Speakers offer testimony. They also hedge. This essay offers an account of how hedging makes a difference to testimony. Two components of testimony are considered: how testimony warrants a hearer's attitude, and how testimony changes a speaker's responsibilities. Starting with a norm-based approach to testimony where hearer's beliefs are prima facie warranted because of social norms and speakers acquire responsibility from these same norms, I argue that hedging alters both components simultaneously. It changes which attitudes a hearer is prima facie (...) warranted in forming in response to testimony, and reduces how much responsibility a speaker undertakes in testifying. A consequence of this account is that speakers who hedge for strategic purposes deprive their hearers of warrant for stronger doxastic attitudes. (shrink)

This paper investigates ‘authoritative knowledge’, a neglected species of practical knowledge gained on the basis of exercising practical authority. I argue that, like perceptual knowledge, authoritative knowledge is non-inferential. I then present a broadly reliabilist account of the process by which authority yields knowledge, and use this account to address certain objections.

When should you believe testimony that you receive from your social media feeds? One natural answer is suggested by non-reductionism in the epistemology of testimony. Avoid accepting social media testimony if you have an undefeated defeater for it. Otherwise, you may accept it. I argue that this is too permissive to be an adequate epistemic policy because social media have some characteristics that tend to facilitate the efficacy of misinformation on those platforms. I formulate and defend an alternative epistemic policy (...) for belief on social media, which is inspired by reductionism in the epistemology of testimony. (shrink)

A speaker’s retraction of her own previous testimony serves to defeat the reason for belief provided by her testimony in a distinctive way. In telling an addressee that p, the speaker purports to settle for the addressee the question whether p. In retracting her testimony, the speaker then revokes her settling of this question for the addressee, cancelling the addressee’s entitlement to pass the epistemic buck back to her should the content of her belief be challenged, and this entitlement is (...) cancelled even if the addressee has good reason to believe that the speaker’s retraction is misguided or mistaken. Deferentially believing a speaker and allowing them to settle a theoretical question thus has a distinctive temporal and interpersonal character, requiring the addressee to assume that both she herself and the speaker will continue to do their part in the joint activity that is the addressee’s holding p true. (shrink)