Evidentialism, Fantl-McGrath’s Argument and the Argument from Error

Abstract

The paper aims to show that the example given by J. Fantl and M. McGrath (2002) that pragmatic considerations regarding the risk of attributing the desired epistemic status to a given belief in a given situation affect the very concept of «epistemic fact» and as a consequence, we must abandon evidentialism, as a general concept that the necessary and sufficient conditions of justification are determined solely by the available epistemic data, does not achieve its goals. Taking into account J. Kvanvig's position that the problem of «pragmatic encroachment» could be reduced to the notion of «the false presupposition about the value of knowledge» (2011), we may say that this is not a problem of epistemic rationality, but a problem of the sufficiency of epistemic justification in situations where the risk of making a mistake is just another factor that emphasizes the fundamentally subjective nature of epistemic status attribution to a belief. As a consequence, we see the J. Fantl’s and M. McGrath’s argument as a form of the skeptical argument «from error», which is solved by pointing out on the fundamental difference in the «volumes» of epistemic data within situations that the person introspectively draws for himself, assuming whether he knows or not. Such an interpretation does not threaten evidentialism at all.