Resistance to Evidence, by Mona Simion

Extract

1. Introduction

The stated goal of Mona Simion’s outstanding monograph Resistance to Evidence is fairly modest: to develop an epistemological theory that can correctly classify cases of intuitively impermissible evidence-resistance as impermissible, and furthermore that explains why they are epistemically impermissible.

This goal conceals a larger ambition: to develop a novel framework of epistemic normativity writ large that proposes to locate its roots, provides new externalist accounts of central notions in epistemology (such as evidence and justification), and defends positive epistemic duties. This framework is constructed by giving a creative spin to the traditional idea that our cognitive capacities have the epistemic function of generating knowledge, coupled with the innovative insight that these capacities are input-dependent. Whereas epistemologists have thought of our cognitive capacities on the model of the heart, which functions to pump the blood that circulates within the body, we should think of these capacities instead on the model of lungs, which have as their task both processing oxygen and grasping enough of it from the environment.