Knowledge, Evidence, and Naked Statistics

Abstract Many who think that naked statistical evidence alone is inadequate for a trial verdict think that use of probability is the problem, and something other than probability—knowledge, full belief, causal relations—is the solution. I argue that the issue of whether naked statistical evidence is weak can be formulated within the probabilistic idiom, as the question whether likelihoods or only posterior probabilities need to be taken into account in our judgment of a case. This question also identifies a major difference between the Process Reliabilist and Probabilistic Tracking views of knowledge and other concepts. Though both are externalist, and probabilistic, epistemic theories, Tracking does and Process Reliabilism does not put conditions on likelihoods. So Tracking implies that a naked statistic is not adequate evidence about an individual, and does not yield knowledge, whereas Reliabilism implies that it gives justified belief and knowledge.