Epistemology of Testimony

Edited by Stephen Wright (University of Oxford)
Assistant editor: Jonathan Reibsamen (Columbia International University)
About this topic
Summary Perhaps most of what we take ourselves to know about the world and its history comes from testimony we have received. The epistemology of testimony is concerned with questions regarding the nature and normativity of testimonial belief and knowledge. The literature on testimony is large and growing, and identifiable subdivisions have begun to appear. In the late 1980s and early 1990s the central question concerned the nature of justification from testimony. Reductionists (or “reductivists”) about testimonial justification, following Locke and Hume, argued that an individual’s justification from testimony reduces to other kinds of justification, such as justification from that individual’s own sensory perception, memory, and inference. The anti-reductionist (or “non-reductivist”), often citing Thomas Reid as inspiration, argued that justification from testimony does not reduce to justification from other sources. However, not all in the reductionist camp agree about what justification from testimony reduces to, and not all in the anti-reductionist camp agree about the nature of the justification from testimony. Other questions addressed in recent epistemology of testimony literature include: Under what conditions are testimonial beliefs justified or epistemically warranted? Is testimony a transmissive source of knowledge or justification, or a generative source? Are there unique epistemic norms governing testimony? Are there unique speech acts within the category of ‘testimony’ that bring with them unique epistemic entitlements? Does testimonial belief enjoy a kind of default justification? Can groups be testifiers, and if so, are the epistemic norms governing the production and reception of group testimony the same or different from those governing testimony from individuals?
Key works

Historical antecedents to the contemporary literature include Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Hume’s On Miracles, and Reid’s An Inquiry into the Human Mind and Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man. Significant contemporary works include: C. A. J. Coady’s Testimony: A Philosophical Study (Coady 1992), Tyler Burge’s “Content Preservation” (Burge 1993) and “Interlocution, Perception, and Memory” (Burge 1997), Elizabeth Fricker’s “Against Gullibility” (Fricker 1994) and “Second-Hand Knowledge” (Fricker 2006), Jennifer Lackey’s Learning from Words (Lackey 2008), and Sanford Goldberg’s Relying on Others (Goldberg 2010). For an overview, John Greco’s “Recent Work on Testimonial Knowledge” (Greco 2012) is a good place to start.

Related

Contents
742 found
Order:
1 — 50 / 742
  1. Why Take Our Word for It?Ishani Maitra & Daniel Nolan - manuscript
    Remove from this list   Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  2. Epistemic vice predicts acceptance of Covid-19 misinformation.Marco Meyer, Mark Alfano & Boudewijn De Bruin - manuscript
    Why are mistaken beliefs about Covid-19 so prevalent? Political identity, education and other demographic variables explain only a part of individual differences in the susceptibility to Covid-19 misinformation. This paper focuses on another explanation: epistemic vice. Epistemic vices are character traits that interfere with acquiring, maintaining, and transmitting knowledge. If the basic assumption of vice epistemology is right, then people with epistemic vices such as indifference to the truth or rigidity in their belief structures will tend to be more susceptible (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  3. Pooling, Products, and Priors.Richard Pettigrew & Jonathan Weisberg -
    We often learn the opinions of others without hearing the evidence on which they're based. The orthodox Bayesian response is to treat the reported opinion as evidence itself and update on it by conditionalizing. But sometimes this isn't feasible. In these situations, a simpler way of combining one's existing opinion with opinions reported by others would be useful, especially if it yields the same results as conditionalization. We will show that one method---upco, also known as multiplicative pooling---is specially suited to (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  4. Reductionism and knowledge.David Pearce - manuscript
    in How Many Questions?, ed. Leigh S. Cauman, Isaac Levi, Charles Parsons, and Robert Schwartz, Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1983, pp. 276-300.
    Remove from this list  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  5. On the Uses and Abuses of Celebrity Epistemic Power.Alfred Archer, Mark Alfano & Matthew Dennis - forthcoming - Social Epistemology.
    The testimonies of celebrities affect the lives of their many followers who pay attention to what they say. This gives celebrities a high degree of epistemic power, which has come under close scrutiny during the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper investigates the duties that arise from this power. We argue that celebrities have a negative duty of testimonial justice not to undermine trust in authoritative sources by spreading misinformation or directing attention to untrustworthy sources. Moreover, celebrities have a general imperfect duty (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  6. Faith and Rational Deference to Authority.Lara Buchak - forthcoming - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.
    Many accounts of faith hold that faith is deference to an authority about what to believe or what to do. I show that this kind of faith fits into a more general account of faith, the risky-commitment account. I further argue that it can be rational to defer to an authority even when the authority’s pronouncement goes against one’s own reasoning. Indeed, such deference is rational in typical cases in which individuals treat others as authorities.
    Remove from this list   Direct download (4 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  7. The epistemic and moral role of testimony†.Katherine L. Caldwell - forthcoming - History and Theory.
    Remove from this list  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  8. Intellectual Humility, Testimony, and Epistemic Injustice.Ian M. Church - forthcoming - In Mark Alfano, Michael Lynch & Alessandra Tanesini (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Humility. New York, USA: Routledge.
    In this exploratory paper, I consider how intellectual humility and epistemic injustice might contribute to the failure of testimonial exchanges. In §1, I will briefly highlight four broad ways a testimonial exchange might fail. In §2, I will very briefly review the nature of epistemic injustice. In §3, I will explore how both epistemic injustice and intellectual humility can lead to failures in testimonial exchange, and I’ll conclude by suggesting how intellectual humility and epistemic injustice might be related.
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  9. Critical notice of Jonathan Sutton, without justification.E. J. Coffman - forthcoming - Philosophical Books.
    In Without Justification,[1] Jonathan Sutton undermines the orthodox view that a justified belief needn’t constitute knowledge; develops a battery of arguments for the unorthodox thesis that you justifiedly believe P iff you know P; and explores the topics of testimony and inference in light of his equation of justification and knowledge (J=K). This book is essential reading at epistemology’s cutting edge. In §I, we’ll take an extended tour of the book, raising various questions and objections along the way. In §II, (...)
    Remove from this list  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  10. Testimonial Injustice and Mutual Recognition.Lindsay Crawford - forthcoming - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy.
    Much of the recent work on the nature of testimonial injustice holds that a hearer who fails to accord sufficient credibility to a speaker’s testimony, owing to identity prejudice, can thereby wrong that speaker. What is it to wrong someone in this way? This paper offers an account of the wrong at the heart of testimonial injustice that locates it in a failure of interpersonal justifiability. On the account I develop, one that draws directly from T. M. Scanlon’s moral contractualist (...)
    Remove from this list  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  11. Language and testimony in classical indian philosophy.Madhav Deshpande - forthcoming - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  12. Antisocial Modelling.Georgi Gardiner - forthcoming - In Alfano Mark, Jeroen De Ridder & Colin Klein (eds.), Social Virtue Epistemology.
    This essay replies to Michael Morreau and Erik J. Olsson’s ‘Learning from Ranters: The Effect of Information Resistance on the Epistemic Quality of Social Network Deliberation’. Morreau and Olsson use simulations to suggest that false ranters—agents who do not update their beliefs and only ever assert false claims—do not diminish the epistemic value of deliberation for other agents and can even be epistemically valuable. They argue conclude that “Our study suggests that including [false] ranters has little or no negative effect (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  13. Virtue Epistemology and Explanatory Salience.Georgi Gardiner - forthcoming - In Heather Battaly (ed.), Routledge Handbook of Virtue Epistemology. Routledge.
    Robust virtue epistemology holds that knowledge is true belief obtained through cognitive ability. In this essay I explain that robust virtue epistemology faces a dilemma, and the viability of the theory depends on an adequate understanding of the ‘through’ relation. Greco interprets this ‘through’ relation as one of causal explanation; the success is through the agent’s abilities iff the abilities play a sufficiently salient role in a causal explanation of why she possesses a true belief. In this paper I argue (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  14. Testimony and the Scope of the A Priori.Peter Graham - forthcoming - In Dylan Dodd & Elia Zardini (eds.), Beyond Sense. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    Tyler Burge famously argues in his 1993 paper "Content Preservation" that it is not only a priori true that we enjoy a prima facie warrant to take what others assert as true, but also that there our warrant to believe what we are told in certain special cases is a priori. So just as our warrant for believing certain mathematical truths might be a priori, so too there are cases of belief through testimony that are a priori. Then in a (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  15. What's Wrong With Testimony? Defending the Epistemic Analogy between Testimony and Perception.Peter Graham - forthcoming - In Jennifer Lackey & Aidan McGlynn (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Social Epistemology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    This chapter states the contrast between presumptivism about testimonial warrant (often called anti-reductionism) and strict reductionism (associated with Hume) about testimonial warrant. Presumptivism sees an analogy with modest foundationalism about perceptual warrant. Strict reductionism denies this analogy. Two theoretical frameworks for these positions are introduced to better formulate the most popular version of persumptivism, a competence reliabilist account. Seven arguments against presumptivism are then stated and critiqued: (1) The argument from reliability; (2) The argument from reasons; (3) the argument from (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  16. Fake News: The Case for a Purely Consumer-Oriented Explication.Thomas Grundmann - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    Our current understanding of ‘fake news’ is not in good shape. On the one hand, this category seems to be urgently needed for an adequate understanding of the epistemology in the age of the internet. On the other hand, the term has an unstable ordinary meaning and the prevalent accounts which all relate fake news to epistemically bad attitudes of the producer lack theoretical unity, sufficient extensional adequacy, and epistemic fruitfulness. I will therefore suggest an alternative account of fake news (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  17. Understanding and Testimony.Allan Hazlett - forthcoming - In Jennifer Lackey & Aidan McGlynn (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Social Epistemology. Oxford.
    Can understanding be transmitted by testimony, in the same sense that propositional knowledge can be transmitted by testimony? Some contemporary philosophers – call them testimonial understanding pessimists – say No, and others – call them testimonial understanding optimists – say Yes. In this chapter I will articulate testimonial understanding pessimism (§1) and consider some arguments for it (§2).
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  18. The Role of Assurance in Judgment and Memory.Edward Hinchman - forthcoming - In Sanford Goldberg & Stephen Wright (eds.), Memory and Testimony: New Essays in Epistemology.
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  19. Prescriptive and Evaluative Norms of Assertion.Jonathan Ichikawa - forthcoming - Analysis Reviews.
    Critical notice of Christoph Kelp and Mona Simion's _Sharing Knowledge: A Functionalist Account of Assertion_.
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  20. Epistemic Authority.Christoph Jäger - forthcoming - In Jennifer Lackey & Aidan McGlynn (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Social Epistemology. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press.
    This handbook article gives a critical overview of recent discussions of epistemic authority. It favors an account that brings into balance the dictates of rational deference with the ideals of intellectual self-governance. A plausible starting point is the conjecture that neither should rational deference to authorities collapse into total epistemic submission, nor the ideal of mature intellectual self-governance be conflated with (illusions of) epistemic autarky.
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  21. False Authorities.Christoph Jäger - forthcoming - Acta Analytica.
    An epistemic agent A is a false epistemic authority for others iff they falsely believe A to be in a position to help them accomplish their epistemic ends. A major divide exists between what I call "epistemic quacks", who falsely believe themselves to be relevantly competent, and "epistemic charlatans", i.e., false authorities who believe or even know that they are incompetent. Both types of false authority do not cover what Lackey (2021) calls "predatory experts": experts who systematically misuse their social-epistemic (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  22. Believing the Incomprehensible God: Aquinas on Understanding God’s Testimony.O. P. James Dominic Rooney - forthcoming - Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association.
    While there has been recent epistemological interest as to whether knowledge is 'transmitted' by testimony from the testifier to the hearer, there is another facet of the epistemology of testimony that raises a distinct problem: whether a hearer can receive testimonial knowledge without fully understanding the content of the testimony. Aquinas' account of faith illustrates the problem of receiving testimonial knowledge without being able to comprehend the content of testimony. As Aquinas conceives of it, revelation provides a case in principle (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  23. Trust and Belief.Arnon Keren - forthcoming - In Judith Simon (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Trust and Philosophy. New York, USA: pp. 109-120.
    One fundamental divide among philosophers studying the nature of trust concerns the relation between trust and belief. According to doxastic accounts of trust, trust entails a belief about the trustee: either the belief that she is trustworthy with respect to what she is trusted to do, or that she will do what she is trusted to do. Non-doxastic accounts deny that trusting entails holding such a belief. The chapter describes and evaluates the main considerations which have been cited for and (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  24. Empfehlen und Vertrauen.Jon Leefmann - forthcoming - In Wissensproduktion und Wissenstransfer in Zeiten der Pandemie. Der Einfluss der Corona-Krise auf die Erzeugung und Vermittlung von Wissen.
    Der Erfolg von Maßnahmen zur Eindämmung der COVID-19-Pandemie ist abhängig vom Vertrauen der Öffentlichkeit in wissenschaftliche Experten. Zwar ist Vertrauen als Einstellung gegenüber Experten im Zusammenhang mit der Pandemie bereits viel Aufmerksamkeit zuteilgeworden, allerdings meist in Bezug auf das Vertrauen, das Laien Äußerungen wie Behauptungen und Mitteilungen entgegenbringen, die ihnen das Wissen der Experten zugänglich machen sollen. Dieser Aufsatz stellt dagegen eine andere Art der Äußerung in den Mittelpunkt: die Empfehlung. Im Zusammenhang mit der Pandemie haben Forderungen gegenüber der Politik (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  25. Social Epistemology.Boaz Miller - forthcoming - Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
  26. The Epistemology of Testimony: Locke and His Critics.Kenneth L. Pearce - forthcoming - In Stephen Howard & Jack Stetter (eds.), The Edinburgh Critical History of Early Modern and Enlightenment Philosophy. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
    Contemporary discussions of the epistemology of testimony are often framed in terms of the disagreement on this topic between Hume and Reid. However, it is widely assumed that, prior to Hume, philosophers in the grip of Enlightenment individualism neglected philosophical questions about testimony, simply treating testimony as ordinary empirical evidence. In fact, although the evidential model of testimony was popular in early modern philosophy, it was also the subject of vigorous debate. This chapter examines Locke's defence of the evidential model (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  27. Knowledge of things and aesthetic testimony.Chris Ranalli - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    Many philosophers believe that aesthetic testimony can provide aesthetic knowledge. This leaves us with the question: why does getting aesthetic knowledge by experience – by seeing a painting up close, or witnessing a performance first-hand – nevertheless seem superior to aesthetic testimony? I argue that it is due to differences in their epistemic value; in the diversity of epistemic goods each one provides. Aesthetic experience, or the experience of art or other aesthetic objects, affords multiple, distinctive epistemic goods whereas aesthetic (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  28. Socially Distributed Cognition and the Epistemology of Testimony.Joseph Shieber - forthcoming - In Miranda Fricker, Peter Graham, David Henderson & Nikolaj Jang Pedersen (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Social Epistemology. New York, NY, USA: pp. 87-95.
    Most discussions of the epistemology of testimony include personalist requirements. These include either requirements that stipulate certain features that individual testifiers must have in order to count as transmitters of knowledge, or that stipulate certain features that individual recipients of testimony must have in order to count as acquiring knowledge on the basis of that testimony. For example, in the former case, many views require that testifiers be competent and honest, whereas, in the latter case, many views require that recipients (...)
    Remove from this list  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  29. Doxastic Justification and Testimonial Beliefs.Emmanuel Smith - forthcoming - Episteme:1-14.
    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 (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  30. Can Real Social Epistemic Networks Deliver the Wisdom of Crowds?Emily Sullivan, Max Sondag, Ignaz Rutter, Wouter Meulemans, Scott Cunningham, Bettina Speckmann & Mark Alfano - forthcoming - In Tania Lombrozo, Joshua Knobe & Shaun Nichols (eds.), Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy, Volume 1. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    In this paper, we explain and showcase the promising methodology of testimonial network analysis and visualization for experimental epistemology, arguing that it can be used to gain insights and answer philosophical questions in social epistemology. Our use case is the epistemic community that discusses vaccine safety primarily in English on Twitter. In two studies, we show, using both statistical analysis and exploratory data visualization, that there is almost no neutral or ambivalent discussion of vaccine safety on Twitter. Roughly half the (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  31. Deference to Experts.Alex Worsnip - forthcoming - In Jonathan Dancy, Ernest Sosa, Matthias Steup & Kurt Sylvan (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Epistemology, 3rd edition. Wiley-Blackwell.
    Especially but not exclusively in the United States, there is a significant gulf between expert opinion and public opinion on a range of important political, social, and scientific issues. Large numbers of lay people hold views contrary to the expert consensus on topics such as climate change, vaccines, and economics. Much political commentary assumes that ordinary people should defer to experts more than they do, and this view is certainly lent force by the literally deadly effects of many denials of (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  32. Making life more interesting: Trust, trustworthiness, and testimonial injustice.Aidan McGlynn - 2024 - Philosophical Psychology 37 (1):126-147.
    A theme running through Katherine Hawley’s recent works on trust and trustworthiness is that thinking about the relations between these and Miranda Fricker’s notion of testimonial injustice offers a perspective from which we can see several limitations of Fricker’s own account of testimonial injustice. This paper clarifies the aspects of Fricker’s account that Hawley’s criticisms target, focusing on her objections to Fricker’s proposal that its primary harm involves a kind of epistemic objectification and her characterization of testimonial injustice in terms (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  33. La incredulidad crédula.Montserrat Crespin Perales - 2023 - Telos Cuadernos de Comunicación, Tecnología y Sociedad, N. 122.
    Resumen: Una parte de la legitimación de los medios de comunicación reposa en el crédito que la ciudadanía les concede en calidad de fuentes confiables de conocimiento. En el caso de las noticias y los informativos opera la presunción de veracidad y, en menor medida, la prudencia escéptica. Palabras clave: confiabilidad, presunción de veracidad, testimonio, incredulidad crédula. Abstract: Part of the legitimacy of the media rests on the credit that citizens give them as reliable sources of knowledge. In the case (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  34. Excessive testimony: When less is more.Finnur Dellsén - 2023 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 107 (2):525-540.
    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 (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (5 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  35. On Living the Testimonial Sceptic’s Life: Can Testimonial Scepticism Be Dismissed?Arnon Keren - 2023 - Philosophical Quarterly 74 (1):333-354.
    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 (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  36. Why It's OK Not to Think for Yourself.Jonathan Matheson - 2023 - Routledge.
    We tend to applaud those who think for themselves: the ever-curious student, for example, or the grownup who does their own research. Even as we’re applauding, however, we ourselves often don’t think for ourselves. This book argues that’s completely OK. -/- In fact, it’s often best just to take other folks’ word for it, allowing them to do the hard work of gathering and evaluating the relevant evidence. In making this argument, philosopher Jonathan Matheson shows how 'expert testimony' and 'the (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  37. Unwanted knowledge transmission.Ísak Andri Ólafsson - 2023 - Synthese 201 (5):1-17.
    John Greco (2020) sets out to create a unified virtue-theoretic account of knowledge generation and transmission in his book The Transmission of Knowledge. One of the advantages of his view is that it can defend the achievement view from a known strand of counterexamples. To accomplish that, he relies on joint agency being essential to knowledge transmission. Joint agency can be characterized as a sort of interdependent and interactive cooperation between speaker and hearer that share an intention to transmit knowledge. (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  38. An Idle and Most False Imposition: Truth-Seeking vs. Status-Seeking and the Failure of Epistemic Vigilance.Joseph Shieber - 2023 - Philosophic Exchange 2023.
    The theory of epistemic vigilance posits that -- to quote the eponymous paper that introduced the theory -- “humans have a suite of cognitive mechanisms for epistemic vigilance, targeted at the risk of being misinformed by others." Despite the widespread acceptance of the theory of epistemic vigilance, however, I argue that the theory is a poor fit with the evidence: while there is good reason to accept that people ARE vigilant, there is also good reason to believe that their vigilance (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  39. Wise groups and humble persons: the best of both worlds?Mattias Skipper - 2023 - Asian Journal of Philosophy 2 (1):1-10.
    This paper is about a problem that can arise when we try to harness the “wisdom of the crowd” from groups comprised of individuals who exhibit a certain kind of epistemic humility in the way they respond to testimonial evidence. I begin by setting out the problem and then make some initial steps toward solving it. The solution I develop is tentative and may not apply in all circumstances, but it promises to alleviate what seems to me to be a (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  40. A Credibility-Backed Norm for Testimony.Matt Weiner - 2023 - Episteme 20 (1):73-85.
    I propose that testimony is subject to a norm that is backed by a credibility sanction: whenever the norm is violated, it is appropriate for the testifier to lose some credibility for their future testimony. This is one of a family of sanction-based norms, where violation of the norm makes it appropriate to lose some power; in this case, the power to induce belief through testimony. The applicability of the credibility norm to testimony follows from the epistemology of testimony, in (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  41. Testimonial Injustice: The Facts of the Matter.Migdalia Arcila-Valenzuela & Andrés Páez - 2022 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology:1-18.
    To verify the occurrence of a singular instance of testimonial injustice three facts must be established. The first is whether the hearer in fact has an identity prejudice of which she may or may not be aware; the second is whether that prejudice was in fact the cause of the unjustified credibility deficit; and the third is whether there was in fact a credibility deficit in the testimonial exchange. These three elements constitute the facts of the matter of testimonial injustice. (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (4 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  42. Trusting scientific experts in an online world.Kenneth Boyd - 2022 - Synthese 200 (1):1-31.
    A perennial problem in social epistemology is the problem of expert testimony, specifically expert testimony regarding scientific issues: for example, while it is important for me to know information pertaining to anthropogenic climate change, vaccine safety, Covid-19, etc., I may lack the scientific background required to determine whether the information I come across is, in fact, true. Without being able to evaluate the science itself, then, I need to find trustworthy expert testifiers to listen to. A major project in social (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (4 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  43. ‘Yo no fui’. Sobre el valor epistémico de la palabra del acusado.Joaquín Casalia - 2022 - Dissertation, Universidad Torcuato di Tella
    En Argentina, el acusado tiene permitido jurídicamente mentir, en el sentido de que no hay ninguna norma que le prohíba hacerlo. Tradicionalmente se considera que este 'derecho a mentir’ es beneficioso para el acusado. En el trabajo argumento que, por el contrario, le genera un profundo daño epistémico e, indirectamente, moral. Dicho permiso inhabilita que sus afirmaciones puedan ser razones para que sus escuchantes –decisores– crean justificadamente en el contenido de lo afirmado. Así, el permiso socava el valor epistémico de (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  44. On testimonial knowledge and its functions.Michel Croce - 2022 - Synthese 200 (2):1-21.
    The problem of explaining how we acquire knowledge via testimony gives rise to a dilemma, according to which any theory must make testimonial knowledge either too hard or too easy, and therefore no adequate account of testimonial knowledge is possible. In recent work, John Greco offers a solution to the dilemma on behalf of anti-reductionism that appeals to Edward Craig’s functionalist epistemology. It is argued that Greco’s solution is flawed, in that his functionalist account provides wrong verdicts of ordinary cases (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (4 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  45. Falsche Autoritäten.Christoph Jäger - 2022 - In Rico Hauswald & Pedro Schmechtig (eds.), Wissensproduktion und Wissenstransfer unter erschwerten Bedingungen. Der Einfluss der Corona-Krise auf die Erzeugung und Vermittlung von Wissen im öffentlichen Diskurs. Freiburg im Breisgau: Alber. pp. 219-243.
  46. Guided by Voices. Moral Testimony, Advice, and Forging a ‘We’. [REVIEW]Gloria Mähringer - 2022 - Philosophical Quarterly 72 (2):523-525.
    Remove from this list   Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  47. Why Think for Yourself?Jonathan Matheson - 2022 - The Philosophers' Magazine 98:26-32.
  48. Mental Imagery and the Epistemology of Testimony.Daniel Munro - 2022 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 52 (4):428-449.
    Mental imagery often occurs during testimonial belief transmission: a testifier often episodically remembers or imagines a scene while describing it, while a listener often imagines that scene as it’s described to her. I argue that getting clear on imagery’s psychological roles in testimonial belief transmission has implications for some fundamental issues in the epistemology of testimony. I first appeal to imagery cases to argue against a widespread “internalist” approach to the epistemology of testimony. I then appeal to the same sort (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  49. Norms of Inquiry, Student-Led Learning, and Epistemic Paternalism.Robert Mark Simpson - 2022 - In Jonathan Matheson & Kirk Lougheed (eds.), Epistemic Autonomy. New York, NY, USA: pp. 95-112.
    Should we implement epistemically paternalistic measures outside of the narrow range of cases, like legal trials, in which their benefits and justifiability seem clear-cut? In this chapter I draw on theories of student-led pedagogy, and Jane Friedman’s work on norms of inquiry, to argue against this prospect. The key contention in the chapter is that facts about an inquirer’s interests and temperament have a bearing on whether it is better for her to, at any given moment, pursue epistemic goods via (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  50. The Hearer’s Conditions for Accepting Testimony.H. C. Winnie Sung - 2022 - In Yong Huang (ed.), Ernest Sosa Encountering Chinese Philosophy. Bloomsbury Academic. pp. 107-118.
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
1 — 50 / 742