He maintains a causal, proto-Humean skepticism about existential inferences: "From the fact that some thing is known to be, it cannot be inferred evidently, by evidentness reduced to the first principle, or to the certitude of the first principle, that there is some other thing" (Second Letter 11).
On this view one can hope for much more than a minimal point in the evidentness order one can hope to garner evidence for a proposition examining its inter-relationships with other statements that are low in the evidentness ordering.
To begin with, let us say that a statement is "intrinsically plausible" if it is "low" in the evidentness order but the sort of thing that could be overturned by other evidence.[8] One way to garner support for a proposition is to show that it leads to intrinsically plausible consequences.
In addition, Buridan drops his epistemological standards for sensory knowledge in general: because of the possibility of God's deceptiveness, at best we are capable of "conditional evidentness".
(2) Is finding a minimal point in the evidentness order (of a given interpretability degree) the most one could hope for or are there other, more subtle ways of accumulating evidence for axioms, ways that might further buttress even the minimal points in the evidentness order (of a given interpretability degree)?
Ultimately one would like to find axioms that are minimal in the evidentness order.
For example, perhaps judgments of the form "X is prior to Y in the evidentness order" are really just reflections of our mathematical training.
We shall organize the statements in each interpretability degree by the relation of being more evident than and we shall speak of the collection of all statements so ordered as the evidentness order.
In addition, one might raise skeptical worries about the evidentness order.
And this is what we mean in saying that the statement "ϵ0 is well-ordered" is minimal in the evidentness order (of the degree of the Hydra Theorem).
This objective necessity is to be located in the evidentness that accompanies thinking that is properly executed and reaches its goal whether through the self-given reality of lived experience or the "givenness that binds us to an outer perception" (Dilthey 2002, 28).
