Not Enough There There Evidence, Reasons, and Language Independence

The philosophical significance of language dependence results (à la Goodman’s “grue” problem) has been seriously underestimated. In this article I argue that: The trouble caused by language dependence is not confined to formal analyses of evidential support; language dependence concerns apply to any story about how we should draw conclusions from evidence. This is because language dependence reveals a deep problem: evidential propositions do not possess enough information to substantively favor some conclusions over others. Introducing a distinction between natural and nonnatural properties does not alleviate this problem. The problem is not equally a problem for everyone—it makes some views of evidential favoring much harder to maintain than others. The special victims of the problem I will discuss posit an evidential favoring relation: an objective three-place relation between two hypotheses and a body of evidence that obtains when the evidence favors one hypothesis over the other. By “objective” I mean that the relation does not vary with particular facts about agents. Subjective facts about an agent may determine what counts as his evidence, but our question is whether, once the evidence is established, what that evidence favors depends on subjective considerations. A wide variety of contemporary philosophical views maintain the existence of an evidential favoring relation, though they often don’t call it by that name. Some epistemologies make it an objective fact that a particular body of evidence supports one hypothesis over another, or provides more justification to believe one hypothesis. Epistemologists may make this more precise by suggesting that each hypothesis has a specific evidential, logical, or objective probability relative to a given body of evidence. The evidence then favors (or confirms) one hypothesis over another just in case it renders the former more probable than the latter. In a different area of philosophy, metaethicists consider whether an agent’s evidence provides more reason to believe one hypothesis than another. A widespread