 It is possible that the experience (or acquaintance with it) is intended to serve not only as a truth-maker and justifier for the appearance belief, but as evidence for that belief as well. By “evidence” is meant here not just any factor that serves to confer justification on a belief, but something that serves as a ground, or reason, or rational basis, for that  belief.[2]  Not all justification-conferring or justification-relevant factors count as evidence in this sense (if they did, Earl Conee and Richard Feldman [2004] would not have to defend evidentialism). For example, Descartes held that all clear and distinct judgments were justified, though certain judgments—e.g., “I think”—are justified without evidential appeal to clarity and distinctness. It is the fact that it is clear and distinct that makes it justified, not the agent’s awareness of that fact or appreciation of that fact’s epistemic significance, so clarity and distinctness are not functioning here as evidence. Similarly, reliabilism holds, roughly, that being reliably formed renders a belief justified; although reliability need not—and typically does not—figure in as the agent’s evidence or grounds for believing something. Thus, one can claim that perceptual experiences are nondoxastic (i.e., non-belief) states that serve as evidence for appearance beliefs, in much the way that beliefs serve as evidence for other beliefs, though with one crucial difference: for one belief to serve as evidence for another, the former must be justified; experiences are not susceptible to justification, thus can be neither justified nor unjustified, but—on this view—can nevertheless serve as evidence and confer justification on beliefs. The justification of appearance beliefs would then depend on evidential connections to other mental states but not to other beliefs, and because experiences need not be justified in order to serve as evidence, the threatened regress is halted in a way that is consistent with foundationalism. The idea of such nondoxastic evidence raises several problems, as we will see shortly.