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The Inference Objection to Evidence Cases

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Abstract

Chastain (1975) and Sawyer (2012), among others, claim that direct cognitive relations can be initiated in evidence cases. Direct cognitive relations will here include Chastain’s knowledge-of and Sawyer’s trace-based acquaintance, as well as related notions such as having-in-mind and singular thought. Against this controversial claim, it is often objected that such cases are better understood as cases of inference rather than cases of direct thought. When one detects something by its footprint, the objection goes, one merely infers that it exists rather than thinking of it directly. The goal of this paper is to analyze what is meant by the inference objection and consider several possible responses to it. Ultimately, I will not offer a knock-down argument against the inference explanation; in fact, I’ll try to explain why I suspect one isn’t possible. Instead, I’ll appeal to the possibility of misdescription and analogous cases involving non-human animals to show that the inference explanation is less plausible than the account to which it provides an alternative.

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Notes

  1. See Russell (1910) and Russell (1912) for extensive discussion of the distinction.

  2. See, for example, the Socrates case in Donnellan (1974) and the Thales case in Donnellan (1970), as well as Bianchi and Bonanini (2014) for discussion of these passages.

  3. I take Chastain’s hedging here about perception to be avoidable by my inclusion of the word “direct” in the definition of an evidence case. Whether it’s some kind of perception of the burglar or not, it’s certainly not direct perception of him.

  4. This of course mirrors Donnellan’s (1966) claims about the referential use in the martini case: according to Donnellan, “the man drinking the martini” refers to whomever the speaker had in mind, even if it’s water in his glass and there’s a man drinking an actual martini in the kitchen. Chastain here applies the same basic notion to evidence cases that Donnellan would have treated as attributive.

  5. I am grateful for insightful anonymous reviewer comments on this manuscript.

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Correspondence to Julie Wulfemeyer.

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Wulfemeyer, J. The Inference Objection to Evidence Cases. Philosophia 50, 361–368 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-021-00375-x

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