Academic paper: The Social View of Evidence

This academic paper is the main chapter of my dissertation, which has the same name.

Here is a summary of the paper:

What makes it the case that something is evidence for a hypothesis? Many people

think that evidential relations, e.g. “e is evidence for h”, are out there in the world for

us to discover. By contrast, I develop a social view of evidence, on which what is

evidence for what is decided by groups in the process of social deliberation.

I support this view by showing that it explains key epistemic phenomena, such as the

normative force of evidence and resistance to evidence. A controversial but

illuminating consequence of the view is that evidence is inherently political.

Dotan Social View of Evidence

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