Concept

Evidence

Overview

anything presented in support of an assertion

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

In the original texts

Passages from public-domain books where Evidence is discussed.

That there are such cases, no one is likely to dispute. Assertions for which there is abundant positive evidence are often disbelieved, on account of what is called their improbability, or impossibility. And the question for consideration is what, in the present case, these words mean, and how far and in what circumstances the properties which they express are sufficient grounds for disbelief. § 2. It is to be…
John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive
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Part of this circumstantial evidence is found in so-called scientific control, that is, the evidence that conditions were such that similar experiences could happen to others and could be described as they are described in the account given. Other parts of this evidence which we call corroborative are found in the statements of others which bear out details of this peculiar event, though it is important to note that…
John Dewey, Creative Intelligence
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One important point about self-evidence is made clear by the case of memory, and that is, that self-evidence has degrees: it is not a quality which is simply present or absent, but a quality which may be more or less present, in gradations ranging from absolute certainty down to an almost imperceptible faintness. Truths of perception and some of the principles of logic have the very highest degree of self-evidence…
Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy
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Again, self-evidence must not be the same thing as the absence of doubt or the presence of complete certainty. If we are completely certain of a proposition, we do not seek a ground to support our belief. If self-evidence is alleged as a ground of belief, that implies that doubt has crept in, and that our self-evident proposition has not wholly resisted the assaults of scepticism. To say that any given person…
Bertrand Russell, The Analysis of Mind
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I could not know, for instance, without some such evidence, such a fact as that Julius Caesar was murdered. For such a fact I must, in the first instance, have the evidence of other persons; and if I am to know that their evidence is trustworthy, I must have some ground in experience for supposing it to be so. There are, therefore, some kinds of facts which we cannot know without the evidence of experience and…
G. E. Moore, Philosophical Studies
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Evidence

Overview

In the original texts

Philosophers who discussed Evidence

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Place in the tradition