Probability and defeaters

Abstract

My thanks to Branden Fitelson and Elliott Sober (hereafter ‘F&S’) for their comments on my evolutionary argument against naturalism. F&S devote most of their attention to what I called “the preliminary argument” (WPF, pp. 228-29). This argument as stated in WPF contains an error: It confuses the unconditional objective or logical probability of R with its probability conditional on our background knowledge. The main argument, happily, is unaffected, and here I’ll comment only on what F&S have to say about the main argument. F&S start several hares, most of which seem to me to run rather badly. I can’t chase them all, so I’ll restrict myself to the following four.