Heeding Misleading Evidence

The evidentialist denies that Smith can do this in our original story. [...]an explanation is needed of the precarious epistemic character of (C) in Smiths particular situation, if an appeal to robustness is to succeed in solving the problem. [...]this encounter is also the acquisition of evidence that pertains to (R), the basis on which (C) itself is known. Since this is so, an encounter of that sort, in addition to showing Smith the truth of the antecedent, happens also to be the acquisition of new and negative evidence about the basis on which the whole conditional was known. [...]any alleged knowledge that could survive the acquisition of defeating contrary evidence against its basis would have the tenacity of dogma, not knowledge. Ignoring this dependency appears to leave no good reason to deny that Smith would be equally reasonable in believing at t2 the propositions (R), (1), (3) and not-(2). Since in fact this would be an unreasonable refusal to defer to compelling counterevidence, an inability to account for this constitutes an objection to any such form of coherentism.17 I am grateful to James Cargile, Stewart Cohen, Richard Feldman, epistemology discussion group participants at Brown University, and colloquium participants at UC Davis for helpful comments on previous drafts of this work.Department of PhilosophyUniversity of Rochester (email: conee@philosophy.rochester.edu)