Revisiting the Evidence-as-Object Theory

Sara Aronowitz (University of Toronto, St. George Campus)

Philosophers tend to reject the "bloodied knife" notion of evidence, on which evidence is an object we have, in favor of conception tied to mental states, on which evidence is the propositions we know, the things we believe, or the way things seem to us. The former conception is usually linked with the idea that evidence consists in public objects, whereas the latter suggests that evidence is mental and private. I will argue for a version of the evidence-as-object view, but one on which these objects are not always public or external to the agent. Instead, certain internal mental objects play a role in learning and justification that is more like a bloodied knife than a doxastic state.  Drawing on Chapman & Wylie's work on evidence in archeology, we can see that only the evidence-as-object view makes sense of how we revisit and reconsider past experiences and see more in them than we saw originally.