1 The Evidence Approach to Paraconsistency versus The Paraconsistent Approach to Evidence Jonas R. Becker Arenhart 1 Abstract In this paper, we analyze the epistemic approach to paraconsistency. This approach is advanced as an alternative to dialetheism on what concerns interpreting paraconsistency and contradictions; instead of having to accept that there are true contradictions (as dialetheists argue), it is suggested that we may understand such situations as involving only conflicting evidence, which restricts contradictions to a notion of evidence weaker than truth. In this paper, we first distinguish two conflicting programs entangled in the proposal: i) interpreting paraconsistency in general through the notion of evidence, and ii) modeling reasoning with evidence by using paraconsistent logic. The first part of the program, we argue, does not succeed, on the grounds that it does not lead to a uniform proposal to the understanding of paraconsistency, and fails to engage with dialetheism in a legitimate dispute about interpretation of paraconsistency. Also, when seen through the lights of the second kind of approach, a ‘logic as modeling’ approach, weaknesses of dealing with evidence through paraconsistency come to light, basically because evidence does not seem to suggest the need of a paraconsistent treatment. As a result, one can neither approach paraconsistency in general through evidence, nor approach evidence with the use of paraconsistent logics. Key-words: paraconsistent logics; contradictions; evidence; dialetheism; logic as modeling. 1. Introduction Dialetheism is the thesis that some contradictions, understood as propositions of the form A and ¬A, may both be true sometimes (see Priest 2006 for an articulated defense; Priest, Berto and Weber 2018 for general exposition). Understanding the falsity of proposition A as the truth of ¬A (the negation of A), that leads us to the thesis that some propositions are both true and false at the same time (i.e., they bear truth-value gluts). Now, supposing that some proposition B is also just false, one has a direct case against the so-called rule of explosion, that is, from A and ¬A one is not allowed to validly infer every B. Under these conditions, not every proposition follows from a contradiction. This restriction on explosion characterizes paraconsistent logics (see da Costa, Krause and Bueno (2007); Barrio and da Re (2018); Barrio, Pailos, and Szmuc (2018) advance further discussion). Dialetheism, then, is closely related to paraconsistency. Philosophically, dialetheism must be justified by its own arguments, and that is an issue we shall not examine here. The fact is that being a dialetheist, one has good reasons to adopt a paraconsistent logic: it pops out as a result of the intuitive semantics that a dialetheist advances, and those facts are then codified in a system of logic, of course (again, see Priest 2006). Recently, however, Carnielli and Rodrigues (2015, 2019a, 2019b), and Carnielli, Coniglio, and Rodrigues (2018), have advanced a related question: can one be a paraconsistent logician and not be a dialetheist? Is it possible to explain in an intuitively satisfactory way the failure of the rule of explosion without embracing a version of dialetheism? How to make sense, in a non-dialetheist context, of the idea that we may ‘have a contradiction’, but that not every proposition follows from it? It is to this question that Carnielli and Rodrigues (2015, 2019a, 2019b) and Carnielli, Coniglio and Rodrigues (2018) have turned themselves. Their proposal, in a nutshell, is to shift from the 1 a) Department of Philosophy. Federal University of Santa Catarina, Brazil. b) Research Fellow of the Institute Vienna Circle. University of Vienna, Austria.