Testimony and inferential justification

Theoria: Revista de Teoría, Historia y Fundamentos de la Ciencia 39 (1):5-22 (2024)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

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.

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 92,907

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Similar books and articles

The Justification of Testimony and Intellectual Virtues.Ruery-Lin Chen - 2018 - Proceedings of the XXIII World Congress of Philosophy 75:55-61.
Monitoring and Anti-Reductionism in the Epistemology of Testimony.Sanford Goldberg & David Henderson - 2006 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 72 (3):600 - 617.
A Critical Introduction to Testimony.Axel Gelfert - 2014 - New York: Bloomsbury Academic.
Social Knowledge and Social Norms.Peter J. Graham - 2018 - In Markos Valaris & Stephen Hetherington (eds.), Knowledge in Contemporary Philosophy. London, UK: Bloomsbury Publishing. pp. 111-138.
Epistemic Internalism and the Challenge from Testimony.Felix Bräuer - 2019 - Rivista Italiana di Filosofia del Linguaggio 1 (13):82-98.
Epistemic buck-passing and the interpersonal view of testimony.Judith Baker & Philip Clark - 2018 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 48 (2):178-199.
Excessive testimony: When less is more.Finnur Dellsén - 2023 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 107 (2):525-540.
Group testimony.Deborah Tollefsen - 2007 - Social Epistemology 21 (3):299 – 311.
Accepting testimony.By Matthew Weiner - 2003 - Philosophical Quarterly 53 (211):256–264.
Accepting Testimony.Matthew Weiner - 2003 - Philosophical Quarterly 53 (211):256 - 264.

Analytics

Added to PP
2024-05-15

Downloads
0

6 months
0

Historical graph of downloads

Sorry, there are not enough data points to plot this chart.
How can I increase my downloads?

Citations of this work

No citations found.

Add more citations

References found in this work

No references found.

Add more references