What counts as evidence? What makes it good or bad? How do we know?

In court cases, the prosecution, plaintiff, and defendant present “evidence” that something happened or didn’t happen, that it happened in one way or another, that someone did something or did not do something. Evidence is meant to point to something as-yet undetermined. The same goes with scientific evidence, statistical evidence, and anecdotal evidence. Yet, because evidence points to something unknown, sorting it out is often messy business! How do we judge whether evidence is trustworthy or good? Can we determine shared “rules” of evidence? And what about so-called “self-evident” things or claims? This week, we’re diving right into this messy business of evidence.

In this episode, we discuss the following thinkers/ideas/texts/etc.:

• The Chicago Water Taxi
• The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and a breakdown of the most cited philosophers by Eric Schwitzgebel
• The episode “Forks” of the Hulu series, The Bear
• Paul’s Epistle to the Hebrews, 11:1
• Our episode on Bad Faith
• The Surgeon General’s 1964 warning about smoking
• The Sagan Standard of evidence
• Sorites predicates
• Martin Heidegger and the groundless ground
• Christine Blasey Ford’s scientific explanation of her memory during the Bret Kavanaugh confirmation hearings
• Emma Bianchi’s discussion of the concept of “symptom” in The Feminine Symptom
• The controversy surrounding The Bell Curve
• The Pragmatic Tradition in philosophy
• The “coherence theory of truth”
• The “Lazy Relativism” episode of Hotel Bar Sessions podcast