Evidence-Based Beliefs?

Abstract

In ancient times, before some point in the second half of the nineteenth century, if youwere uncertain how to investigate a topic, epistemologists—philosophers concerned with knowledge and rational belief—would be among the people you would first think of reading and consulting. They had played a large role in the early years of the scientific revolution, mediating the delicate tension between scientific discovery and traditional belief. The last such figure with this kind of influence was John Stuart Mill. But all that has changed. For at least the past hundred years, your first port of call would be a statistician. There are several reasons for this. One is that the philosophers blew it. At first they were raising real issues about how to understand the physical world, and making helpful suggestions about how to achieve this. Some of these suggestions would seem bizarre now, but they were intelligently defended and usually fitted the science of the time. Then they got hung up on dramatic skeptical issues. How do we know the world is really there? How do we know that other people