2). Bomer declares that "we want students to view their writing as more than exercises for learning to write, as more than obedience to teacher instruction, but rather as a unique form of social action" (2). Students begin to see writing as more than a teacher-directed exercise when they can see how their writing relates to their lives and the world around them. It is useful to use an interdisciplinary approach that blends two or more disciplines together, as social justice cannot be achieved through writing alone. Rather, a writer must understand the social, historic, and scientific background of an issue. One such issue that is addressed in this lesson, is students' freedom of verbal expression-what speech is protected by the First Amendment? How is the nature of a particular expression determined? Who has the final authority in issues of free speech? Further Reading

Common Core Standards

This resource has been aligned to the Common Core State Standards for states in which they have been adopted. If a state does not appear in the drop-down, CCSS alignments are forthcoming.

State Standards

This lesson has been aligned to standards in the following states. If a state does not appear in the drop-down, standard alignments are not currently available for that state.

NCTE/IRA National Standards for the English Language Arts

• 1. Students read a wide range of print and nonprint texts to build an understanding of texts, of themselves, and of the cultures of the United States and the world; to acquire new information; to respond to the needs and demands of society and the workplace; and for personal fulfillment. Among these texts are fiction and nonfiction, classic and contemporary works.
• 4. Students adjust their use of spoken, written, and visual language (e.g., conventions, style, vocabulary) to communicate effectively with a variety of audiences and for different purposes.
• 5. Students employ a wide range of strategies as they write and use different writing process elements appropriately to communicate with different audiences for a variety of purposes.
• 8. Students use a variety of technological and information resources (e.g., libraries, databases, computer networks, video) to gather and synthesize information and to create and communicate knowledge.
• 12. Students use spoken, written, and visual language to accomplish their own purposes (e.g., for learning, enjoyment, persuasion, and the exchange of information).

Materials and Technology

Copies of Avi’s Nothing But the Truth

• Position Statements handout
• Expression Rights of Students (handout on Supreme Court cases regarding free speech in schools)
• Nothing But the Truth Presentation Rubric

Preparation

• Students should have read the novel Nothing But the Truth .
• Decide when students will write their response to the first writing prompt. In this lesson, students write the response after reading the book; however, the prompt can be used as an anticipatory activity, before reading the novel.
• Make copies or an overhead of the Position Statements handout and the Nothing But the Truth Presentation Rubric .
• Familiarize yourself with the Expression Rights of Students cases regarding free speech in public schools.
• Check the First Amendment Websites to ensure that all are appropriate for us in your class. If desired, make an overhead or copies of the links so that students can continue their research outside of class.
• Decide how much time to allot for each group’s presentation. If groups keep their presentations in the 5-7 minute time limit, all the presentations can be given in one day.
• Decide when to give presentations, ideally a week after their work with the Persuasion Map . Ideally, build at least one additional work day into the schedule to provide enough time for students to plan and practice their work. Work time in class is especially important to ensure that students can assemble easily without having to arrange for special meetings outside of school hours. You may also make arrangements for students to work in your classroom or the library is they before school starts, during lunch, and after school.
• Test the Persuasion Map on your computers to familiarize yourself with the tools and ensure that you have the Flash plug-in installed. You can download the plug-in from the technical support page.

Student Objectives

Students will

• analyze the theme of a novel using both personal opinion and factual information.
• engage with the novel by making personal connections to its themes.
• use the Internet for research.
• use a variety of technological and information resources (e.g., libraries, databases, computer networks, video) to gather and synthesize information in support of an opinion.
• compose a position statement.
• synthesize their position statements with those of two to four other students.
• present, explain, and defend their position statements.

Session One

• In their journals or loose leaf, have students respond to the following prompt as they enter the room, “Using your own experience and the events in Nothing But the Truth , list the rights you feel you should, but do not have, as a young adult.”
• Divide students into small groups and give each group a piece of chart paper and some markers. Alternatively, students can gather their responses on overhead transparencies.
• Ask groups to discuss their responses to the prompt, compiling a list of their rights or rights they think they should have on the chart paper. Give students about five minutes for this work.
• Bring the class together and ask representatives from each group can share their lists, either posting their list on the wall or sharing it with an overhead projector.
• Using the lists generated as a class, ask students to write for a few minutes about which of the rights they listed are violated in Philip’s situation.
• After allowing students to gather their ideas, ask students to discuss Philip’s situation and their opinion of his rights (about 20 minutes or so).

Philip: “It’s a free country.” Dr. Palleni: “Nothing is free.” (74-5) Dr. Palleni: “If a student creates a disturbance in a classroom, that’s breaking a rule. An important rule. Students cannot break—cannot make a disturbance in a classroom.” (83) Mrs. Narwin: “He’s a student. I’m a teacher. Hands aren’t meant to be even.” (177)

Session Two

• Explain that during this session you will look for reference material and research material relating to the issues of free speech raised in Nothing But the Truth .
• Begin the session with basic information about free speech, pointing first to the Bill of Rights and then to the information from the handout on Supreme Court cases regarding free speech in schools .
• Point students to the First Amendment Websites . If you want to allow students to continue research outside of class, provide them a copy of the Web page or ask them to copy the addresses into their notebooks.
• Ask students to use the First Amendment Websites to find as much information as they can about rights for young adults, focusing on free speech rights related to schools. Depending on your students’ Internet capabilities, you may want to narrow the search further.
• Ask students should keep track of the important points found in their research, such as Supreme Court cases, examples from schools throughout the country, public opinion, and so forth.
• If desired, explain that students can cut and paste relevant information from Web pages to a Word document, explaining why the information is important using a different font color, making sure that they cite their sources.
• Have a 10 to 20 minute discussion of the information that students find. A suggestion would be for each student to read one section of his/her notes with both the Internet information and his/her evaluation of its importance.

Session Three

• Have students respond in writing to the following prompt, “Explain whether or not you feel Phillip’s free speech rights were violated.”
• After allowing students to gather their ideas in writing, ask them to discuss their answers as a class or in small groups. Encourage students to engage specifically in issues that expose different opinions. Ask students to point to evidence from the novel or from their research that supports their beliefs.
• After students have had time to share their views, introduce position statements, using the Position Statements handout.
• Answer any questions that students have about how to write position statements. If students need additional examples, work through the process of composing position statements on another topic, such as funding for after-school activities or the use of standardized testing.
• Once you're satisfied that students understand the task, ask students to create a position statement that related to Phillip’s free speech rights (or another topic) in the novel. Students’ goal during this session is to gather ideas informally. Explain that they will work on creating a more polished statement with support during the next session.
• As students work in their groups, circulate and monitor student progress, encouraging them to brainstorm reasons for their position. Let them know a few minutes before the work period will conclude so that they have time to wrap up their thoughts.
• If desired, students can continue their work as homework. By the beginning of the next class session, students should gathered the reasons supporting their position—using their research, passages from the novel, and their personal opinion.

Session Four

• Introduce the Persuasion Map Student Interactive to your students, demonstrating how to use the tool. To provide a full example, work through the interactive using one of the example topics from the previous session (e.g., a position on school uniforms).
• Answer any questions about using the Persuasion Map , then ask students to enter their information in order to construct a position statement and a map of the related support. Ask students to complete their maps as they finish.
• As students finish and printout their work, arrange them in groups based on their position, placing all the students with the same position together. Ask groups to combine their statements and support to create the strongest argument possible. Groups will refine their statement and support as more students finish and join the group.
• Once all students have finished with the Persuasion Map and joined a group, explain that groups will present their position statements and support orally during the next class session.
• Go over the Presentation Rubric , indicating the amount of time each student needs to speak.
• Allow students the remainder of the class session to work on their presentations.

Additional Work Time (optional)

• If possible, allow students additional time to work on their group presentations in class. At the beginning of work sessions, remind students of the assignment and the requirements of the Presentation Rubric .
• As students work in their groups, circulate and monitor student progress.
• If students need additional support for their positions, encourage them to return to the resources used in Session Two.
• Let them know a few minutes before the work period will conclude so that they have time to wrap up their thoughts.

Session Five: Discussing Phillip's Rights

• Before the presentations begin, ask students to keep notes on the presentations, consisting of the group’s position, their reasons, and the student’s opinion of the argument. Ask students to use their notes to record any questions they have for the group at then end of the presentation.
• Rotate through the groups, allowing each group the allotted time to present.
• When all the groups have presented, ask students to debate whether Phillip’s rights were violated.
• If possible, arrange the desks in a circle for debate, asking students to sit by people with the same viewpoint.
• To manage the class discussion, students can pass a sponge ball to someone on the opposite side, with a hand raised, for a response. The responding speaker should acknowledge the main point of the previous speaker, offer an opinion on the point (not the person), and add something original.
• Explain what surprised you the most from your research abut students’ rights.
• Explain how your research affected your opinion of Phillip’s situation.
• How have you been affected by rights you do or do not have as a student?
• In what ways are your experiences similar to Philip’s?
• How has Philip’s situation and your research shaped your view of fighting for your rights?
• Use the students’ printout from the Persuasion Map as a graphic organizer for a persuasive essay on the novel.
• Tie the rights discussed in this lesson to another novel, such as Summer of My German Soldier, Farewell to Manzanar, The Witch of Blackbird Pond, Bat 6 , or Speak .

Student Assessment / Reflections

• As students discuss free speech and the situation in Nothing But the Truth , listen for comments that indicate students are identifying specific evidence from the story that connects to the information they have researched. The connections that they make between the details in the novel and the details they choose as their supporting reasons for their position will reveal their understanding and engagement with the novel.
• Monitor student interaction and progress during group work to assess social skills and assist any students having problems with the project.
• Use the Presentation Rubric to assess group presentations.
• Respond to the content and quality of students’ thoughts in their final reflections on the project. Look for indications that the student provides supporting evidence for the reflections, thus applying the lessons learned from the work with the Persuasion Map and position statements.
• Calendar Activities
• Lesson Plans
• Student Interactives

Students will identify how Martin Luther King Jr.'s dream of nonviolent conflict-resolution is reinterpreted in modern texts. Homework is differentiated to prompt discussion on how nonviolence is portrayed through characterization and conflict. Students will be formally assessed on a thesis essay that addresses the Six Kingian Principles of Nonviolence.

The Persuasion Map is an interactive graphic organizer that enables students to map out their arguments for a persuasive essay or debate.

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• Kindergarten K

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Argument Essay: Evidence

9 min read • october 30, 2020

Stephanie Kirk

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We aren’t sure where it started, but many teachers use REHUGO to help students find evidence on the Argument FRQ .  This acronym provides a quick check that can help you build logical evidence that supports your claim .

R - Reading - Something you have read, fiction or nonfiction, that connects the given topic.

E - Entertainment - A movie or song with dialogue or lyrics that present related ideas.

H - History - An event, document, speech, or person from history that aligns with the given topic.

U - Universal Truths - A common maxim or socially-accepted quote people tend to accept as truth.

G - Government - A national or international current event or governmental situation related to the topic.

O - Observations - Any cultural, technical, or societal trend that relates to the topic.

Suggested Guided Questions for the Argument FRQ

Now that you have a better understanding of the Argument FRQ ’s expectations and scoring, let’s visit a sample prompt and add a few guided questions that you can use to help plan your own writings.

Guided Question 1: What does the prompt say?

Why do I do this? Understanding the concept or idea presented by the prompt is vital to planning a response that thoroughly addresses the prompt and stays on topic throughout.  This is where you are going to BAT the PROMPT .

What does it look like?   Break down the prompt to identify what the given assertion is saying to decide what your position on the given topic will be.

Background : Gladwell asserts that society should trust each other in order to continue to be productive. Assuming the best about each other presents a better outcome than assuming the worst about each other.

Advice : The new stable prompt wording does not give much advice , but you should revisit advice you learned in class or from us as Fiveable -- things like using Toulmin to plan your response and planning modes of development that help progress your reasoning.

Task : Write an essay giving your position about the importance of trust. Specifically, is Gladwell right or wrong? And why?

🎥 Watch: AP Lang - Argumentation, Part I: It's a Trap!

Rhetorical Situation : When writing for AP Lang, it is important to consider the rhetorical situation and write in a manner that demonstrates an understanding of all elements of that situation. 

Context - the historical, social, and cultural movements in the time of the text

Occasion - special circumstances, atmosphere, attitudes, and events surrounding the creation of the text

Exigence - the urgency that leads to an action

Purpose - the goal the speaker wants to achieve and the desired audience movement

Speaker - the person or group who creates a text

Persona - the “mask” shown to his/her audience

Audience - listener, viewer, or reader of a text

Think : The goal is to present the information in a way the audience will understand ( diction / syntax ). May have a primary audience , but a secondary or unintended audience may be created if the text ends up on social media, etc.

Image Courtesy of Dana Anderson, Writing Unleashed

Guided Question 2: What do I think?

Why do I do this?   Taking a moment to brainstorm ideas can help organize thoughts and build an outline that you can revisit if you lose your train of thought in the stress of timed writing.  

What does it look like?   This might just be stream-of-consciousness in your head, cloud diagrams, or even bulleted notes on the side of your prompt, but it needs to end with a clear position statement you can use for your thesis statement . For example:

Trust is important. It does suck to get betrayed though but having a positive outlook creates positive results. Thinking the worst makes people act negatively because they project in a way that leads toward the worst response. ⬇️

Thesis Statement : Although some people believe humanity seems self-interested, a trusting nature enables individuals to focus on the positive and treat others with the respect that foster positive interrelationships.

Guided Question 3: What evidence can I use?

Why do I do this?   Revisit REHUGO and use Toulmin to plan your body paragraphs based on the thesis statement you came to when brainstorming ideas.

Modes of Development : When writing, it is helpful to arrange the overall essay and its parts in a way that aligns with the purpose .  Consider these basic modes and how you might use them in writing an argumentative essay.

Cause and Effect attempt to follow the chain of events and establish causation. The description brings imagery and details into a text so that it set up the tone and ensures the reader can follow the mood.

Classification allows the speaker to categorize things in a way that guides the reader to follow the line of reasoning.

Comparison , looking at the similarities and differences, helps to analyze the intricate details of a given topic.  Because this describes differing elements, it may be structured by the element or by the characteristic.

Definition works to explain what something is or is not. By defining the subject being discussed, the speaker is able to control the thinking about that subject.  Because this helps to clarify the topic, it is generally used in the introductory section of argumentation.

Exemplification is used when explaining the topic or situation by giving examples to help lead the audience to the desired conclusion.

Narration tells a story or gives an anecdote to help illustrate the point.

Process Analysis serves to explain the process by which something is done.

What does it look like?   I always use a version of the T-chart because one side is my evidence and the other side helps me consider multiple perspectives.  You may not have an idea in all areas, and you may have multiple ideas in one area. Try to time yourself so that you get plenty of strong evidence without wasting too much time.

🎥 Watch: AP Lang - Review: Argument Body Paragraphs

PRO TIP: What if you have more evidence for the other side? Well, you haven’t started writing just yet, so it isn’t too late to go back and revise the thesis statement . Sometimes this happens in looking for evidence, and that’s perfectly okay.  In fact, many times students will say they wrote an essay using evidence that went completely against what they felt in their head or heart just because they couldn’t put a logical argument on paper without getting too emotional. Know your audience , and build your argument.

Guided Question 4: How should I effectively organize my response?

Why do I do this?   This step helps to outline the response so that your ideas are organized before you start writing.  The general advice is to follow the structure of Classical Argumentation , but there is no rule saying that must be done to score well on the rubric. 💯

What does it look like?   One way of doing this would be to mark numbers by ideas tracked and written in the brainstorm, but some do take a moment to build an outline with topic sentences. 

Start by creating Toulmin Position Statements that can be used for topic sentences and then move into a writing plan. Here’s a sample for this prompt:

Sample Outline:

Intro - Summarize idea, define trust

Revised Thesis: Although some people believe trust must be earned, maintaining a trusting nature is important because it enables society to focus on positivity and create positive interrelationships that lead to positive outcomes. 

At the most basic level, trust is important because the human experience has taught us that the foundation of a relationship is trust.

Universal truth

Observation

Indeed historical perspective can give more credible evidence as to why trust is vital to society.

Certainly, there have been times where trust resulted in less-than-desirable situations.

Entertainment - refute

Conclude: When considering the value of trust in society, it is clear that the benefits of granting trust far outweigh the consequences of withholding it.

Key Terms to Review ( 35 )

Argument FRQ

BAT the PROMPT

Cause and Effect

Classical Argumentation

Classification

Description

Entertainment

Exemplification

Logical Evidence

Modes of Development

Observations

Process Analysis

Rhetorical Situation

Thesis Statement

Toulmin method

Trust in modern society

Universal Truths

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Debunking Myths: the Truth Behind Flight 93’s Tragic End

This essay about the fate of United Airlines Flight 93 contests the conspiracy theory that it was shot down by the U.S. military on September 11, 2001. It examines key points such as the widespread debris from the crash, the military’s orders on that day, and eyewitness accounts, concluding that the evidence supports the official narrative. The flight crashed due to the heroic efforts of passengers attempting to reclaim the aircraft from hijackers, not because of a military intervention. The essay emphasizes that conspiracy theories distract from the bravery of these individuals and the factual, investigated events of that tragic day, underscoring the importance of honoring their memory with the truth.

How it works

Within the heartbreaking mosaic of events that transpired on September 11, 2001, United Airlines Flight 93’s narrative occupies a singular position in American memory. Unlike the other flights that were taken over that day, this one was not able to reach its anticipated destination of Washington, D.C. Rather, it went down in a Pennsylvanian field near Shanksville. The bravery of the passengers who tried to take back control of the plane from the hijackers is widely known and appreciated. However, surrounding this act of bravery are persistent rumors and conspiracy theories suggesting that Flight 93 was actually shot down by the U.

S. military in a desperate bid to prevent another targeted attack.

This theory hinges on a few key points of contention. Proponents argue that debris scattered over several miles indicates the plane was shot down, as such a spread would be inconsistent with a crash following an onboard struggle. Additionally, they point to the rapid response of the military that day and the existence of a shoot-down authorization given by then-Vice President Dick Cheney, which, they claim, suggests a military intervention took place.

First and foremost, it is crucial to understand the context of that fateful morning. The chaos and unprecedented nature of the attacks led to a fog of war scenario where communication and immediate facts were muddled. The order authorized by Cheney indeed allowed for a shoot-down if necessary, but this was a measure of last resort, and there is no evidence that it was executed on Flight 93.

The debris field spread, often cited as evidence of a shootdown, can actually be explained by the high-speed impact with which Flight 93 hit the ground. Experts and official reports confirm that the plane was traveling at about 580 miles per hour when it crashed. At such a high speed, the impact force would naturally scatter debris across a wide area, a fact consistent with other high-speed crashes. Moreover, the FBI’s extensive investigation found no evidence of an external explosion that would indicate a missile strike or a shootdown.

Eyewitness accounts from that day also support the conclusion that the passengers were fighting to regain control of the aircraft. Phone calls made from the plane provided real-time details of their brave attempt. The sudden changes in the flight path and the erratic maneuvers of the aircraft in its final moments are consistent with a struggle in the cockpit rather than an external military action.

Further dispelling the shootdown theory is the lack of physical evidence for such an event. Missile strikes leave distinct signatures on wreckage, none of which were found on the debris recovered from Flight 93. The National Transportation Safety Board’s (NTSB) report outlines the aircraft’s destruction as consistent with a ground impact from a high-speed dive, which was corroborated by the cockpit voice recorder data.

The persistence of the shootdown theory can likely be attributed to the deep-seated need for answers and the complexity of accepting the random, chaotic elements of such a catastrophic day. Conspiracy theories provide a sense of control or alternative explanation that some find comforting in the face of such senseless tragedy. However, they also undermine the heroism of the passengers whose actions likely prevented further loss of life by ensuring that Flight 93 did not reach its intended target.

In conclusion, the evidence overwhelmingly supports the fact that Flight 93 was not shot down, but rather crashed as a result of the passengers’ courageous efforts to stop the hijackers. This act of heroism should be remembered and respected as a poignant reminder of the resilience and bravery that individuals can muster in the face of dire threats. While the allure of conspiracy theories might offer an alternative narrative, they distract from the factual events verified by extensive investigation and disrespect the memory of those who fought valiantly that day. It’s our responsibility to uphold the truth and honor their sacrifice.

Cite this page

Debunking Myths: The Truth Behind Flight 93's Tragic End. (2024, May 12). Retrieved from https://papersowl.com/examples/debunking-myths-the-truth-behind-flight-93s-tragic-end/

"Debunking Myths: The Truth Behind Flight 93's Tragic End." PapersOwl.com , 12 May 2024, https://papersowl.com/examples/debunking-myths-the-truth-behind-flight-93s-tragic-end/

PapersOwl.com. (2024). Debunking Myths: The Truth Behind Flight 93's Tragic End . [Online]. Available at: https://papersowl.com/examples/debunking-myths-the-truth-behind-flight-93s-tragic-end/ [Accessed: 16 May. 2024]

"Debunking Myths: The Truth Behind Flight 93's Tragic End." PapersOwl.com, May 12, 2024. Accessed May 16, 2024. https://papersowl.com/examples/debunking-myths-the-truth-behind-flight-93s-tragic-end/

"Debunking Myths: The Truth Behind Flight 93's Tragic End," PapersOwl.com , 12-May-2024. [Online]. Available: https://papersowl.com/examples/debunking-myths-the-truth-behind-flight-93s-tragic-end/. [Accessed: 16-May-2024]

PapersOwl.com. (2024). Debunking Myths: The Truth Behind Flight 93's Tragic End . [Online]. Available at: https://papersowl.com/examples/debunking-myths-the-truth-behind-flight-93s-tragic-end/ [Accessed: 16-May-2024]

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Deborah Cotton Made Us Face the Truth About America’s Past

D eborah “Big Red” Cotton and I met by getting shot together. It was a Mother’s Day afternoon during Barack Obama’s second term as America’s first Black president. We were two of 19 people gunned down in the biggest mass shooting in the modern history of New Orleans, a city stained by racism and violence since its time as the biggest slave market in North America. The shooting targeted a second line parade, an iconic local ritual that evolved from the burial rites enslaved Africans brought with them to Louisiana starting in 1722 and that later helped give birth to jazz. To desecrate such a sacred gathering, New Orleans singer John Boutte said, was “ like bringing a gun to church and starting to shoot people. It’s just hateful.”

Gravely wounded, Cotton was not expected to live through the night. But she held on long enough to dictate a statement that a close friend delivered to a hastily called City Council meeting. A day after the shooting, a surveillance video had surfaced that showed a Black man watching as the parade passed left to right. Suddenly, the man plunged into the crowd—which consisted almost entirely of Black men, women, and children—and began firing a handgun at point blank range. As people ran and threw themselves to the ground in terror, the gunman kept firing until he emptied his weapon, then ran away.

Cotton’s City Council statement implored the people of New Orleans to stop and think before passing judgment. “Do you know what it takes to be so disconnected in your heart that you walk out into a gathering of hundreds of people who look just like you and begin firing?” she asked.  Alluding to the bleak circumstances facing many young Black men in New Orleans—parents absent or impoverished, abysmal schools, rampant gang and police violence, few job options beyond menial labor or drug dealing—she added, “These young men have been separated from us by so much trauma.”

Thanks to what Cotton and the police officers investigating the shooting both labeled “a miracle,” she did live through the night. In fact, I connected with her in New Orleans a few months later. She’d been discharged from the hospital by then, though her return to normal life was uncertain at best. Some vital organs had been severely compromised or outright removed. The doctors said she had many more surgeries ahead.

When we spoke, after telling me to call her "Deb," she shared that she often felt nauseous, anxious, and sometimes depressed these days. Yet she evinced not the slightest anger toward the two gunmen who had shot us and seventeen other people at a ritual that, as she well knew, was sacred to Black identity in New Orleans. Instead, she reiterated her initial response.

“I try to put myself in other people’s shoes in life,” Cotton told me. “I asked myself, ‘What has happened to put those young men in such a dead-hearted place that they would shoot into a crowd of people who looked just like them?’  That’s what’s so striking to me. They weren’t shooting at white men; they weren’t shooting at Black women. They were shooting at other Black men. There’s a level of self-hatred there that is so profound. It’s like they’re trying to wipe themselves out.”

Today, Cotton’s message of mercy and understanding toward people who have done us harm, or who we fear will do us harm, is much-needed balm for a nation that has been polarized by figures and forces spreading division and hatred.  When I first got to know her, Cotton’s ability to forgive made me think of her as a saint.  As I went on to write a book about the Mother’s Day shooting, I also came to see her as a prophet.  

Cotton’s belief in forgiveness, I learned, was no straightforward act of Christian charity; it was accompanied by her clear-eyed, historically grounded warning that horrors like the Mother’s Day shooting—and, for that matter, the election of an unabashed racist to succeed the nation’s first Black president—would continue to happen in the United States until the circumstances underlying those horrors were honestly named and confronted. Elaborating on her reasons for forgiving the Mother’s Day gunmen, she later explained to me that, “Racism can kill Black people even when a Black finger pulls the trigger.”

Read More: James Baldwin Insisted We Tell the Truth About This Country. The Truth Is, We’ve Been Here Before

To remedy the legacies of slavery that fueled such horrors, she advocated a strategy of truth and reconciliation, a version of which had helped South Africa to navigate the transition from apartheid to democracy in the 1990s. (As Cotton and I got to know one another, we were happy to discover that the anti-apartheid struggle had loomed large in both of our political comings of age. She even confessed to feeling a tiny bit jealous that I had been arrested with Archbishop Desmond Tutu protesting apartheid at South Africa’s embassy in Washington, D.C.)

When Nelson Mandela emerged from 27 years in prison to lead a new South Africa, the country had just fought a bloody civil war after nearly 100 years of repression of the Black and mixed-race majority by the white minority.  It was far from clear that South Africa would not descend back into violence, much less that it could evolve into a unified country with freedom and equality for all.

South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission was designed to enable South Africans to move forward “on the basis that there is a need for understanding but not for vengeance, a need for reparation but not for retaliation, a need for ubuntu [an African word connoting communal solidarity] but not for victimization.”  The Commission conducted a nationwide conversation about what happened during apartheid. Victims were invited to testify about injustices. Security officials could apply for amnesty from prosecution, provided they told the whole truth about their wrongdoings. The Commission aimed to establish a truthful record of what apartheid had done, present this truth to the South African people, and thereby lay the groundwork for a reconciliation among contending segments of the population so the country could heal.

Tutu, who chaired the Commission, later ventured that the U.S. might also benefit from a truth and reconciliation process. In words that mirror Cotton’s perception of the Mother’s Day gunmen, he wrote that victims of apartheid “often ended up internalizing the definition the top dogs had of them. . . . And then the awful demons of self-hate and self-contempt, a hugely negative self-image, took its place in the center of the victim’s being. . . . Society has conspired to fill you with self-hate, which you then project outward.”

How a racial truth and reconciliation process would operate in the U.S. is a complex question. But the necessary first step is to tell the truth. After the neo-Nazi march in Charlottesville in the opening months of the Trump presidency, civil rights leader Bryan Stevenson said that only after Americans acknowledged the truth about their past could they hope to consign such outbursts of racist hatred to history. “You have to tell the truth before you can get to reconciliation,” he said in an interview with The Guardian , “and culturally we have done a terrible job of truth telling in this country about our history of racial inequality.”

Facing unpleasant truths about America’s past is not easy, but no one should blame themselves for being unaware of those truths in the first place. America’s schools, churches, legal and political systems, and news media have obscured the truth about race and slavery since before the nation’s birth. Teachers, parents, clergy, coaches, neighbors, and employers have passed down harmful habits of word and deed to younger generations. Those inherited patterns are part of what makes racism a systemic condition rather than an individual shortcoming.

After a White supremacist massacred nine Black people in a church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015 hoping to trigger a race war, a white man named Garry Civitello called in to a national TV show and asked, “How can I be less racist?” Heather McGhee, a Black scholar on the show, praised Civitello for his desire to change. She suggested that he get to know some Black people and read some Black history. Civitello ended up not voting for Trump in 2016, even though nearly all the white people around him in rural North Carolina did. In a comment countless Americans might echo if they read the history books McGhee had recommended to him, Civitello marveled that, “There are so many things I did not know that I thought I knew.”

Deborah Cotton eventually succumbed to her wounds—she died four years after the shooting—but she lost her faith in truth and reconciliation.  After recovering her health sufficiently to work part-time, she took a job with the Alliance for Safety and Justice, a nonprofit that worked to reform the criminal justice system, including the mass incarceration of people of color. Shortly after Trump was elected in 2016, Cotton was invited to address a conference of government officials and legal experts in Louisiana’s state capital. The first speaker was an older white woman who had lost her son to gun violence. The woman argued forcefully against reforming current practices, insisting that her son’s killers never be allowed back on the streets.

“Then I got up,” Cotton later told me, “and I said that the young men who shot me and the other people on Mother’s Day should be punished, but I didn’t think they should spend the rest of their lives in prison. I said I thought those young men could redeem themselves and make a positive contribution to society if we would consider alternatives to life in prison. After the panel was over, a long line of people came up and wanted to talk with me, take my card, have me come speak to their organization, and whatnot. That felt so good. My statement and presence sent a very different message than people usually hear from victims of crime.”

Driving home afterwards, Cotton found herself actually feeling grateful that she’d been shot. “During the first year after the shooting,” she told me, “I often felt like I didn’t want to live anymore. I wasn’t going to take action myself, but many days I thought, ‘Just let me go.’ Now, I feel like if getting shot was what put me in the position to do this work, then I’m glad I was shot.”

“Wait—are you serious?” I asked. “Glad you got shot? I’m glad you survived, but I’m sure as hell not glad you were shot.”

“Yeah, I’m serious,” Cotton replied. “That’s just how I feel.”

Excerpted from Big Red's Mercy: The Shooting of Deborah Cotton and a Story of Race in America by Mark Hertsgaard. Published by Pegasus Books, May 7 th 2024

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Truth, Objectivity and Evidence in History Writing

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Robert Barnard , Joseph Ulatowski

It is often claimed by theorists of truth that truth is objective. Upon reflection, however, this familiar principle can be understood in multiple ways. With this in mind, we have conducted empirical studies designed to elicit people's responses to questions about the objectivity of truth. These studies suggest the following: (1) overall, individuals tend to endorse claims that are consistent with the objectivity of truth; (2) individuals' conceptions of the objectivity of truth can be importantly different from one another; (3) philosophers and non-philosophers both endorse the objectivity of truth, but the apparent commitment of philosophers is stronger.

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GODWIN OGBECHE OLOFU

The attainment of absolute truth in historical interpretation has remained one of the major problems that make the study of history profound and complex. This owed to the fact that, human's affairs which history study appears to be more complex, less easily analyzed, less accessible to quantitative and précised presentation than the physical state of affairs. Distracted by the success and achievements of the physical and natural science, there has been greater demand over time for the application of scientific methodology in the study of history and its interpretation. The study acknowledged the fact that absolute objectivity in history to a great extent may only be idealistic and not realistic as the historian is left with lot of challenges to achieving this goal. The objective of this paper is to examine the various techniques and methods through which historical truth can be achieved. The paper explains the concept of history and objectivity in history, before taking a cursory look at the nature and methods of writing history. The study had suggested some measures to overcome the challenges facing the historian in achieving objectivity in history.

Barry Smith

1 This paper develops ideas presented for the first time in our 2001 and (in press), which present a detailed history of the act-content-object distinction in relation to the concepts of truthmakers and truthbearers. The first stresses developments in our understanding of those special objects of judgments called states of affairs. The second concerns mainly the general development of theories of judgment at the turn of the last century. The present paper concerns especially the development of the concept of the objectivity of truth.

David L Hildebrand

In a discussion associating his views with those of William James, Richard Rorty once wrote that the word "true" (like the words "good" and "rational") was merely a normative notion, "a compliment paid to sentences that seem to be paying their way and that fit in with other sentences which are doing so." (Rorty, 1982, p. xxv) Rorty argued that our culture's failures to achieve "Objectivity" tell us that we have been desiring the wrong ideal all along. Perhaps "true" is just a compliment and "objectivity" is just an illusory desire; perhaps not. Regardless, calling objectivity "illusory" has done little to eradicate the constant and practical need of discussing and debating what objectivity should—and should not mean. To better understand objectivity, this paper examines how objectivity is faring among theorists in history and journalism because both fields are crucially important in influencing what the average person considers to be debate, argument, knowledge, truth—indeed, what they think is "objectivity." First, I present two sketches of the recent history of the concept of "objectivity"—first among historians and then among journalism/media theorists. Second, I examine several critiques each field has made against what they consider the traditional conception of objectivity. Third, I shift to these critics' pragmatic proposals for reconstructing objectivity. Finally, I make a very brief case regarding why these critics' proposals would benefit from greater connection with a philosophically pragmatist conception of democracy. In brief, my tentative conclusion is that these (historians' and journalists') proposals to renovate "objectivity" only become defensible once they more firmly connected to democracy by dialogical and epistemic habits of inquiry.

Journal of the Philosophy of History 6 (2012) 339–368

This paper develops under-recognized connections between moderate historicist methodology and character (or virtue) epistemology, and goes on to argue that their combination supports a “dialectical” conception of objectivity. Considerations stemming from underdetermination problems motivate our claim that historicism requires agent-focused rather than merely belief-focused epistemology; embracing this point helps historicists avoid the charge of relativism. Considerations stemming from the genealogy of epistemic virtue concepts motivate our claim that character epistemologies are strengthened by moderate historicism about the epistemic virtues and values at work in communities of inquiry; embracing this point helps character epistemologists avoid the charge of objectivism. Keywords: historiography, virtue epistemology, naturalism, objectivity, thick concepts, underdetermination problem

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Long before the emergence of Donald Trump as the main symbol of what has suitably been called a "post-truth" political culture, I have been thinking on a very trivial thing: why as a rule do we condemn deliberate falsehood in politics, journalism, the academia, and other fields? In posing this question, I was not intending to validate the kind of relativism that says "the distinction between lying and telling the truth does not matter". My insight was rather that the analysis of practices that claim respect for truth and truthfulness could well start with an exploration of the ways they reject lies and other means of deception. I have focused on the role of the condemnation of lying in history writing, because this is the only field I am really familiar with. I have tried to catch up with some very interesting philosophical and literary discussions, and to connect them to the old problem of historical objectivity. I ended up attracted to the ethical issues that normally remain in the background of the arguments in favor of and against objectivity. But what if those issues are pushed into the foreground? What if objectivity is more about ethics than epistemology or methodology? These are the problems I have attempted to unpack in the text.

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ABSTRACT: Frege, and others who followed him, stressed the role of fallibility as a means to defining ‘objectivity.’ By defining objective judgments as fallible, these philosophers contributed to the consolidation of a theory of objectivity which suggested interpreting epistemological, as well as other judgements, as being objective. An important philosophical implication of this theory lies in its disclosure of the interrelations between truth and objectivity. In light of this insight, and based on an analysis of instances of false (epistemological and other) judgments, I show that truth and objectivity go hand-in-hand, while falsity and objectivity do not. This finding alone indicates the necessity to revise the theory of objectivity.

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Michael Cohen, right, leaves his apartment building in New York May 14, 2024. Cohen is a key witness in former President Donald Trump's criminal trial. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)

Trump evidence summary that omitted some phone call records is standard, not tampering, experts say

If your time is short.

Evidence presented in former President Donald Trump’s criminal trial in New York included a summary showing records of calls between Michael Cohen, Trump’s former lawyer, and Keith Davidson, a former lawyer for Stormy Daniels.

Some records of calls between the two men were omitted from the summary, a paralegal testified.

Experts, as well as state and federal law, say it’s common practice for summaries of voluminous evidence to omit some pieces of evidence, which are otherwise still in evidence in other places. It does not prove evidence tampering, experts said.

Donald Trump’s supporters claim the prosecution tampered with evidence in the former president’s criminal trial, following a courtroom exchange between a paralegal from Manhattan District Attorney Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office and a Trump attorney.

In May 10 testimony, Jaden Jarmel-Schneider, the paralegal, said under questioning from Trump defense attorney Emil Bove that some records of phone calls involving Michael Cohen — a former Trump lawyer turned prosecution witness — were omitted from a summary of calls presented as evidence in the business records case about hush money. 

Trump faces 34 counts of falsifying business records to cover up a hush money payment to adult film actor Stormy Daniels before the 2016 presidential election. Daniels’ real name is Stephanie Clifford.

"Evidence tampering is a FELONY!" a May 13 X post partly said. "Alvin Bragg’s Office Deleted 3 pages of Phone Call Records of Michael Cohen (with) Stormy Daniels’ Lawyer!" The post linked to a May 11 Epoch Times article about the exchange.

Other social media posts , including from Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr. and conservative media outlets , seized on the courtroom exchange to accuse the prosecution of improperly handling evidence.

At issue is a summary of phone calls between Cohen and Keith Davidson, who formerly represented Daniels. The calls took place between Aug. 5, 2016, and Jan. 12, 2018, but the summary presented as evidence didn’t include every call. Another summary of calls between Davidson and former Daniels’ manager Gina Rodriguez also omitted some calls.

Legal experts told PolitiFact the prosecution did nothing wrong by omitting some calls from the summaries. 

"It is very common" for prosecutors to submit as evidence a summary of records that omits some they don't deem relevant, as an aid to the jury, said Karen Friedman Agnifilo, a criminal defense attorney who worked at the Manhattan district attorney’s office before Bragg took office. "The judge will tell the jury this is what it is and what it is for. It is not considered tampering," Friedman Agnifilo said. 

Evidence tampering, defined by federal law , is when a person "alters, destroys, conceals or removes any record, document or thing with purpose to impair its verity or availability in such proceeding or investigation."

Jarmel-Schneider told prosecutor Christopher Conroy in testimony that the calls cut from the summary are still in evidence in other places. We contacted Bragg’s office to ask where in the evidence they are located, but we received no reply.

Jarmel-Schneider agreed with Bove’s statement that the call summaries presented in court don’t list every call between the people named. "That would be tens of hundreds of thousands of calls," he said.

Bove asked Jarmel-Schneider whether exhibit 337 included every call between Cohen and Davidson, and the paralegal said, "We narrowed down by a time period."

Bove said about a page and a half of calls between Cohen and Davidson were omitted, but Jarmel-Schneider said he couldn’t confirm that number offhand. Later in the exchange, Bove said about three pages of calls between Davidson and Rodriguez were also cut from a summary exhibit , a number Jarmel-Schneider also couldn’t confirm offhand.

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After Bove’s questioning, prosecutor Conroy asked Jarmel-Schneider whether all the calls, including those that were cut from the call summaries, were still in evidence in other places, to which he replied, "Yes." 

Conroy then asked why they had been cut from the summaries.

"My understanding is that the decision was always going to be that we would admit the parts of the call summaries that were related to what came out in trial," Jarmel-Schneider said. "That’s the point of doing summary charts. We’re pretty far down the road now, so we made decisions about which parts of them to include."

Both the longer lists of calls and the later, shortened lists were each submitted to the defense, which did not object to them being submitted into evidence, Jarmel-Schneider testified .

Frank Bowman, a University of Missouri law professor and former Denver local prosecutor and Florida federal prosecutor, said state and federal laws allow for summaries of evidence to be presented in court.

"When a witness is called to enter summary charts or similar evidence, the evidence is — by definition — summary," Bowman wrote in an email to PolitiFact. "It is not merely a repetition of all the evidence previously entered in other forms."

Federal Rule 1006 allows the use of summaries "to prove the content of voluminous writings" as long as the original content is available for either side to examine. A New York state rule on evidence contains similar language. The summary must be accurate and the opposing side can challenge its accuracy and seek to have it excluded from evidence. 

We found no evidence — such as news reports or trial transcript remarks — that Trump’s attorneys have sought to exclude the call summaries from evidence.

"Sometimes a summary will merely reorganize previously admitted evidence in a more easily comprehensible way," Bowman said. "Sometimes it will highlight the points that the prosecution thinks are most relevant without including absolutely everything. There is nothing improper about either approach."

An X post said Bragg’s office "deleted 3 pages of phone call records of Michael Cohen with Stormy Daniels’ lawyer," which is evidence tampering. 

Bragg’s office did not "delete" the phone call records. The records were omitted from a summary, which experts told us is standard. The summaries are not intended to be exhaustive.

Trump had the opportunity to challenge the summary’s accuracy and seek to have it excluded from evidence; we found no evidence — such as news reports or trial transcript remarks — that his attorneys have done so. 

The call records in question are available elsewhere as part of the evidence. 

We rate the claim False.

PolitiFact Researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this report.

Read About Our Process

The Principles of the Truth-O-Meter

Our Sources

X post , May 13 2024

Email interview, Frank Bowman, University of Missouri law professor, May 14, 2024

Email interview, Karen Friedman Agnifilo,criminal defense attorney at Agnifilo Law Group, May 14, 2024

The Epoch Times, Alvin Bragg’s Office Deleted Phone Call Records of Michael Cohen and Stormy Daniels’ Lawyer , May 11, 2024

The Federalist, Paralegal Testimony: Alvin Bragg’s Office Tampered With Evidence , May 13, 2024

Cornell Law School Legal Information Institute, Rule 1006. Summaries to Prove Content , accessed May 14, 2024

Cornell Law School Legal Information Institute, 25 CFR § 11.440 - Tampering with or fabricating physical evidence , accessed May 15, 2024

New York State Unified Court System, 10.11. Exception for Summary of Voluminous Material , accessed May 14, 2024

New York Courts, Trump trial transcript, pages 3218 through 3236 , May 10, 2024

New York Courts, People’s exhibit 337, calls between Michael Cohen and Keith Davidson , accessed May 15, 2024 

New York Courts, People’s exhibit 344, calls between Keith Davidson and Gina Rodriguez , accessed May 15, 2024 

New York Courts, PeopleVs.DTrump-71543/Evidence/People/ , accessed May 15, 2024

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The Great Honeybee Fallacy

For years, people have understood them to be at imminent risk of extinction, despite evidence to the contrary. Why?

E veryone , for so long, has been worried about the honeybees. Governments, celebrities, social-media users, small businesses, multinational conglomerates—in the two decades or so since news emerged that American honeybees were disappearing, all manner of entities with a platform or a wallet have taken up and abandoned countless other causes, but they can’t quit trying to save the bees.

In 2022, at least 18 states enacted bee-related legislation. Last year, a cryptocurrency launched with the intention of raising “awareness and support for bee conservation.” If you search Etsy right now for “save the bees,” you’ll be rewarded with thousands of things to buy. Bees and Thank You, a food truck in suburban Boston, funds bee sanctuaries and gives out a packet of wildflower seeds—good for the bees!—with every grilled cheese sandwich it sells. A company in the United Kingdom offers a key ring containing a little bottle of chemicals that can purportedly “revive” an “exhausted bee” should you encounter one, “so it can continue its mission pollinating planet Earth.”

All of the above is surprising for maybe a few different reasons, but here’s a good place to start: Though their numbers have fluctuated, honeybees are not in trouble. Other bees are. But the movement’s poster child, biggest star, and attention hound is not at risk of imminent extinction, and never has been. “There are more honeybees on the planet now than there probably ever have been in the history of honeybees,” Rich Hatfield, a biologist at the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation, told me. “They are in no threat of going endangered. It’s not an issue.”

The idea that honeybees need our help is one of our most curiously persistent cultural myths. It is well intended. But it is also unhelpful: a distraction from more urgent biodiversity problems, and an object lesson in the limits of modern environmentalism and the seductiveness of modern consumerism. That the misconception has survived for so long may tell us less about bees than it does about the species that has, for centuries, adored, influenced, and exploited them more than any other. “Save the bees” rhetoric has turned them into something unspoiled, a miracle of mother nature’s ingenious machinery. But everything about the modern American honeybee has been shaped by humans, including its sustained existence.

A true truth about the bees: The modal American honeybee is, essentially, a farm animal—part of a $200-billion-a-year industry that’s regulated by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and is as sophisticated and professionalized as any other segment of the sprawling system that gets food on our plates. The nation’s largest beekeeping operation, Adee Honey Farms, has more than 80,000 colonies, facilities in five states, and nearly 100 employees. Its bees, and those at other large-scale apiaries, do produce honey, but more and more, the real money is in what the industry calls “pollination services”: the renting-out of bees to fertilize the farms of Big Ag, which have seen their indigenous pollinators decline with urbanization and industrialization.

Every February, right before the almond trees start blooming powdery and white across California’s San Joaquin Valley, bees from all over the country pack onto semitrucks and head west, where they participate in the largest supervised pollination event on Earth, doing their part to ensure that America’s most beloved nut makes its way again into snack packs and candy bars. Throughout the spring and early summer, they do the same for other crops—watermelons, pumpkins, cucumbers, alfalfas, onions—before heading home to the honey farm, where the most ambitious among them can expect to make a 12th of a teaspoon of the gooey, golden stuff over their lifetime. In the early 1990s, when Adee started renting out bees for industrial fertilization, that income accounted for about a third of its revenue, with honey making up the rest. Now the ratio is flipped.

Read: A uniquely French approach to environmentalism

As that transition was happening, another force threatened to rearrange the industry even more dramatically. Worker bees were flying away for pollen and never coming back, abandoning their hives’ queens and young like a lousy husband in an enduring cliché. No one could figure out why. Some blamed a common class of pesticides called neonicotinoids, which are toxic to bees. Others zeroed in on the stress incurred by all that trucking of beehives around the country for pollination. Maybe it was warmer winters, or malnutrition, or the parasitic Varroa mite, or a sign of the Rapture.

This was not the first time bees had gone missing en masse. In 1869, and in 1918, and in 1965, farmers had reported similar phenomena, given names such as “spring dwindle” and “disappearing disease” in the scientific literature. But it was the first time that such an event reached full-scale public crisis, or that knowledge of it spread much beyond the insular world of farmers, beekeepers, entomologists, and agriculture regulators.

In retrospect, it was a perfect moment for a predicament like this to effloresce into panic. Social media had recently birthed an immensely powerful way of both disseminating information and performing one’s values loudly and publicly. An Inconvenient Truth , Al Gore’s feature-length climate-change call to arms, had become one of the highest-grossing documentaries of all time. Michael Pollan was at the peak of his powers, having just published The Omnivore’s Dilemma , which laid out the consequence and quantity of choices facing contemporary eaters. Americans were newly aware of the terrifying fragility of our food systems, and newly in possession of robust ways to talk about it. Brands were interested in aligning themselves with noncontroversial, blandly feel-good causes. Plus, humans were already primed to love bees; we have since biblical times . “We think of bees as being very pure,” Beth Daly, an anthrozoology professor at the University of Windsor, in Canada, told me. They are honey and flowers and sunshine, beauty and abundance, communitarianism and hard work.

By 2007, the mystery thing making these lovely creatures go away had a scary-sounding new name: colony collapse disorder. Within a decade, bee panic was everywhere. A spate of nonfiction books warned of the imminent threat of a Fruitless Fall and A Spring Without Bees . The White House convened a task force. General Mills temporarily removed the cartoon-bee mascot from boxes of Honey Nut Cheerios, enacting a high-concept allegory meant, I guess, to stun Americans into action. The cosmetics company Burt’s Bees released a limited-edition lip-balm flavor (strawberry), some of whose proceeds went to one of the approximately gazillion honeybee-conservation nonprofits that had recently sprung up. Samuel L. Jackson gave Scarlett Johansson and Ryan Reynolds “10 pounds of bees” as a wedding gift. Laypeople started keeping backyard hives. Häagen-Dazs created an awareness-raising ice-cream flavor and funded a VR short film shot from the perspective of a bee; in it, Alex, our apian protagonist, warns that “something terrible is happening.”

She (it?) was not entirely wrong. Colony collapse was an actual problem, a scientific whodunit with genuinely high stakes. Honeybees are responsible for pollinating roughly every third bite Americans eat. Scientists were correct to think back then that if colonies were to keep collapsing, our food system would need to change in painful, potentially catastrophic ways.

Much more worrying, though, and more real: The population of wild bees—the non-honey-producing, non-hive-dwelling relatives of the species humans have been intent on saving—has been decreasing steadily, for years. Insects of all kinds are declining in record numbers , and their deaths will have repercussions we cannot even imagine.

Read: The illogical relationship Americans have with animals

Yet heads have been turned mostly toward the honeybee. That’s because, unlike so many other imperiled animals, honeybees are part of a huge industry quite literally invested in their survival. Apis mellifera are living things, but they are also revenue-generating assets; the thousands of people who rely on bees’ uncompensated labor to buy groceries and pay the cable bill had every incentive to figure out colony collapse. So they found better agrochemicals and bred mite-resistant bees. They gave their bees nutritional supplements, fats and proteins and minerals ground as fine as pollen and snuck into the food supply. They moved hives into atmospherically controlled warehouses. They adapted.

All told, it was kind of the Y2K of environmental disasters. Not that colony collapse was a hoax, or that the panic surrounding it was an overreaction. Rather, it was an appropriate reaction—a big problem made smaller thanks to the difficult, somewhat unglamorous, behind-the-scenes labor of trained professionals with a vested interest in averting disaster. In 2019, an economist-entomologist team published a study analyzing the effects of colony collapse on the managed-pollinator industry; they found “cause for considerable optimism, at least for the economically dominant honey bee.” According to the most recent data from the USDA Census of Agriculture , honeybees have been the country’s fastest-growing livestock category since 2007. Also, very clearly, our food system has not fallen to pieces.

This doesn’t mean honeybee keepers aren’t struggling—some are. But as Hatfield, the Xerces Society biologist, told me, that’s an issue for the business of honeybee keeping, not the moral and practical project of pollinator conservation. He finds a useful comparison in a different domesticated animal: chickens. “When we get bird flu,” he said, “we leave that up to USDA scientists to develop immunizations and other things to help these chickens that are suffering in these commercial chicken coops. We don’t enlist homeowners to help the chicken populations in their backyard.”

I n 2018 , Seirian Sumner, a wasp scientist and fan , conducted a survey of 748 people, mostly in the United Kingdom, on their perceptions of various insects. She and her collaborators, she told me, “were absolutely flabbergasted” by their results: Bees are roughly as adored as butterflies and significantly more liked than wasps—their wilder cousins—which serve various important roles in ecosystem regulation, and which are in genuine, fairly precipitous decline.

Sumner was born in 1974 and doesn’t recall much love for bees when she was growing up. You weren’t “buying your bee slippers and your bee socks and your bee scarf and your bee mug and everything else,” she told me. Today’s craze for bees, her research suggests, is a mutually reinforcing phenomenon. People love bees because they understand their importance as pollinators. People understand their importance as pollinators because it is easier to fund research and write magazine articles and publish children’s books and engage in multi-platform brand campaigns about animals that people are already fond of.

Honeybees are, in point of fact, amazing. They have five eyes, two stomachs, and a sense of smell 50 times more sensitive than a dog’s. They do a little dance when they find good pollen and want to tell their friends about it. They are feminists, and obviously, they dress well. They produce a near-universally-liked substance, and they do not have to die to do it. Loving bees, and wanting more of them in our food system, is simple. Engaging meaningfully with the cruel, complicated reality of industrial food production, or the looming, life-extinguishing horror of climate change, is not.

To save the bees is to participate in an especially appealing kind of environmental activism, one that makes solutions seem straightforward and buying stuff feel virtuous. Worried about vanishing biodiversity? Save the bees. Feeling powerless about your mandatory participation, via the consumption required to stay alive, in agriculture systems that produce so much wreckage, so much waste, so much suffering for so many living things? Save the bees. Tired of staring at the hyperobject ? Save the bees. When we are grasping for ways to help, we tend to land on whatever is within arm’s reach.

In the 17th century, when what is now called the American honeybee was imported from Europe, large-scale industrial agriculture did not exist. Farms were surrounded by wild flora and powered by non-machine labor, without pesticides and chemical fertilizers, which also did not exist. Bees lived, ate, and pollinated all in the same place; they built their nests in untilled soil and unchopped trees. Even if farmers could have trucked them in, they didn’t have to. But as farming changed, bees became livestock, then itinerant laborers—there to meet the needs of the industrial systems that created those needs in the first place. Their numbers have always oscillated based on our demands: In the 1940s, when sugar rationing made beekeeping extraordinarily profitable, the bee population swelled; as soon as the war was over, it fell again. In 2024, thanks to the efforts of professional beekeepers and (to a lesser extent) backyard hobbyists, they’re faring better than ever.

Now the industrialized world that made, and saved, the honeybee as we know it is being called on to save other insects—the ones that really are in trouble. This will be trickier. When you ask experts what a layperson should do for all pollinators in 2024, they have a lot to say: Use fewer insecticides, inside and outside. Convert mowed lawn into habitat that can feed wild animals. Reconsider your efforts to save the honeybee—not just because it’s a diversion, but because honeybees take resources from wild bees . Buy organic, and look for food grown using agricultural practices that support beneficial insects. Get involved with efforts to count and conserve bees of all species. (The experts do not think you should buy a lip balm.)

What they are getting at is … an inconvenient truth: America does have an insect-biodiversity crisis. It is old and big—much older and much bigger than colony collapse disorder—and so are the solutions to it. The best require returning our environment into something that looks much more like the place the first American honeybees encountered. Having a backyard beehive isn’t the answer to what’s ailing our ecosystem, because having a backyard is the problem. Buying ice cream from a global food conglomerate isn’t the answer, because buying ice cream from a global food conglomerate is the problem . The movement to save the honeybee is a small attempt at unwinding centuries of human intervention in our natural world, at undoing the harms of the modern food system, without having to sacrifice too much. No wonder so many of us wanted to believe.

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Gaza’s mass graves: Is the truth being uncovered?

Calls for an independent inquiry are mounting as more burial sites are found across Gaza, but experts say bringing the truth to light will take time.

Palestinian emergency workers continue to uncover mass graves in and around three hospitals in the Gaza Strip, months after Israeli forces laid siege to them, claiming they were being used as Hamas command centres.

More than 500 bodies have been recovered with Palestinian officials saying several of them showed signs of mutilation and torture amounting to war crimes. Israel’s military has rejected the allegations as “baseless”, saying the bodies were buried by Palestinians during the fighting between Israeli forces and Hamas in the area.

Keep reading

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The United Nations, the United States and the European Union have called for an independent investigation to determine the truth and ensure accountability. UN spokesperson Stephane Dujarric said: “It’s important that all forensic evidence be well preserved.”

But as Israel intensifies its assault on the southern city of Rafah, having closed the crossing into Egypt and preventing any possible deployment of forensic teams or equipment into Gaza, burial sites are being dug up and evidence haphazardly collected.

Experts said the disturbance of sites where proof of war crimes might lie will make the search for truth harder – yet not all hopes for justice are lost.

How is evidence being collected from the mass graves?

Three mass graves have been found at the Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Younis, three at al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City and one at the Kamal Adwan Hospital in Beit Lahiya.

Mohammad Zaanin, a member of the Palestinian Civil Defence in Gaza, told Al Jazeera on Thursday that a fourth gravesite containing 42 bodies had been found at al-Shifa Hospital. The bodies were decomposed and unrecognisable, but some had IDs on them or were identified by relatives from clothing remnants.

Civil Defence teams have been documenting the remains through photos and videos, working with little protective gear and no forensic equipment. “We have some body bags and a little equipment to protect our hands and noses, but in reality, this is a local effort, and it puts a lot of pressure on our team,” Zaanin said.

Thani Nimr Abdel Rahman, who works with the Al Mezan Center for Human Rights in Gaza’s Jabalia refugee camp and has visited the burial sites at al-Shifa Hospital, said she witnessed the ground being excavated using bulldozers.

Before the dead are reburied at a new site, relatives of the missing search for pieces of clothing around the remains for a sign of their loved ones. At times, the corpses have been left unattended. “The dogs came to devour the bodies, and the smell was deadly,” Abdel Rahman told Al Jazeera. “[This work] requires more capabilities and forensic experts, none of which are available in Gaza.”

Has evidence of war crimes been found?

Several Civil Defence members have claimed to have found evidence of ill treatment, including torture, extrajudicial executions and unlawful killings of noncombatants that could amount to war crimes.

Rami Dababesh, a member of the Civil Defence team who took part in the exhumation work at al-Shifa Hospital, told Al Jazeera that his team had found “headless corpses”. Paramedic Adel al-Mashharawi said he saw bodies of children and women dressed in hospital garments.

Civil Defence member Mohammed Mughier said at least 10 of the bodies had been found with bound hands while others still had medical tubes attached to them. He added that additional forensic examination was needed on about 20 bodies of people who they suspect had been “buried alive”.

Yamen Abu Sulaiman, the head of the Civil Defence in Khan Younis, said some of the bodies found at the Nasser Medical Complex had been “stacked together” and showed indications of field executions having taken place. At least 392 bodies were recovered at this site alone.

Is the evidence gathered reliable?

Mass grave investigations are typically a highly complex, lengthy and expensive process, requiring significant expertise and resources. The overarching operating principle underpinning the forensic scientific approach is “do no harm” because interference with the site may prejudice the evidence.

“The first reaction from pretty much everyone is to dig the bodies up because it’s a very emotional thing,” Stefan Schmitt, a forensic scientist at Florida International University who has investigated mass graves in multiple conflicts, told Al Jazeera.

“But bodies are safer underground when it comes to identifying them and determining what happened. Particularly in this case, where the truth is so incredibly important and where all sides are propagating their own version of the events, it’s especially important to be able to determine what really took place.”

Digging up bodies, especially using invasive methods such as bulldozers, wipes out clues that could help determine responsibility and archaeological evidence that could reveal when a grave was dug and with what tools, Schmitt said.

Every exhumation also scatters evidence as decomposing body parts are left behind in the original burial site. Once a corpse is moved and reburied, information on where it came from can be lost.

Inaccurate information may also be added as part of the documentation process. Schmitt said misidentification by grieving relatives who are psychologically inclined to want closure is frequent in the context of war. Claims of bodies having been decapitated or buried alive were also hard to back up without autopsies being carried out.

Photographic and video evidence alone may not be sufficient to remedy confusion. For visual evidence to be viewed as reliable, a chain of custody must be ensured, Schmitt said.

The process of documentation must give a clear sense of the exhumation process both spatially and in regards to timing with pictures containing information including metadata and geolocation taken in a sequence. Shots must be framed to feature landmarks before zooming in on the details. The information is then methodically collected in a spreadsheet, from which each entry is hyperlinked to the relevant visual data.

“I have been shown pictures that came from Gaza, but I couldn’t see the chain of custody. I don’t know where they’re coming from,” Schmitt said, adding that this means he has consequently unable to give an expert opinion on what they show.

“What is happening right now is destroying evidence. I know that that’s not deliberate, but it plays into the hands of those that don’t want the truth to be told.”

Can international organisations help?

The UN has called for “a clear, transparent and credible investigation” of mass graves in Gaza. The EU backed the call, saying the discovery of bodies at the hospitals “creates the impression that there might have been violations of international human rights” while the US said it wanted the matter to be “thoroughly and transparently investigated”.

It is unclear which organisation would heed the call, or who in the future might take up the hefty task of investigating.

UN human rights spokesperson Jeremy Laurence told Al Jazeera the international body was not providing support in evidence gathering at burial sites in Gaza “because it requires specific expertise that does not exist on the ground”.

Is there any hope of justice for victims?

As the Rafah border crossing with Egypt remains closed, the prospects of foreign investigators being sent in to investigate allegations of war crimes appear slim.

However, not all hope for justice is lost. “What you have got, as opposed to what you haven’t got, might itself be extremely revealing,” said Geoffrey Nice, a British barrister who led the prosecution in the trial of Serbian politician Slobodan Milosevic at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague.

“Because you haven’t got it all doesn’t mean you haven’t got enough,” Nice told Al Jazeera about forensic scientific evidence.

In the former Yugoslavia, remains were dug up for decades, and DNA testing ensured identification even many years after the events. “Efforts on identification never end, and there is a huge body of evidence. Never worry about what you haven’t got. Use what you have got,” the barrister added.

Evidence gathered at the mass graves could point to specific offences or be merged into a broader inquiry into war crimes. An unbiased judiciary and investigatory organisation may be set up, but this will take decades of work and cost a large sum of money, requiring the support of wealthy countries.

According to Nice, should a tribunal for Gaza be set up, “it would not be sensible to have participating members from any countries that supported Israel with weapons.”

“The Israel-Gaza conflict is hopelessly sensitive. The funding body, be it the EU or someone else, has got to be prepared after having funded it to have absolutely no further engagement except when asked,” he added.

Is justice being pursued elsewhere?

Legal proceedings are also already ongoing at top courts. The International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague is overseeing an active investigation into the atrocities on October 7 by Hamas and the response by the Israeli military. The office of the prosecutor has jurisdiction in the Palestinian territories but has not made any public comments about the discovery of mass graves.

The International Court of Justice (ICJ), a separate court, is considering a case brought by South Africa in which Israel stands accused of committing genocide in Gaza. It will take several years to reach a verdict, during which time, the court is expected to investigate a litany of alleged offences.

Among key provisional measures issued to prevent the crime of genocide, the ICJ ordered Israeli authorities to “take effective measures to prevent the destruction and ensure the preservation of evidence” related to the allegations. It also ordered unimpeded access to humanitarian aid, which humanitarian organisations said has been blocked since the offensive in Rafah began.

“If the general conclusion of any court is that what is going on in Gaza is beyond the limits of warfare, then it is not difficult to track the chain of command back to the top,” Nice said.

Then, the barrister added, “you can start to see if there is individual responsibility.”

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The Possible Collapse of the U.S. Home Insurance System

A times investigation found climate change may now be a concern for every homeowner in the country..

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Across the United States, more frequent extreme weather is starting to cause the home insurance market to buckle, even for those who have paid their premiums dutifully year after year.

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Christopher Flavelle , a climate change reporter for The New York Times.

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