Headstrong Physicist: Case Study

❖ Question 6.2 Present the first worry about the popular version of evidentialism, and discuss a possible reply to it. The first worry about the popular version of evidentialism states that (conclude from the ‘Headstrong Physicist’ example), in the case that one is willingly rejecting to accept positively additional evidence that may or may not alter his/her justification on the proposition supported by his/her evidences, then evidentialism sounds wrong. Popular version of evidentialism says that “One is justified in believing a proposition p iff: the evidence one has supports p (to a sufficiently high degree)”. So, what if (in response to the case of the ‘Headstrong Physicist’), the physicist’s evidences have sufficiently high degree of belief. If so, it’s possible that the physicist knows that his colleague’s criticisms won’t affect his degree of belief on his evidences too much. And hence, his degree of belief in his evidences is still sufficient to say that he is justified in believing his own theory. Now, considering the first sentence of this ‘Headstrong Physicist’ example, it states that the physicist is “unable to tolerate criticism”, giving an …show more content…
With the inductive learning strategy, learning theory provide a response to the inductive skeptic. In regard to the raven problem and the inductive learning strategy, without an observed raven, the out come is a suspended judgment, so the inductive skeptic can’t challenge the observer with the question “if all raven are black”. If the first raven observed is non-black, then we have an answer for the inductive skeptic. But, if the first raven is black, then our response to the inductive skeptic would be that we have a strategy to the question, given that we have time to observe all raven. Therefor, in response to the inductive skeptic we have a strategy that convert to the true answer that the inductive skeptic would