ABSTRACT
My aim in this paper is to defend the claim that evidential support is an objective matter against a challenge from subjectivists. Subjectivists about evidential support hold that a body of evidence only supports a given hypothesis relative to some subjective factor, like a set of evidential standards, or standards for evaluating evidence, and that there is no privileged set of evidential standards. For subjectivists, the only case where there is a non-relative fact of the matter about the degree to which evidence supports a hypothesis is the trival one where the evidence entails the hypothesis or its negation, for this is a case where all permissible evidential standards agree on the degree to which the evidence supports the hypothesis. By contrast, objectivists hold that whether and to what extent a body of evidence supports a hypothesis is an objective matter, so that a body of evidence supports a hypothesis to a given degree simpliciter , not just relative to a choice of evidential standards. (Objectivists can endorse talk of
ABSTRACT Objectivism about evidential support is the thesis that facts about the degree to which a body of evidence supports a hypothesis are objective rather than depending on subjective factors like one’s own language or epistemic values. Objectivism about evidential support is key to defending a synchronic, time-slicecentric conception of epistemic rationality, on which what you ought to believe at a time depends only on what evidence you have at that time, and not on how you were at previous times. Here, I defend a version of objectivism about evidential support on which facts about evidential support are grounded in facts about explanatoriness.
