Evidentialism

Feldman says that the possession of evidence is the mark of a justified belief and that is what is called evidentialism.

I will give the following example:

Several months ago I woke up in the middle of the night with a terrible pain in my stomach.  At first I thought I had indigestion or something so I tried to sleep it off.  After a few minutes the pain only got worse.  After a while I could not stand it any longer and had to be rushed to the Emergency Room.  At that point I was not sure what I had anymore.  The pain was the worst I ever felt in my life and I really thought I was going to die.

Once at the hospital several hours passed before they could figure out what was wrong with me.  In the mean time I was dealing with the pain thinking I would never live.  At one point the nurse was filling out my paperwork and asked me what my religion was.  I got really scared with that question thinking they were asking me that because I was really going to die and they would need to know what religious leader they needed to bring.  In my mind, that was confirmation that I was going to die. 

Feldman gives the following evidentialist principle about justification:

    Believing p is justified for S at t iff S’s evidence at t supports p

Believing I am going to die is justified for me at that time iff my evidence at that time supports that I am going to die.

“Evidentialists says that the evidence a person has at a given time consists of all the information the person has to go on at that time.” (45)

This means that I was justified in believing that I was going to die because all the information that I had was going on at that time.  The information being that I was having the worse pain of my life, they had asked me my religion, and after hours of tests they couldn’t figure out what was causing the pain.

Since I now know I wasn’t really going to die and my belief was not well founded I can apply the Get the Evidence Principle.

    GEP.     If S’s actual evidence supports p, but S should have had additional evidence, and this
                 additional evidence would not support p, then S’s belief in p is not justified.

I should have waited for the results of all the tests before believing I was going to die.  Because I didn’t, my belief was not justified.