Talk:Defeater

This article is rated Stub-class on Wikipedia's content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects:

Philosophy: Epistemology Low‑importance This article is within the scope of WikiProject Philosophy, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of content related to philosophy on Wikipedia. If you would like to support the project, please visit the project page, where you can get more details on how you can help, and where you can join the general discussion about philosophy content on Wikipedia.PhilosophyWikipedia:WikiProject PhilosophyTemplate:WikiProject PhilosophyPhilosophy articles Low This article has been rated as Low-importance on the project's importance scale. Associated task forces: /  Epistemology

This article gets the topic completely wrong. Defeaters act on justifications. Say that an agent S takes some piece of evidence, E1, as being a justification for a proposition P. Then an undercutting defeater is a piece of evidence, E2, that undermines the justification relation between E1 and P1, so that E1+E2 does not justify P. An opposing defeater is a piece of evidence, E3, that S takes as a justification for not-P, so that E1+E3 justifies P and not-P (ie, E1+E3 justifies an incoherence, although (E1+E2)+E3 does not). — Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.42.89.132 (talk) 15:42, 15 June 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I added an introduction and some examples. I followed the comment by 68.42.89.132 and reformulated the issue in terms of justification and evidence. I also removed the paragraph on "opposing defeaters" since (according to the sources that I'm aware of) it is just another term for rebutting defeaters. The article now has footnotes and references so I removed the maintenance templates.Phlsph7 (talk) 11:51, 14 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]