Epistemology of Testimony

Edited by Stephen Wright (Oxford University)
Assistant editor: Jonathan Reibsamen (Columbia International University)
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  1. Epistemic vice predicts acceptance of Covid-19 misinformation.Marco Meyer, Mark Alfano & Boudewijn De Bruin - 2021
    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 (...)
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  2. 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 (...)
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  3. 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 (...)
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  4. Testimonial Injustice: The Facts of the Matter.Migdalia Arcila-Valenzuela & Andrés Páez - forthcoming - 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. (...)
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  5. 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.
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  6. 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.
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  7. Excessive Testimony: When Less Is More.Finnur Dellsén - forthcoming - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.
    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 (...)
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  8. 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 (...)
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  9. 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 (...)
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  10. 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 (...)
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  11. 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).
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  12. The Role of Assurance in Judgment and Memory.Edward Hinchman - forthcoming - In Sanford Goldberg & Stephen Wright (eds.), Memory and Testimony: New Essays in Epistemology.
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  13. 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.
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  14. 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 (...)
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  15. Making Life More Interesting: Trust, Trustworthiness, and Testimonial Injustice.Aidan McGlynn - forthcoming - Philosophical Psychology.
    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 (...)
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  16. Los problemas probatorios de la injusticia testimonial en el derecho.Andrés Páez & Migdalia Arcila-Valenzuela - forthcoming - Isonomía. Revista de Teoría y Filosofía Del Derecho.
    Resumen: Una de las formas más comunes y menos estudiadas de parcialidad judicial subjetiva es la disminución de la credibilidad otorgada a un testigo debido a un prejuicio identitario implícito del agente judicial. En la epistemología social, este fenómeno ha sido estudiado bajo la rúbrica de la injusticia testimonial. En este ensayo mostramos que para determinar la ocurrencia de un caso de injusticia testimonial en el derecho se deben cumplir tres condiciones que son imposibles de verificar empíricamente y que están (...)
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  17. Aesthetic Testimony and Aesthetic Concepts.Andrea Sauchelli - forthcoming - American Philosophical Quarterly.
    I propose a new account of the limits of aesthetic testimony. One of this new account’s main claims is that, among the kinds of aesthetic cognitive achievements, it is useful to distinguish aesthetic understanding. In particular, I suggest that the aesthetic understanding of X involves an understanding of why X is aesthetically valuable. In turn, aesthetic understanding is essentially connected to the deployment of aesthetic concepts. Given the fine-grained structure of some of these concepts, certain forms of testimony are not (...)
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  18. 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 (...)
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  19. Deference to Experts.Alex Worsnip - forthcoming - In Jonathan Dancy, Ernest Sosa, Matthias Steup & Kurt Sylvan (eds.), A Companion to Epistemology (3rd ed.). 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 (...)
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  20. 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 (...)
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  21. 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 (...)
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  22. 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 (...)
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  23. ‘Yo no fui’. Sobre el valor epistémico de la palabra del acusado.Joaquín Casalia - 2022 - Dissertation,
    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 (...)
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  24. 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 (...)
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  25. 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.
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  26. Iris Murdoch, privacy, and the limits of moral testimony.Cathy Mason - 2022 - European Journal of Philosophy 30 (3):1125-1134.
    Recent discussions of moral testimony have focused on the acceptability of forming beliefs on the basis of moral testimony, but there has been little acknowledgement of the limits to testimony's capacity to convey moral knowledge. In this paper I outline one such limit, drawing on Iris Murdoch's conception of private moral concepts. Such concepts, I suggest, plausibly play an important role in moral thought, and yet moral knowledge expressed in them cannot be testimonially acquired.
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  27. 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 (...)
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  28. 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 (...)
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  29. Second Philosophy and Testimonial Reliability: Philosophy of Science for STEM Students.Frank Cabrera - 2021 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science (3):1-15.
    In this paper, I describe some strategies for teaching an introductory philosophy of science course to Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) students, with reference to my own experience teaching a philosophy of science course in the Fall of 2020. The most important strategy that I advocate is what I call the “Second Philosophy” approach, according to which instructors ought to emphasize that the problems that concern philosophers of science are not manufactured and imposed by philosophers from the outside, but (...)
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  30. Preemptive Authority: The Challenge From Outrageous Expert Judgments.Thomas Grundmann - 2021 - Episteme 18 (3):407-427.
    Typically, expert judgments are regarded by laypeople as highly trustworthy. However, expert assertions that strike the layperson as obviously false or outrageous, seem to give one a perfect reason to dispute that this judgment manifests expertise. In this paper, I will defend four claims. First, I will deliver an argument in support of the preemption view on expert judgments according to which we should not rationally use our own domain-specific reasons in the face of expert testimony. Second, I will argue (...)
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  31. Facing Epistemic Authorities: Where Democratic Ideals and Critical Thinking Mislead Cognition.Thomas Grundmann - 2021 - In Sven Bernecker, Amy K. Flowerree & Thomas Grundmann (eds.), The Epistemology of Fake News. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    Disrespect for the truth, the rise of conspiracy thinking, and a pervasive distrust in experts are widespread features of the post-truth condition in current politics and public opinion. Among the many good explanations of these phenomena there is one that is only rarely discussed: that something is wrong with our deeply entrenched intellectual standards of (i) using our own critical thinking without any restriction and (ii) respecting the judgment of every rational agent as epistemically relevant. In this paper, I will (...)
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  32. Articulating Understanding: A Phenomenological Approach to Testimony on Gendered Violence.Charlotte Knowles - 2021 - International Journal of Philosophical Studies 29 (4):448-472.
    ABSTRACT Testimony from victims of gendered violence is often wrongly disbelieved. This paper explores a way to address this problem by developing a phenomenological approach to testimony. Guided by the concept of ‘disclosedness’, a tripartite analysis of testimony as an affective, embodied, communicative act is developed. Affect indicates how scepticism may arise through the social moods that often attune agents to victims’ testimony. The embodiment of meaning suggests testimony should not be approached as an assertion, but as a process of (...)
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  33. Bystander Omissions and Accountability for Testimonial Injustice.J. Y. Lee - 2021 - International Journal of Philosophical Studies 29 (4):519-536.
    Literature on testimonial injustice and ways that perpetrators might combat it have flourished since Miranda Fricker’s ground-breaking work on testimonial injustice. Less attention has been given, however, to the role of bystanders. In this paper, I examine the accountability that bystanders may have for their omissions to redress testimonial injustice. I argue that bystander accountability applies in cases where it is opportune for bystanders to intervene, and if they are also sufficiently equipped and able to redress the testimonial injustice. Moreover, (...)
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  34. Anticipatory Epistemic Injustice.Ji-Young Lee - 2021 - Tandf: Social Epistemology 35 (6):564–576.
    Epistemic injustices are wrongs that agents can suffer in their capacity as knowers. In this article, I offer a conceptualisation of a phenomenon I call anticipatory epistemic injustice, which I claim is a distinct and particularly pernicious type of epistemic injustice worthy of independent analysis. I take anticipatory epistemic injustice to consist in the wrongs that agents can suffer as a result of anticipated challenges in their process of taking up testimony-sharing opportunities. I distinguish my account from paradigmatic cases of (...)
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  35. Moral Testimony as Higher Order Evidence.Marcus Lee, Jon Robson & Neil Sinclair - 2021 - In Michael Klenk (ed.), Higher-Order Evidence and Moral Epistemology. Routledge.
    Are the circumstances in which moral testimony serves as evidence that our judgement-forming processes are unreliable the same circumstances in which mundane testimony serves as evidence that our mundane judgement-forming processes are unreliable? In answering this question, we distinguish two possible roles for testimony: (i) providing a legitimate basis for a judgement, (ii) providing (‘higher-order’) evidence that a judgement-forming process is unreliable. We explore the possibilities for a view according to which moral testimony does not, in contrast to mundane testimony (...)
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  36. Testimony, Faith and Humility.Finlay Malcolm - 2021 - Religious Studies 57 (3):466-483.
    It is sometimes claimed that faith is a virtue. To what extent faith is a virtue depends on what faith is. One construal of faith, which has been popular in both recent and historical work on faith, is that faith is a matter of taking oneself to have been spoken to by God and of trusting this purported divine testimony. In this paper, I argue that when faith is understood in this way, for faith to be virtuous then it must (...)
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  37. Epistemic Injustice from Afar: Rethinking the Denial of Armenian Genocide.Imge Oranlı - 2021 - Social Epistemology 35 (2): 120-132.
    Genocide denialism is an understudied topic in the epistemic injustice scholarship; so are epistemic relations outside of the Euro-American context. This article proposes to bring the literature into contact with an underexplored topic in a ‘distant’ setting: Turkey. Here, I explore the ethical and epistemological implications of the Turkish denial of the Armenian genocide as a pervasive and systematic epistemic harm. Using an interdisciplinary methodology, I argue that a philosophical exploration of genocide denialism requires examining the role of institutions and (...)
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  38. More on Normic Support and the Criminal Standard of Proof.Martin Smith - 2021 - Mind 130 (519):943-960.
    In this paper I respond to Marcello Di Bello’s criticisms of the ‘normic account’ of the criminal standard of proof. In so doing, I further elaborate on what the normic account predicts about certain significant legal categories of evidence, including DNA and fingerprint evidence and eyewitness identifications.
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  39. Time Sensitivity and Acceptance of Testimony.Nader Alsamaani - 2020 - Organon F: Medzinárodný Časopis Pre Analytickú Filozofiu 27 (4):422–436.
    Time sensitivity seems to affect our intuitive evaluation of the reasonable risk of fallibility in testimonies. All things being equal, we tend to be less demanding in accepting time sensitive testimonies as opposed to time insensitive testimonies. This paper considers this intuitive response to testimonies as a strategy of acceptance. It argues that the intuitive strategy, which takes time sensitivity into account, is epistemically superior to two adjacent strategies that do not: the undemanding strategy adopted by non-reductionists and the cautious (...)
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  40. Moral Understanding and Cooperative Testimony.Kenneth Boyd - 2020 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 50 (1):18-33.
    It is has been argued that there is a problem with moral testimony: testimony is deferential, and basing judgments and actions on deferentially acquired knowledge prevents them from having moral worth. What morality perhaps requires of us, then, is that we understand why a proposition is true, but this is something that cannot be acquired through testimony. I argue here that testimony can be both deferential as well as cooperative, and that one can acquire moral understanding through cooperative testimony. The (...)
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  41. The Ethics and Epistemology of Trust.J. Adam Carter, and & Mona Simion - 2020 - Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Trust is a topic of longstanding philosophical interest. It is indispensable to every kind of coordinated human activity, from sport to scientific research. Even more, trust is necessary for the successful dissemination of knowledge, and by extension, for nearly any form of practical deliberation and planning. Without trust, we could achieve few of our goals and would know very little. Despite trust’s fundamental importance in human life, there is substantial philosophical disagreement about what trust is, and further, how trusting is (...)
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  42. Moral Understanding, Testimony, and Moral Exemplarity.Michel Croce - 2020 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 23 (2):373-389.
    While possessing moral understanding is agreed to be a core epistemic and moral value, it remains a matter of dispute whether it can be acquired via testimony and whether it involves an ability to engage in moral reasoning. This paper addresses both issues with the aim of contributing to the current debates on moral understanding in moral epistemology and virtue ethics. It is argued that moral epistemologists should stop appealing to the argument from the transmissibility of moral understanding to make (...)
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  43. Að treysta sérfræðingum [English: "Trusting Experts: What, When, and Why?"].Finnur Dellsén - 2020 - Ritið 20 (3):235-258.
    English abstract: In order for experts to serve as authorities in our society, people need to trust them when they make claims that fall within their domains of expertise. However, it also seems important for people to think independently and critically about the experts‘ conclusions – one shouldn‘t believe everything one is told. In this paper, I examine this tension with the aim of answering four closely related questions: (1) What is it to trust experts? (2) Why do we often (...)
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  44. Epistemic internalism and testimonial justification.Jonathan Egeland - 2020 - Episteme 17 (4):458-474.
    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 (...)
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  45. Group Testimony: Defending a Reductionist View.Domingos Faria - 2020 - Logos and Episteme 11 (3):283-304.
    Our aim in this paper is to defend the reductionist (or deflationist) view on group testimony from the attacks of divergence arguments. We will begin by presenting how divergence arguments can challenge the reductionist view. However, we will argue that these arguments are not decisive to rule out the reductionist view; for, these arguments have false premises, assuming dubious epistemic principles that testimony cannot generate knowledge and understanding. The final part of this paper will be devoted to presenting the advantages (...)
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  46. Can Artificial Entities Assert?Ori Freiman & Boaz Miller - 2020 - In Sanford C. Goldberg (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Assertion. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. pp. 415-436.
    There is an existing debate regarding the view that technological instruments, devices, or machines can assert ‎or testify. A standard view in epistemology is that only humans can testify. However, the notion of quasi-‎testimony acknowledges that technological devices can assert or testify under some conditions, without ‎denying that humans and machines are not the same. Indeed, there are four relevant differences between ‎humans and instruments. First, unlike humans, machine assertion is not imaginative or playful. Second, ‎machine assertion is prescripted and (...)
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  47. Critical Review of Richard Moran, The Exchange of Words. [REVIEW]Peter Graham - 2020 - Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2.
    Moran's book is sure to be widely read. It does more to bring to light the moral psychology characteristic of tellings understood as assurances than any other work I know. His book raises challenges for other views, introduces interesting and evocative distinctions, and puts together in one place Moran's sustained reflections on the way we provide others a distinctive kind of reason for belief though normatively binding ourselves though the exchange of words. I agree that assurances and acceptances in Moran's (...)
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  48. The Function of Assertion and Social Norms.Peter Graham - 2020 - In Sanford Goldberg (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Assertion. New York, USA: Oxford University Press. pp. 727-748.
    A proper function of an entity is a beneficial effect that helps explain the persistence of the entity. Proper functions thereby arise through feedback mechanisms with beneficial effects as inputs and persistence as outputs. We continue to make assertions because they benefit speakers by benefiting speakers. Hearers benefit from true information. Speakers benefit by influencing hearer belief. If hearers do not benefit, they will not form beliefs in response to assertions. Speakers can then only maintain influence by providing true information, (...)
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  49. Transmitting Understanding and Know-How.Stephen Grimm - 2020 - In Stephen Hetherington & Nicholas D. Smith (eds.), What the Ancients Offer to Contemporary Epistemology. New York, USA: Routledge.
    Among contemporary epistemologists and scholars of ancient philosophy, one often hears that transmitting propositional knowledge by testimony is usually easy and straightforward, but transmitting understanding and know-how by testimony is usually difficult or simply impossible. Further provocative conclusions are then sometimes drawn from these claims: for instance, that know-how and understanding are not types of propositional knowledge. In contrast, I argue that transmitting propositional knowledge is sometimes easy and sometimes hard, just as transmitting know how and understanding is sometimes easy (...)
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  50. Assertion and Testimony.Edward Hinchman - 2020 - In Sanford Goldberg (ed.), Oxford Handbook of Assertion. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    [The version of this paper published by Oxford online in 2019 was not copy-edited and has some sense-obscuring typos. I have posted a corrected (but not the final published) version on this site. The version published in print in 2020 has these corrections.] Which is more fundamental, assertion or testimony? Should we understand assertion as basic, treating testimony as what you get when you add an interpersonal addressee? Or should we understand testimony as basic, treating mere assertion -- assertion without (...)
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