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Ask "Why Do You Believe That?" not "Do You Have Any Evidence?"

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There’s a bunch of common constructions that go something like “Do you have any evidence for that claim?” or “What’s your evidence?” I mostly think this construction sucks.

There’s a bunch of common constructions that go something like “Do you have any evidence for that claim?” or “What’s your evidence?” I mostly think this construction sucks. I’ll explain why. I have only one half-decent theory of what it means for one thing to be evidence of another. Roughly: A is evidence for B just in case P(B | A) > P(B). That is, A is evidence for B just in case learning that A is true would make you assign a higher probability to B. To have evidence for B, then, is just for there to be some proposition A, such that you know A, and P(B | A) > P(B). There’s a famous…

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