  Here is an example of the way in which intuitions about justification can drive one's account of evidence, given a commitment to the Evidentialist thesis that changes in what an individual is justified in believing always reflect changes in her total evidence. It is sometimes suggested that how confident a scientist is justified in being that a given hypothesis is true depends, not only on the character of relevant data to which she has been exposed, but also on the space of alternative hypotheses of which she is aware. According to this line of thought, how strongly a given collection of data supports a hypothesis is not wholly determined by the content of the data and the hypothesis. (Nor is it wholly determined by their content together with the scientist's background theory of how the world works.) Rather, it also depends upon whether there are other plausible competing hypotheses in the field. It is because of this that the mere articulation of a plausible alternative hypothesis can dramatically reduce how likely the original hypothesis is on the available  data.[7] 