Anti-reductionists hold that beliefs based upon comprehension (of both force and content) of tellings are non-inferentially justified. For reductionists, on the other hand, comprehension as such is not in itself a warrant for belief: beliefs based on it are justified only if inferentially supported by other beliefs. I discuss Elizabeth Fricker's argument that even if anti-reductionism is right in principle, its significance is undercut by the presence of background inferential support: for mature knowledgeable adults, justification from comprehension as such (...) plays no active role, and is superseded by inferential warrant. I show that her argument begs important questions. Inferential and non-inferential support combine to over-determine the justification of comprehension-based beliefs. (shrink)

On an individualist view of testimonial justification, a subject’s belief based on testimony is justified ultimately on the basis of nontestimonial beliefs alone. The prevailing version of individualism has been inductive individualism, according to which the nontestimonial basis for a testimonial belief is an inductively based belief in the reliability of the testifier. Here I consider an alternative to inductive individualism, which I call the parity account. This is the view, endorsed in various forms by Allan Gibbard, (...) Richard Foley and Keith Lehrer, that my testimonial beliefs have epistemic standing because there is a cognitive parity between me and others. I may trust the beliefs of others because I may trust my own beliefs. I focus on an argument central to Lehrer’s account: I am worthy of my trust in what I believe; others are as worthy of my trust in what they believe as I am in what I believe; so others are worthy of my trust in what they believe. I examine whether this argument can justify my testimonial beliefs. If the parity account is to succeed, the premises of the argument need support. I criticize diverse ways of supporting the premises suggested by Lehrer and by remarks of Foley. I conclude that the parity argument cannot account for the justification of all my testimonial beliefs. It is at best an adjunct argument that depends for its force on prior justified testimonial beliefs.Author Keywords: Testimony; Justification; Parity; Trust; Individualism; Skepticism. (shrink)

Can a hearer be rationally justified to have beliefs based on testimony alone when the source of his information is known to have conflicting epistemic goals? When it comes to belief justification, existing theories either recommend avoiding epistemic conflicts of interest or ignoring them. This is an important epistemological limitation. A theory that comes in degrees, capable of explaining what beliefs we are justified to hold and why, despite epistemic conflict of interest, is still lacking. Building on a game-theoretical (...) approach, I suggest such a theory and argue that the hearer can justify some beliefs on testimony alone. This justification relies on an equilibrium concept, which is only reached in the long run. In addition, the hearer’s justified beliefs will always be less accurate than those held by the original source. For instance, assume the speaker is a climate scientist who has good reasons to believe that a 2∘\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$^{\circ }$$\end{document}C increase in temperature will lower the current global GDP by 10 percentage points. Under epistemic conflict of interest, a hearer will typically be justified to a belief close to that value, but not equal to it. The smaller the epistemic conflict of interest, the closer, on average, the hearer’s and speaker’s belief. These results highlight the importance of scientific norms which, in practice, are the embodiment of these equilibrium mechanisms and thus of scientific credibility. (shrink)

Although research on epistemic injustice has focused on the effects of prejudice in epistemic exchanges, the account of prejudice that emerges in Fricker’s (2007) view is not completely clear. In particular, I claim that the epistemic role of prejudice in the structure of testimonial justification is still in need of a satisfactory explanation. What special epistemic power does prejudice exercise that prevents the speaker’s words from constituting evidence for the hearer’s belief? By clarifying this point, it will be (...) possible to address two more general issues concerning the nature of prejudice: its resistance to counterevidence and the steps involved in overcoming prejudice. I propose a hinge account of prejudice, based on the recent perspective of hinge epistemology, to help clarify these aspects. According to the hinge account, prejudices share a fundamental feature with hinges: they work as norms of evidential significance, and as such, they determine what can and cannot count as evidence for belief. (shrink)

Transmission views of testimony hold that a speaker's knowledge or justification can become the audience's knowledge or justification. We argue that transmission views are incompatible with the hypothesis that one's epistemic state, together with one's practical circumstances, determines what actions are rationally permissible for an agent. We argue that there are cases where, if the speaker's epistemic state were transmitted to the audience, then the audience would be warranted in acting in particular ways. Yet, the audience in these (...) cases is not so warranted, as their strength of justification does not come close to the speaker's. (shrink)

Elizabeth Fricker has recently proposed a principle aimed at stating the necessary and sufficient conditions for testimonial justification. Her proposal entails that a hearer is justified in believing a speaker’s testimony only if she recognizes the speaker to be trustworthy, which, given Fricker’s internalist commitments, requires the hearer to have within her epistemic purview grounds which justify belief in the speaker’s trustworthiness. We argue that, as it stands, Fricker’s principle is too demanding, and we propose some amendments to (...) it. We further discuss the viability of her internalist approach to testimony.Keywords: Testimony; Justification; Internalism; Social epistemology; Elizabeth Fricker. (shrink)

ABSTRACTAccording to epistemic internalists, facts about justification supervene upon one's internal reasons for believing certain propositions. Epistemic externalists, on the other hand, deny this. More specifically, externalists think that the supervenience base of justification isn't exhausted by one's internal reasons for believing certain propositions. In the last decade, the internalism–externalism debate has made its mark on the epistemology of testimony. The proponent of internalism about the epistemology of testimony claims that a hearer's testimonial justification for believing (...) that p supervenes upon his internal reasons for thinking that the speaker's testimony that p is true. Recently, however, several objections have been raised against this view. In this paper, I present an argument providing intuitive support for internalism about the epistemology of testimony. Moreover, I also defend the argument against three recent objections offered by Stephen Wright in a couple of recent papers. The upshot of my discussion is that external conditions do make an epistemic difference when it comes to our testimonial beliefs, but that they cannot make any difference with respect to their justificatory status – i.e., they are justificationally irrelevant. (shrink)

I argue that a Humean account can make sense of the phenomenology associated with testimonial justification; the phenomenology being that in standard cases hearers regularly simply accept a testifier’s assertions as true – hearers don't engage in monitoring. The upshot is that a Humean account is in a better position dialectically than is usually supposed. I provide some background to the debate before setting out two challenges facing accounts of testimonial justification. The first challenge is to (...) provide an account that accords with the phenomenology of testimonial reception; the second challenge is to provide an account that can make sense of some testimonial beliefs enjoying greater justification than others. I show the credulist position to be vulnerable to the second challenge and the Humean position to be vulnerable to the first challenge. I argue that a Humean account, by drawing on dual process theory, can overcome the first challenge. (shrink)

Elizabeth Fricker’s writings on testimonial justification include some contrary ideas. In this paper, we propose Fricker’s theory of justification coherently and explain why she speaks of different ideas and which idea is more compatible with her general theory of knowledge. Fricker proposes three conditions for justification of testimonial beliefs for adults by appealing to commonsense world-picture and defining a paradigm case of testimony: justified belief of using speech act of telling, justified belief of the sincere (...) of testifier and the competence of testifier. The speech act of telling itself requires that for example, testifier at least apparently speaks from his knowledge and thinks that hearer is ignorant of the testimony. We argue that various parts of Fricker’s theory face problems. For example, double standard about children and adults in testimonial justification is against unity of conception of knowledge. چون تعداد کلمات کمتر از 150 کلمه بود این عبارت در اینجا قرار گرفت تا اجازه عبور از این مرحله داده شود. (shrink)

According to David Hume, testimonial belief is justified inferentially; according to Thomas Reid, by contrast, testimonial belief has justification by default. Aquinas’s approach is different. This article explains the importance of various kinds of testimonial belief in Aquinas, and argues that his account of testimonial justification is a pluralist one: testimonial ‘opinion’ is justified inferentially, while testimonial ‘faith’ is justified by one’s attitude toward the speaker. When one has faith in this restricted (...) sense, one believes the speaker’s statement in order to ‘adhere’ to the speaker, with a special act of will, and typically for the reason that the speaker is truthful. The article concludes with some comments on the characteristics and advantages of Aquinas’s account that distinguish it from recent accounts of testimonial justification. (shrink)

Although research on epistemic injustice has focused on the effects of prejudice in epistemic exchanges, the account of prejudice that emerges in Fricker's (2007) view is not completely clear. In particular, I claim that the epistemic role of prejudice in the structure of testimonial justification is still in need of a satisfactory explanation. What special epistemic power does prejudice exercise that prevents the speaker's words from constituting evidence for the hearer's belief? By clarifying this point, it will be (...) possible to address two more general issues concerning the nature of prejudice: its resistance to counterevidence and the steps involved in overcoming prejudice. I propose a hinge account of prejudice, based on the recent perspective of hinge epistemology, to help clarify these aspects. According to the hinge account, prejudices share a fundamental feature with hinges: they work as norms of evidential significance, and as such, they determine what can and cannot count as evidence for belief. (shrink)

The Assurance View, as advanced by Angus Ross and Richard Moran, makes the epistemology of testimony a matter of interpersonal commitments and entitlements. More specifically, I argue, their position is best understood as claiming that for someone’s belief to be testimonially justified is for some speaker to bear illocutionary responsibility for its truth. With this understanding in hand, I present a problem for the view that has so far escaped attention, a problem deriving from the wide freedom we have to (...) retract our assertions. Retraction dissolves the illocutionary responsibilities that were set up by preceding speech acts; but in some circumstances the epistemic significance of a retraction is effectively nil. We can therefore construct cases in which the responsibilities undertaken in testimony have been canceled, while the justification for belief based on it remains in place—and that shouldn’t be possible, if the Assurance View has things right. I present one such case and press its implications. (shrink)

This paper defends reductionism about testimonial justification of beliefs against two influential arguments. One is the empirical argument to the effect that the reductionist justification of our trust in testimony is either circular since it relies on testimonial evidence or else there is scarce evidence in support of our trust in testimony. The other is the transcendental argument to the effect that trust in testimony is a prerequisite for the very existence of testimonial evidence since (...) without the presumption of people’s truthfulness we cannot interpret their utterances as testimony with propositional contents. This paper contends that the epistemic subject can interpret utterances as testimony with propositional contents without presupposing the credibility of testimony, and that evidence available to the normal epistemic subject can justify her trust in testimony. (shrink)

The Public Justification Principle requires that coercive institutions be justified to all who live under them. I argue that this principle often cannot be satisfied without persons depending on the pure informative testimony of others, even under realistically idealized situations. Two main results follow. First, the sense of justification relevant to this principle has a strongly externalist component. Second, normative expectations of trust are essential to public justification. On the view I propose, whether the Public Justification (...) Principle is satisfied depends on the features of the network of testifiers in which persons are embedded. I consider several such networks to show which features are plausibly relevant. The importance of testimony for public justification ultimately suggests that we should moderate our expectations about the kind of conciliation we can achieve with the social order in which we live. (shrink)

Reductionists about testimony think that testimony is never a basic source of justification. By contrast, anti-reductionists claim that, at least in some paradigmatic cases, testimony is a basic and independent source of justification. In support of their position, anti-reductionists usually claim that paradigmatic testimony-based beliefs are non-inferential in that recipients of testimony usually don’t reason their way from the fact that they were told that p to the belief that p—they simply come to believe that p. In this (...) paper I explore in detail the idea that paradigmatic testimony-based beliefs are non-inferentially justified and conclude that it is grounded on an overly simplistic characterization of inferential relations. Then, and taking my cue from Malmgren’s (2018) rich proposal about the varieties of inferential relations, I defend the view that paradigmatic testimony-based beliefs are inferentially justified after all. (shrink)

I argue that a general feature of human psychology provides strong reason to modify or reject anti-reductionism about the epistemology of testimony. Because of the work of what I call “the background” (which is a collection of all of an individual's synthetizations, summarizations, memories of experiences, beliefs, etc.) we cannot help but form testimonial beliefs on the basis of a testifier's say so along with additional evidence, concepts, beliefs, and so on. Given that we arrive at testimonial beliefs (...) through the work of the background, to be justified in holding a testimonial belief, we must not only have a rational speaker's say so, but we must also form such beliefs in a right way. If this is right, then, contrary to typical anti-reductionism, justified testimonial beliefs require more than just a trustworthy testifier's say so – another requirement is that they are formed in a right way. (shrink)

The paper is concerned with the epistemological status of testimony and the question of what may confer justification on true testimonial beliefs and enable us to call such beliefs knowledge. In particular, it addresses certain anti-reductionist arguments in the epistemology of testimony and their incompatibility with the grammatical categories of egophoricity (conjunct/disjunct marking) and evidentiality (information source marking) present in the architecture of natural languages. First, the tradition of epistemological individualism and its rationale are discussed, as well as (...) certain attempts within this tradition to include testimony-based beliefs in the body of legitimate and rational beliefs. The next section is concerned with the anti-reductionist approach to testimonial beliefs and some arguments supporting ‘the credulity principle’ grounded in Thomas Reid's philosophy of common sense. The last two sections show how the anti-reductionist argumentation is threatened with an insoluble dilemma when considered in the context of languages with the grammatical categories of egophoricity (conjunct/disjunct marking) and evidentiality (information source marking). Special attention is paid to the justificatory role of egophoric and evidential marking; how these grammatical categories may influence the process of belief formation, and consequently, how this bears upon the nature of justification for testimonial beliefs. The final conclusion of the paper is that the anti-reductionist claim concerning the directness and non-inferential nature of testimonial knowledge is bound to meet objections grounded in the structure of many natural languages. This leads to a paradox: in discussion with reductionism, anti-reductionists do seek support for their arguments in common sense beliefs reflected in everyday language, and, on the other hand, their claims are incompatible with the linguistic data found in a number of natural languages. (shrink)

According to the Transmission View of Testimony : TVT: If a speaker testifies to a hearer that p, and if the hearer is justified in believing that p on the basis of that speaker's testimony, then the hearer's belief is justified by whatever justification the speaker has for believing that p. The aim of this paper is to develop and defend a novel objection to the TVT.

Testimony is a special challenge in epistemology. Human life as we know it would be impossible without it; we commonly accept it without question; and only the highly skeptical doubt that from it we gain much knowledge about matters on which we lack independent evidence. In my theory of testimony, it figures as an essential source of knowledge in our lives, but not as a basic source of it; and the way in which testimony yields justification for believing its (...) content is very different from the way in which it yields knowledge. Isabelle Keßels, David Lambert, and Christian Quast have produced a long and detailed study of my treatment of the topic, and here I can note only some important aspects of it and seek to discuss them in ways that may advance understanding of some major aspects of the topic. (shrink)

Within this paper, we argue that Audi’s transmission principle for testimony-based knowledge is untenable, while proposing an alternative route for him to take. We will first set out the core tenets of Audi’s general epistemology before we examine his account of testimony more specifically. Then, we proceed by showing that Audi’s transmission principle for testimony-based knowledge falls prey to a number of prominent counterexamples discussed in the recent literature. In reaction to this, we will put forward the thesis that in (...) cases of testimonial knowledge propositional justification, in contrast to knowledge, is being transmitted. Finally, we conclude that Audi loses sight of this option due to his overly strict classification of knowledge in externalist and justification in internalist terms. (shrink)

This paper identifies two distinct dimensions of what might be called testimonial strength: first, in the case of testimony from more than one speaker, testimony can be said to be stronger to the extent that a greater proportion of the speakers give identical testimony; second, in both single-speaker and multi-speaker testimony, testimony can be said to the stronger to the extent that each speaker expresses greater conviction in the relevant proposition. These two notions of testimonial strength have received (...) scant attention in the philosophical literature so far, presumably because it has been thought that whatever lessons we learn from thinking about testimony as a binary phenomenon will apply mutatis mutandis to varying strengths of testimony. This paper shows that this will not work for either of the two aforementioned dimensions of testimonial strength, roughly because less testimony can provide more justification in a way that can only be explained by appealing to the (non-binary) strength of the testimony itself. The paper also argues that this result undermines some influential versions of non-reductionism about testimonial justification. (shrink)

According to assurance views of testimonial justification, in virtue of the act of testifying a speaker provides an assurance of the truth of what she asserts to the addressee. This assurance provides a special justificatory force and a distinctive normative status to the addressee. It is thought to explain certain asymmetries between addressees and other unintended hearers (bystanders and eavesdroppers), such as the phenomenon that the addressee has a right to blame the speaker for conveying a falsehood but (...) unintended hearers do not, and the phenomenon that the addressee may deflect challenges to his testimonial belief to the speaker but unintended hearers may not. Here I argue that we can do a better job explaining the normative statuses associated with testimony by reference to epistemic norms of assertion and privacy norms. Following Sanford Goldberg, I argue that epistemic norms of assertion, according to which sincere assertion is appropriate only when the asserter possesses certain epistemic goods, can be ‘put to work’ to explain the normative statuses associated with testimony. When these norms are violated, they give hearers the right to blame the speaker, and they also explain why the speaker takes responsibility for the justification of the statement asserted. Norms of privacy, on the other hand, directly exclude eavesdroppers and bystanders from an informational exchange, implying that they have no standing to do many of the things, such as issue challenges or questions to the speaker, that would be normal for conversational participants. This explains asymmetries of normative status associated with testimony in a way logically independent of speaker assurance. (shrink)

The etiology of a perceptual belief can seemingly affect its epistemic status. There are cases in which perceptual beliefs seem to be unjustified because the perceptual experiences on which they are based are caused, in part, by wishful thinking, or irrational prior beliefs. It has been argued that this is problematic for many internalist views in the epistemology of perception, especially those which postulate immediate perceptual justification. Such views are unable to account for the impact of an experience’s etiology (...) on its justificational status, McGrath, Siegel, and Vahid ). Our understanding of what we have been told can also be affected by, for example, wishful thinking or irrational background beliefs. I argue that testimonial beliefs based on such states of understanding can thus be rendered unjustified. This is problematic not only for internalist immediate justification views of testimony, but also for some externalist views, such as the form of proper functionalism endorsed by Burge, and Graham. The testimonial version of the argument from etiology, unlike the perceptual variant, does not rest on the controversial hypothesis that perception is cognitively penetrable. Furthermore, there is a stronger case for the claim that testimonial justification can be undermined by etiological effects since, I argue, testimonial beliefs can be based on the background mental states which affect our understanding of what is said, and our states of understanding are rationally assessable. (shrink)

According to the Interpersonal View of Testimony, testimonial justification is non-evidential in nature. I begin by arguing that the IVT has the following problem: If the IVT is true, then young children and people with autism cannot participate in testimonial exchanges; but young children and people with autism can participate in testimonial exchanges; thus, the IVT should be rejected on the grounds that it has over-cognized what it takes to give and receive testimony. Afterwards, I consider (...) what I take to be the two best motivations for the IVT and argue that they both fail. The overarching lesson, then, is that the IVT is unmotivated and false; we should think of testimonial justification as being evidential in nature. (shrink)

Interpersonalist theories of testimony have the theoretical virtue of giving room to the characteristic interpersonal features of testimonial exchange among persons. Nonetheless, it has been argued that they are at a serious disadvantage when it comes to accounting for the way in which testimonial beliefs may be epistemically justified. In this paper, we defend the epistemological credentials of interpersonalism, emphasizing that it is inseparable from the acceptance of non-evidential epistemic reasons to believe, which demands proper conceptual elaborations on (...) the notions of epistemic reasons and of epistemic justification. We offer a proper reading of epistemic reason, and we defend non-purism on justification as the adequate way to conceive the epistemic proposal of interpersonalism on testimony, realizing that only this combination is capable of apprehending certain cases in which there seems to be no way to rule out the idea that the assurance offered by the testifier offers an epistemic reason to believe that it is not evidential. (shrink)

I argue, first, that testimony is likely a natural kind (where natural kinds are accurately described by the homoeostatic property cluster theory) and that if it is indeed a natural kind, it is likely necessarily reliable. I argue, second, that the view of testimony as a natural kind and as necessarily reliable grounds a novel, naturalist global reductionism about testimonial justification and that this new reductionism is immune to a powerful objection to orthodox Humean global reductionism, the objection (...) from the too-narrow induction base. (shrink)

Sometimes, a form of discrimination is hard to register, understand, and articulate. A rich precedent demonstrates how victim testimonies have been key in uncovering such “hidden” forms of discrimination, from sexual harassment to microaggressions. I reflect on how this plausibly goes too for “attentional discrimination”, referring to cases where the more meaningful attributes of one social group are made salient in attention in contrast to the less meaningful attributes of another. Victim testimonies understandably dominate the “context-of-discovery” stage of research into (...) these initially opaque forms of discrimination; a victim’s encounter with the gap between their experience and dominant conceptual frameworks for understanding it is what provides an initial foothold for analysis to begin. Some object, however, to this methodology continuing to dominate the later “context-of-justification” stage, where the hypothesis is rigorously challenged. I argue that this objection underestimates not just how other methodologies are more likely to inherit the various mechanisms of invisibility hiding the discrimination in question, but also how victim testimonies are distinctively well-suited to recognize and challenge those mechanisms. Victim testimonies, then, ought to continue playing a dominant role into these later stages of research regarding hidden forms of discrimination. (shrink)

An influential idea in the epistemology of testimony is that people often acquire justified beliefs through testimony, in contexts too informationally poor for the justification to be evidential. This has been described as the Scarcity of Information Objection (SIO). It is an objection to the reductive thesis that the acceptance of testimony is justified by evidence of general kinds not unique to testimony. SIO hinges on examples intended to show clearly that testimonial justification arises in low-information contexts; (...) I argue that the common examples show no such thing. There is a great deal of information available in testimonial contexts, including in the examples alleged to show otherwise – enough information to render SIO implausible. Purported SIO examples tend to give a wrong impression about the informational richness of testimonial contexts, I argue, due to the lack of detail in which they are presented. (shrink)

The paper presents an extension of the kind of hinge epistemology proposed in Extended Rationality. A Hinge Epistemology (Coliva 2015) to the case of testimonial justification. This extension stems naturally from a reinterpretation of the classic dispute between reductionists and anti-reductionists with respect to testimonial justification. The interesting and novel aspect of that reinterpretation is that it brings to light the deep analogy between that classic dispute and the contemporary debate between so-called “liberals” and “conservatives” with (...) respect to the structure of perceptual justification. The paper first presents the reinterpretation; it subsequently proposes the extension of hinge epistemology to the case of testimonial justification; it then turns to a detailed discussion of the exact “hinges” testimonial justification is taken to depend on, and closes by considering some possible objections. (shrink)

Assurance theories of testimony attempt to explain what is distinctive about testimony as a form of epistemic warrant or justification. The most characteristic assurance theories hold that a distinctive subclass of assertion (acts of “telling”) involves a real commitment given by the speaker to the listener, somewhat like a promise to the effect that what is asserted is true. This chapter sympathetically explains what is attractive about such theories: instead of treating testimony as essentially similar to any other kind (...) of evidence, they instead make testimonial warrant depend on essential features of the speech act of testimony as a social practice. One such feature is “buck-passing,” the phenomenon that when I am challenged to defend a belief I acquired through testimony, I may respond by referring to the source of my testimony (and thereby “passing the buck”) rather than providing direct evidence for the truth of the content of the belief. The chapter concludes by posing a serious challenge to assurance theories, namely that the social practice of assurance insufficiently ensures the truth of beliefs formed on the basis of testimony, and thereby fails a crucial epistemological test as a legitimate source of beliefs. (shrink)

One of the central problems afflicting reductionism in the epistemology of testimony is the apparent fact that infants and small children are not cognitively capable of having the inductively based positive reasons required by this view. Since non-reductionism does not impose a requirement of this sort, it is thought to avoid this problem and is therefore taken to have a significant advantage over reductionism. In this paper, however, I argue that if this objection undermines reductionism, then a variant of it (...) similarly undermines non-reductionism. Thus, considerations about the cognitive capacities of infants and small children do not effectively discriminate between these two competing theories of testimonial justification. (shrink)

Jennifer Lackey’s case “Creationist Teacher,” in which students acquire knowledge of evolutionary theory from a teacher who does not herself believe the theory, has been discussed widely as a counterexample to so-called transmission theories of testimonial knowledge and justification. The case purports to show that a speaker need not herself have knowledge or justification in order to enable listeners to acquire knowledge or justification from her assertion. The original case has been criticized on the ground that (...) it does not really refute the transmission theory, because there is still somebody in a chain of testifiers—the person from whom the creationist teacher acquired what she testifies—who knows the truth of the testified statements. In this paper, we provide a kind of pattern for generating counterexample cases, one that avoids objections discussed by Peter Graham and others in relation to such cases. (shrink)

The thesis that aesthetic testimony cannot provide aesthetic justification or knowledge is widely accepted--even by realists about aesthetic properties and values. This Kantian position is mistaken. Some testimony about beauty and artistic value can provide a degree of aesthetic justification and, perhaps, even knowledge. That is, there are cases in which one can be justified in making an aesthetic judgment purely on the basis of someone else's testimony. But widespread aesthetic unreliability creates a problem for much aesthetic testimony. (...) Hence, most testimony about art does not have much epistemic value. The situation is somewhat different with respect to aesthetic testimony about nature, proofs, and theories. (shrink)

This article addresses important epistemological issues raised by Barry Hallen and J. Olubi Sodipo’s pioneering philosophical fieldwork among Yoruba herbalists or masters of medicine (onisegun). More precisely, I shall primarily investigate, as well as object to, the unduly restrictive view they take on testimony in Yoruba epistemic practice. With this criticism as the starting point, but still based on the cases Hallen and Sodipo provide, I explore different ways in which an “oral culture” like Yoruba (as traditionally depicted) can rely (...) on testimony as a source of justification without succumbing to the gullible and uncritical attitude towards tradition such societies have been charged with. To this purpose, I put to use relevant developments in analytic epistemology taking place after Hallen and Sodipo published their work. (shrink)

Machine learning (ML) systems play an increasingly relevant role in medicine and healthcare. As their applications move ever closer to patient care and cure in clinical settings, ethical concerns about the responsibility of their use come to the fore. I analyse an aspect of responsible ML use that bears not only an ethical but also a significant epistemic dimension. I focus on ML systems’ role in mediating patient–physician relations. I thereby consider how ML systems may silence patients’ voices and relativise (...) the credibility of their opinions, which undermines their overall credibility status without valid moral and epistemic justification. More specifically, I argue that withholding credibilitydue tohow ML systems operate can be particularly harmful to patients and, apart from adverse outcomes, qualifies as a form of testimonial injustice. I make my case for testimonial injustice in medical ML by considering ML systems currently used in the USA to predict patients’ risk of misusing opioids (automated Prediction Drug Monitoring Programmes, PDMPs for short). I argue that the locus of testimonial injustice in ML-mediated medical encounters is found in the fact that these systems are treated asmarkers of trustworthinesson which patients’ credibility is assessed. I further show how ML-based PDMPs exacerbate and further propagate social inequalities at the expense of vulnerable social groups. (shrink)

Testimony is the mainstay of human communication and essential for the spread of knowledge. But testimony may also spread error. Under what conditions does it yield knowledge in the person addressed? Must the recipient trust the attester? And does the attester have to know what is affirmed? A related question is what is required for the recipient to be justified in believing testimony. Is testimony-based justification acquired in the same way as testimony-based knowledge? This paper addresses these and other (...) questions. It offers a theory of the role of testimony in producing knowledge and justification, a sketch of a conception of knowledge that supports this theory, a brief account of how trust of others can be squared with critical habits of mind, and an outline of some important standards for intellectual responsibility in giving and receiving testimony. (shrink)

Within the contemporary epistemology of testimony, it is widely assumed that testimonial scepticism can be dismissed without engaging with possible reasons or arguments supporting the view. This assumption of dismissibility both underlies the debate between reductionist and non-reductionist views of testimony and is responsible for the neglect of testimonial scepticism within contemporary epistemology. This paper argues that even given liberal assumptions about what may constitute valid grounds for the dismissal of a sceptical view, the assumption that testimonial (...) scepticism is dismissible should be rejected. For even if familiar sceptical positions and scepticism about testimonial justification can be dismissed on such grounds, scepticism about testimonial knowledge cannot. (shrink)

The fact that much of our knowledge is gained through the testimony of others challenges a certain form of epistemic individualism. We are clearly not autonomous knowers. But the discussion surrounding testimony has maintained a commitment to what I have elsewhere called epistemic agent individualism. Both the reductionist and the anti-reductionist have focused their attention on the testimony of individuals. But groups, too, are sources of testimony - or so I shall argue. If groups can be testifiers, a natural question (...) to ask is whether our beliefs based on the testimony of groups are ever justified and whether such a justification is to be conferred inferentially or non-inferentially. I consider and dismiss the possibility of extending an anti-reductionist account of justification to our group testimonial beliefs. I also argue against a version of reductionism that would have our group testimonial beliefs justified only in so far as we were able to monitor the trustworthiness of members of the group. However, there are forms of reductionism that can be extended to make sense of the justification of our group testimonial beliefs. There are mechanisms for monitoring the trustworthiness and competency of a group (rather than its members) and, further, a variety of background beliefs allow us to assess the testimony of a group for reliability. (shrink)

I defend the acceptance principle for testimony (APT), that hearers are justified in accepting testimony unless they have positive evidence against its reliability, against Elizabeth Fricker's local reductionist view. Local reductionism, the doctrine that hearers need evidence that a particular piece of testimony is reliable if they are to be justified in believing it, must on pain of scepticism be complemented by a principle that grants default justification to some testimony; I argue that (APT) is the principle required. I (...) consider two alternative weaker principles as complements to local reductionism; one yields counter-intuitive results unless we accept (APT) as well, while the other is too weak to enable local reductionism to avoid scepticism. (shrink)

There is much to like about the idea that justification should be understood in terms of normality or normic support (Smith 2016, Goodman and Salow 2018). The view does a nice job explaining why we should think that lottery beliefs differ in justificatory status from mundane perceptual or testimonial beliefs. And it seems to do that in a way that is friendly to a broadly internalist approach to justification. In spite of its attractions, we think that the (...) normic support view faces two serious challenges. The first is that it delivers the wrong result in preface cases. These cases suggest that the view is either too sceptical or too externalist. The second is that the view struggles with certain kinds of Moorean absurdities. It turns out that these problems can easily be avoided. If we think of normality as a condition on *knowledge*, we can characterise justification in terms of its connection to knowledge and thereby avoid the difficulties discussed here. The resulting view does an equally good job explaining why we should think that our perceptual and testimonial beliefs are justified when lottery beliefs cannot be. Thus, it seems that little could be lost and much could be gained by revising the proposal and adopting a view on which it is knowledge, not justification, that depends directly upon normality. (shrink)

The essay argues that there is no such thing as the epistemology of testimony as it is currently conceived: a subfield of epistemology that concerns itself with a special form of acquiring knowledge, a special kind of justification, a special sort of reason for belief. Rather, the concept of knowledge contains an account of the possibility of knowing from others. We cannot find ourselves in this predicament: we comprehend what knowledge is all right, and yet have difficulty seeing how (...) one may, from the words of another, come to acquire that: knowledge. And if we cannot find ourselves in this predicament, then there can be no need to introduce, in response to it, concepts that currently attract much interest—trust, authority, sincerity, etc. (shrink)

I defend the acceptance principle for testimony (APT), that hearers are justified in accepting testimony unless they have positive evidence against its reliability, against Elizabeth Fricker's local reductionist view. Local reductionism, the doctrine that hearers need evidence that a particular piece of testimony is reliable if they are to be justified in believing it, must on pain of scepticism be complemented by a principle that grants default justification to some testimony; I argue that (APT) is the principle required. I (...) consider two alternative weaker principles as complements to local reductionism; one yields counter-intuitive results unless we accept (APT) as well, while the other is too weak to enable local reductionism to avoid scepticism. (shrink)

The ability to interact in a natural language profoundly changes devices’ interfaces and potential applications of speaking technologies. Concurrently, this phenomenon challenges our mainstream theories of knowledge, such as how to analyze linguistic outputs of devices under existing anthropocentric theoretical assumptions. In section 1, I present the topic of machines that speak, connecting between Descartes and Generative AI. In section 2, I argue that accepted testimonial theories of knowledge and justification commonly reject the possibility that a speaking technological (...) artifact can give testimony. In section 3, I identify three assumptions underlying the view that rejects conversational AIs – AI-based technologies that converse, as testifiers: conversational AIs (1) lack intentions, (2) cannot be normatively assessed, and (3) cannot constitute an object in trust relations, while humans can. In section 4, I propose the concept ‘AI-testimony’ for analyzing outputs of conversational AIs, suggesting three conditions for technologies to deliver AI-testimony: (1) content is propositional, (2) generated and delivered with no other human directly involved, (3) the output is perceived as phenomenologically similar to that of a human. I conclude that this concept overcomes the limitations of the anthropocentric concept of testimony, opening future directions of research without associating conversational AIs with human-like agency. (shrink)

In this paper I focus on John Locke as a representative figure of English Enlightenment theorizing about the legitimacy of cognitive authority and examine the way in which a greater attention to the cultural milieu in which Locke worked can lead to a profound reexamination of his writings on cognitive authority. In particular, I suggest that an inattention to the rise of a culture of reading and the growing availability of books in Early Modern England has led historians of philosophy (...) largely to misrepresent Locke's theory of testimonial justification. At the core of my paper are two interrelated claims. First, with respect to the history of ideas, I argue that the Locke's interest in testimony as a source of justification was in fact greater than that of his Scholastic forebears, and that this fact has a simple, if as yet unacknowledged, cultural cause -- viz., the rise of the book as a mass commodity in the late 17th century. Second, with respect to the history of philosophy more particularly, I argue that this failure to acknowledge the cultural movements that led to a consideration of testimony as a topic of interest to epistemologists in the Modern era has led to a misreading of Locke's work on the subject. Indeed, Locke, though usually read as having attempted to denigrate testimony as a legitimate source of justification, in fact sought to devise an epistemology that would do justice to the centrality of testimony in the intellectual lives of growing numbers of his contemporaries in 17th and 18th century England and Scotland. (shrink)