I agree that some philosophical searches for analyses of concepts turn out generating endless, fruitless, sequences of counterexamples and new definitions. However, it is not the case that, always, when we are trying to find out the truth conditions for something, we are engaged in such kind of unproductive thinking. As long as we care about what it is for something to be evidence for something else (we may care about this because we want to understand what gives support to scientific theories, etc), it seems legitimate for us to look for satisfactory truth conditions for ‘e is evidence that h’. Trying to make the boundaries of our concepts clear is also part of the project of optimizing our rationality.
While I find this particular re-definition a bit silly, that doesn’t mean that in general having more succinct definitions isn’t a good thing.
If the second definition of evidence were used, it would mean that “collecting evidence” would be a fundamentally different thing than it would be in the first case. In the second, “evidence” is completely relative to what is already known, and lots of new material would not be included.
So if I go out and ask people to “collect evidence”, their actions should be different depending on which definition we collectively used.
In addition, the definition would lead to interesting differences in quantities. If we used the first definition, me having “lots of evidence” could mean having lots of redundant evidence for one small part of something (of course, it would also be helpful to quantify “lots”, but I believe that or something similar could be done). In the second definition, I imagine it would be much more useful to what I actually want.
This new definition makes “evidence” much more coupled to resulting probabilities, which in itself could be a good thing. However, it seems like an unintuitive stretch for my current understanding of the word, so I would prefer that rather than re-defining the word, a condition were used. For example, “updating evidence” for the second definition.
Thanks, that’s interesting. The exercise of thinking how people would act to gather evidence having in mind the two probabilistic definitions gives food for thought. Specifically, I’m thinking that, if we were to tell people: “Look for evidence in favor of h and, remember, evidence is that which …”, where we substitute ‘...’ by the relevant definition of evidence, they would gather evidence in a different way from the way we naturally look for evidence for some hypotheses. The agents to whom that advice was given would have a reflexive access to their own definition of evidence, and they would gather only what is in the scope of that definition. People being given the first definition of evidence could balk when looking for evidence that Obama will be involved in an airplane accident: if they find out that Obama will be in an airplane today, they find out evidence that Obama will be involved in an airplane accident. Now given that these people would have the advice we gave them in mind, they could start questioning themselves if they didn’t receive silly advice.
I think philosophers need to spend less time trying to come up with necessary-and-sufficient definitions of english words.
I agree that some philosophical searches for analyses of concepts turn out generating endless, fruitless, sequences of counterexamples and new definitions. However, it is not the case that, always, when we are trying to find out the truth conditions for something, we are engaged in such kind of unproductive thinking. As long as we care about what it is for something to be evidence for something else (we may care about this because we want to understand what gives support to scientific theories, etc), it seems legitimate for us to look for satisfactory truth conditions for ‘e is evidence that h’. Trying to make the boundaries of our concepts clear is also part of the project of optimizing our rationality.
While I find this particular re-definition a bit silly, that doesn’t mean that in general having more succinct definitions isn’t a good thing.
If the second definition of evidence were used, it would mean that “collecting evidence” would be a fundamentally different thing than it would be in the first case. In the second, “evidence” is completely relative to what is already known, and lots of new material would not be included.
So if I go out and ask people to “collect evidence”, their actions should be different depending on which definition we collectively used.
In addition, the definition would lead to interesting differences in quantities. If we used the first definition, me having “lots of evidence” could mean having lots of redundant evidence for one small part of something (of course, it would also be helpful to quantify “lots”, but I believe that or something similar could be done). In the second definition, I imagine it would be much more useful to what I actually want.
This new definition makes “evidence” much more coupled to resulting probabilities, which in itself could be a good thing. However, it seems like an unintuitive stretch for my current understanding of the word, so I would prefer that rather than re-defining the word, a condition were used. For example, “updating evidence” for the second definition.
Thanks, that’s interesting. The exercise of thinking how people would act to gather evidence having in mind the two probabilistic definitions gives food for thought. Specifically, I’m thinking that, if we were to tell people: “Look for evidence in favor of h and, remember, evidence is that which …”, where we substitute ‘...’ by the relevant definition of evidence, they would gather evidence in a different way from the way we naturally look for evidence for some hypotheses. The agents to whom that advice was given would have a reflexive access to their own definition of evidence, and they would gather only what is in the scope of that definition. People being given the first definition of evidence could balk when looking for evidence that Obama will be involved in an airplane accident: if they find out that Obama will be in an airplane today, they find out evidence that Obama will be involved in an airplane accident. Now given that these people would have the advice we gave them in mind, they could start questioning themselves if they didn’t receive silly advice.