2025.04.6 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews
Mona Simion, Resistance to Evidence, Cambridge University Press, 2024, 216pp., $110.00 (hbk), ISBN 9781009298520.
Reviewed by Catharine Saint-Croix, University of Minnesota
It is easy to dismiss conspiracy theorists and their ilk as irrational or dull, lost to the normative sway of the epistemic. Mona Simion’s Resistance to Evidence offers a timely intervention against this temptation. The centerpiece of Simion’s monograph is an externalist shift in our understanding of what it means to have evidence—eschewing the basic assumption that evidence is “in the head”, so to speak. As Simion unspools this thread, she uses it to weave a broad theory of epistemic normativity with implications well beyond resistance to evidence.
The resulting account yields an analysis of resistance to evidence as epistemic malfunction (and an argument that such malfunction is rare), a unified account of epistemic defeat, and a knowledge-first treatment of…
Read the full article which is published on Notre Dame's Philosophical Reviews (external link)
