How much linguistic understanding is required for testimonial knowledge acquisition? One answer is that, so long as we grasp the content expressed by the speaker, it does not matter if our understanding of it is poor. Call this the ‘Liberal View’ of testimony. This approach looks especially promising when combined with the thesis that we share a public language that makes it easy to grasp the right content. In this paper, I argue that this picture is epistemically problematic. Poor linguistic (...) understanding undermines our ability to recognise evidence and counterevidence for the testimonial content. Because of this, in many cases in which a hearer’s understanding is poor, her resultant testimonial belief will lack sufficient warrant to qualify as knowledge. Given that we often do not possess a sufficiently good understanding of the testimony we consume, I argue that we acquire far less knowledge through testimony than the Liberal View suggests. (shrink)

The epistemology of śabda is one of the main themes in Bhaṭṭa Jayanta’s Nyāyamañjarī, and, in the hypotheses explored in this paper, also the conceptual basis of Jayanta’s textual re-use. The sixth chapter of the Nyāyamañjarī contains a debate between Vaiyākaraṇas and Mīmāṃsakas who, respectively, advocated an holistic or atomistic theory of language. Selected Jayanta’s re-uses from Vyākaraṇa, Mīmāṃsā, and Nyāya sources are here surveyed and analyzed, with a focus on their meaning and on the context. The method of analysis (...) is partially following Moravcsik’s scheme for a classification of citations, as well as Small’s classification by symbolic functions. By re-using texts Jayanta not only imparted authority to his own arguments, but also reassessed the relation of his tradition with other ones. Re-used ideas and words stand for symbols of those authors’ tenets, and those authors represent symbols of their respective traditions. Moreover, by quoting a certain author Jayanta often anointed him with a symbolic status of trustworthy authority, and his statement with a status of śabdapramāṇa. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that the tendency to defer in matters semantic is rationalized by our reliance on the say-so of others for much of what we know about the world. The result, I contend, is a new and distinctly epistemic source of support for the doctrine of attitude anti-individualism.