A Phenomenological Challenge for Evidentialism

"I think that the so-called analogical argument for the existence of other minds is a fairly good argument - as philosophical arguments go - but my belief that my wife has thoughts and sensations generally similar to my own is not based on this or any other argument. Not even partly."[1]

A friend of mine turned me onto this paper by PVI. It's very interesting, and fits in with some reading I'm doing for a seminar on rational disagreement. It's a fascinating paper - I enjoyed reading it - but I almost always enjoy reading PVI, whether or not you agree with him on a given point, he's a delightful writer.

At any rate, I see a challenge for evidentialism here. I mean by 'evidentialism' something like the following: p is justified for S at t iff p fits S's evidence E at t (cribbed directly from Conee and Feldman's Evidentialism). In the context, what PVI is talking about beliefs that we are "hardwired" for, beliefs that we come to "automatically" without having to resort to discursive reasoning.

I think there is also something to what PVI is saying - phenomenologically, there are many beliefs we arrive at that we don't obviously carefully survey our evidence, weigh it, and believe. Belief is frequently automatic. My belief in other minds is one of these things - if I walk into the grad office and see two students sitting there, I don't make a reasoned argument that I am aware of to the conclusion that by certain analogies with my own mind and behavior, the two objects in the room are actually intelligent human beings with minds more or less like my own. I think that PVI might be right also about the material world. I don't wake up in the morning, open my eyes, look out the window and conclude that the simplest explanation is that the things that I am experiencing are non-mental objects independent of my mind. However, I believe it.

So, there's a phenomenological challenge to evidentialism. Evidentialists need a way to account for automatic beliefs that seem to be justified. But I think that the problem is hardly one for evidentialism simpliciter, as an account of justification, but rather with evidentialism as part of the analysis of knowledge. The way I'm inclined to go with this (at least at the moment) is to take the automatic part of belief formation to be part of a basing relation that either causally or otherwise pairs beliefs and evidence (cribbed again from Conee and Feldman).

Aside: for an access internalist, is it necessary that both the justifier of a belief and the basing relation be accessible to the knower?

[1] van Inwagen, Peter, "Is God an Unnecessary Hypothesis?" God and the Ethics of Belief ed. Andrew Dole and Andrew Chignell (Cambridge) 2005, p. 146