ABSTRACT. — Evidence matters in philosophy: the concept of evidence is central to both epistemology and the philosophy of science. Outside philosophy, the concept of evidence is highly employed as well: lawyers, judges, historians and scientists, investigative journalists and reporters, as well as ordinary folk in the course of everyday life talk and think about evidence a lot. When one compares philosophical accounts of evidence with the way the concept is often employed in non-philosophical contexts, however, a puzzle soon emerges. Historically, in philosophy, having evidence has been spelled out in terms of being in one state of mind or another. The problem that often arises from this is that we have difficulties diagnosing resistance to evidence: people are often faced with strong evidence for p but refuse to take it up. In everyday talk and thought, however, having evidence has little to do with being in a particular state of mind. Rather, one is said to have evidence for p when one has objects and facts available to them that render p likely. You will not convince any judge that you had no evidence for p just because you were not paying attention to or refusing to accept the facts supporting p lying in plain view. On the other hand, the non-philosophical account of having evidence seems a bit too agent-insensitive: after all, we are cognitively limited beings, there is only so much information we can be expected to pick up from our environments. This paper is an exercise in unification: it proposes to engineer a novel concept of evidence had as available facts that raise the probability of knowledge. This view, it is argued, escapes this puzzle, and has the capacity to play the roles it needs to play both within and outside philosophy.

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