Home – Home – Jornals – Philosophy of Sciences 2025 number S5

The paper aims to show that the example given by J. Fantle and M. McGrath (2002) (pragmatic considerations regarding the risk of attributing the desired epistemic status to a given belief in a given situation affects the very concept of «epistemic fact» and, as a consequence, we must abandon evidentialism as the idea that necessary and sufficient conditions of justification are determined exclusively by available epistemic data) does not achieve its goal. The idea of B. Weatherson’s example (2005) is to show that J. Fantle and M. McGrath do not distinguish between «the degree of confidence in the truth of a proposition» (pragmatic conditions on justification) and «the degree of confidence in a belief» (pragmatic conditions on belief). We want to use the logic of an adequate epistemic basing relation, i.e. «meta-beliefs that explain why these reasons are precisely the reasons by virtue of which the belief is held» (G. Harman, K. Korcz, etc.), connecting the corresponding belief and its reasons. B. Weatherson points out on only one possible option for assessing the basing relation - through the «analogy with lotteries», - but in a more general case, the logic of looking for an adequate epistemic basing relation allows us to more thorougthfully indicate that we can justify the «practical nature of reasoning» without resorting to assumptions that already suggest that we are obliged to interpret justification in terms of «pragmatic encroachment».