Abstract :
Your evidence constrains your rational degrees of confidence both locally and globally.
On the one hand, particular bits of evidence can boost or diminish your rational degree
of confidence in various hypotheses, relative to your background information. On the
other hand, epistemic rationality requires that, for any hypothesis h, your confidence in
h is proportional to the support that h receives from your total evidence. Why is it that
your evidence has these two epistemic powers? I argue that various proposed accounts
of what it is for something to be an element of your evidence set cannot answer this
question. I then propose an alternative account of what it is for something to be an
element of your evidence set.
