Against Causal Conditions

Abstract Many widely discussed historical and contemporary views in epistemology rely on conditions requiring that evidence be causally related to the event that is the subject of belief. Such ‘causal conditions’ have also appeared both in normative debates about when belief is rational and in metaphysical debates about the relationship between belief and credence. Drawing on this literature, our paper formulates and then carefully scrutinises a range of plausible causal conditions on rational belief. A series of counterexamples leads us to rule out, in turn, distinct attempts to formulate such a condition. We then devise a condition that withstands our test cases. Ironically, though, this condition is ill-suited to play the roles for which causal conditions on rational belief have been theorised in the first place. Our result casts doubt on whether epistemologists should devote further attention to causal conditions, whether on rational belief or on other epistemic states.