Children learn and come to know things about the world at a very young age through the testimony of their caregivers. The challenge comes in explaining how children acquire such knowledge. Since children indiscriminately receive testimony, their testimony-based beliefs seem unreliable, and, consequently, should fail to qualify as knowledge. In this paper I discuss some attempted explanations by Sandy Goldberg and John Greco and argue that they fail. I go on to suggest that what generates the problem is a hidden (...) assumption that the standards for testimonial knowledge are invariant between children and cognitively mature adults. I propose that in order to adequately explain how children acquire testimonial knowledge we should reject this hidden assumption. I then argue that understanding knowledge in terms of intellectual skills gives us a plausible framework to do so. (shrink)

In this paper we address the question of how it can be possible for a non-expert to acquire justified true belief from expert testimony. We discuss reductionism and epistemic trust as theoretical approaches to answer this question and present a novel solution that avoids major problems of both theoretical options: Performative Expert Testimony (PET). PET draws on a functional account of expertise insofar as it takes the expert’s visibility as a good informant capable to satisfy informational needs as equally important (...) as her specific skills and knowledge. We explain how PET generates justification for testimonial belief, which is at once assessable for non-experts and maintains the division of epistemic labor between them and the experts. Thereafter we defend PET against two objections. First, we point out that the non-expert’s interest in acquiring widely assertable true beliefs and the expert’s interest in maintaining her status as a good informant counterbalances the relativist account of justification at work in PET. Second, we show that with regard to the interests at work in testimonial exchanges between experts and non-experts, PET yields a better explanation of knowledge-acquisition from expert testimony than externalist accounts of justification such as reliabilism. As our arguments ground in a conception of knowledge, which conceives of belief-justification as a declarative speech act, throughout the rearmost sections of this paper we also indicate to how such a conception is operationalized in PET. (shrink)

According to so-called “credit views of knowledge,” knowledge is an achievement of an epistemic agent, something for which an agent is creditable or responsible. One influential criticism of the credit view of knowledge holds that the credit view has difficulty making sense of knowledge acquired from testimony. As Jennifer Lackey has argued, in many ordinary cases of the acquisition of testimonial knowledge, if anyone deserves credit for the truth of the audience’s belief it is the testimonial speaker rather than the (...) audience, and so it isn’t clear that testimonial knowers are appropriately creditable for the truth of their beliefs. I argue that the credit view of knowledge can be saved from Lackey’s objection by focusing on the way in which testimonial knowledge is the result of an essentially social epistemic ability. While there is indeed a sense in which a testimonial knower is only partially epistemically responsible for her testimonial belief, this is consistent with the truth of her belief being creditable to her in another sense. The truth of her belief is most saliently explained by, and hence is fully creditable to, an essentially social epistemic ability, an ability that is only partially seated in the knowing subject. (shrink)

In this paper I formulate the thesis of the Division of Epistemic Labor as a thesis of epistemic dependence, illustrate several ways in which individual subjects are epistemically dependent on one or more of the members of their community in the process of knowledge acquisition, and draw conclusions about the cognitively distributed nature of some knowledge acquisition.

The claim that epistemic oughts stem from the “role” of believer is widely discussed in the epistemological discourse. This claim seems to stem from the common view that, in some sense, epistemic norms derive from what it is to be a believer. Against this view, I argue that there is no such thing as a “role” of believer. But there is a role of knower, and this is the role to which some epistemic norms—epistemic role oughts—are attached. Once we conceive (...) of epistemic role oughts as attaching to the role of knower (and not the “role” of believer) we can better understand the nature of epistemic obligation and doxastic control. In advancing a new epistemic role ought approach that recognizes knowers as the subjects of epistemic role oughts, I explain why many epistemic oughts—epistemic role oughts—have normative force and presuppose voluntary control. (shrink)

In recent years, philosophers and psychologists have criticized character- or virtue-based normative theories on the basis that human behavior and cognition depend more on situation than on traits of character. This set of criticisms, which initially aimed at broadly Aristotelian virtue theories in ethics, has expanded to target a wide range of approaches in both ethics and, recently, epistemology. In this essay, I draw on the works of Maria Montessori to defend her conception of character and particularly of intellectual virtue (...) in the light of situationist objections. I start with an overview of the situationist challenge before turning to some reasons to think that Montessori’s virtue epistemology might be susceptible to it. I then offer a brief discussion of Montessori’s approach to character. After laying out two ways that Montessori, like recent conservative defenses of virtue epistemology, deflates the significance of situationist findings, I show some ways that Montessori’s virtue epistemology resembles so-called “accommodationist” responses to situationism. (shrink)

Human beings are promiscuously social creatures, and contemporary epistemologists are increasingly becoming aware that this shapes the ways in which humans process information. This awareness has tended to restrict itself, however, to testimony amongst isolated dyads. As scientific practice ably illustrates, information-processing can be spread over a vast social network. In this essay, a credit theory of knowledge is adapted to account for the normative features of strongly distributed cognition. A typical credit theory analyzes knowledge as an instance of obtaining (...) success because of or through the ability of the individual knower. The extended credit theory developed here broadens this framework so as to accommodate team-like epistemic achievements. The extended credit theory is then contrasted with some similar proposals given from within a process reliabilist framework. Once one isolates pairs of cases of distributed cognition in which there is a difference between sheer reliability and reliability grounded in ability, one can see that the extended credit theory maps the normative terrain better than the alternatives. (shrink)