Grounds of Knowledge
Evidence
What is offered in support of a claim. Evidence is not the same as proof: it raises or lowers how likely a claim is, and its force depends on how it was gathered, what it was gathered for, and what else it is consistent with. Asking what would count as evidence against a claim is usually more revealing than listing evidence for it.
How claims are supported. These concepts ask what has to be in place before a claim earns the right to be believed, and what the difference is between a reason and a rationalisation.
IA prompts this concept is central to
The wording is the guide’s, exactly. Quote it as it stands.
- IA prompt 05What counts as good evidence for a claim?The prompt asks directly for the criteria that separate evidence with force from evidence that merely looks supportive.
- IA prompt 23How important are material tools in the production or acquisition of knowledge?Instruments do not passively record. What a tool can detect sets the outer boundary of the evidence available to a field.
- IA prompt 31How can we judge when evidence is adequate?Adequacy is a threshold rather than a property, so the prompt asks who sets it and against what risk of being wrong.
Prompts where it is a useful second angle
- IA prompt 03What features of knowledge have an impact on its reliability?Most features that make knowledge reliable are features of how its evidence was gathered rather than of the claim itself.
- IA prompt 19What counts as a good justification for a claim?A justification is only as good as what it is built from, so the quality of evidence bounds the quality of the justification.
Evidence under the knowledge framework
Only the elements where this concept has something substantive to say. An empty pairing is left dimmed rather than padded.
What a field can find evidence for marks the outer edge of what it can be about. Questions whose evidence is unobtainable in principle do not become open questions within a discipline; they fall outside its scope, and often get reassigned to another area of knowledge or to no one.
Every discipline's methods are, in effect, a definition of what it will accept as evidence. A controlled trial, a dated document and a proof step are all evidence, but the practices that produce them are not interchangeable, and a method that cannot generate a certain kind of evidence will systematically miss the claims that would have needed it.