It is often suggested that we are equipped with a set of cognitive tools that help us to filter out unreliable testimony. But are these tools effective? I answer this question in two steps. Firstly, I argue that they are not real-time effective. The process of filtering, which takes place simultaneously with or right after language comprehension, does not prevent a particular hearer on a particular occasion from forming beliefs based on false testimony. Secondly, I argue that they are long-term (...) effective. Some hearers sometimes detect false testimony, which increases speakers’ incentives for honesty and stabilizes the practice of human communication in which deception is risky and costly. In short, filtering prevents us from forming a large number of beliefs based on false testimony, not by turning each of us into a high-functioning polygraph but by turning the social environment of human communication into one in which such polygraphs are not required. Finally, I argue that these considerations support strong anti-reductionism about testimonial entitlement. (shrink)

English summary: This paper engages with a tradition in Icelandic philosophy of theorizing about critical thinking. The central thesis of the paper is that critical thinking should not be identified with scientific thinking, since scientific research is often (and inevitably so) based on a kind of epistemic trust in other scientists' testimony that is incompatible with critical thinking. The paper also criticizes the idea that critical thinking should be associated with any of Charles Peirce's four ways of forming beliefs in (...) "The Fixation of Belief". (shrink)

People have become suspicious of authority, including epistemic authorities, i.e., knowledge experts, even on matters individuals are unqualified to adjudicate. This is problematic since most of our knowledge comes from trusting a speaker—whether scholars reading experts, students listening to teachers, children obeying their parents, or pedestrians inquiring of strangers—such that the knowledge transmitted is rarely personally verified. Despite the recent development of social epistemology and theories of testimony, this is not a new problem. Ancient and Medieval philosophers largely took it (...) for granted that most human knowledge primarily comes from listening to a trustworthy speaker whose virtuous character serves to mitigate against the twin concerns of inaccuracy and dishonesty. Thus, unlike contemporary Social Epistemology, few testimonial theories were explicitly laid out despite the crucial role testimony plays throughout a wide range of topics and teachings. To date, the working theory of testimony underpinning the works of medieval philosophers are just now being codified. This is particularly relevant for the Abrahamic faiths since they originate with testimony from God himself. The goal of this dissertation is to explore how the generation and transmission of religious knowledge appears in an exemplary thinker from each faith: Saadya Gaon of Judaism, al-Ghazālī of Islam, and Thomas Aquinas of Christianity. While not contemporaries, these exemplars are theological philosophers who are like-minded in their desire to maintain an orthodox faith while possessing philosophical approaches to truth. Thus, they maintained sophisticated epistemological theories of generation and transmission within their own religious contexts. Cataloguing these medieval testimonial theories reveals a historical incongruity with the current contemporary concept of testimony and its frameworks. Based on the testimonial theories of these three thinkers, I argue for a "transhistorical" concept of testimony that does not presume an evidentialist framework to account for pre-modern theories of testimony which predominantly rely on virtue theoretic frameworks. To test the proposed neutral framework, I offer a virtue epistemological account of testimony in which trust is not an intellectual virtue, but the intellectual aspect of the historic virtue of autonomy. I argue that intellectual autonomy and trust are inversely related in one's interactions with authority. (shrink)

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 (...) normatively constrained and best theorized about in relation to other things we value. This entry is divided into three sections, which explore key (and sometimes interconnected) ethical and epistemological themes in the philosophy of trust: (1) The Nature of Trust; (2) The Normativity of Trust, and (3) The Value of Trust. (shrink)

Science communication via testimony requires a certain level of trust. But in the context of ideologically-entangled scientific issues, trust is in short supply—particularly when the issues are politically ‘entangled’. In such cases, cultural values are better predictors than scientific literacy for whether agents trust the publicly-directed claims of the scientific community. In this paper, we argue that a common way of thinking about scientific literacy—as knowledge of particular scientific facts or concepts—ought to give way to a second-order understanding of science (...) as a process as a more important notion for the public’s trust of science. (shrink)

Journalism and media studies lack robust theoretical concepts for studying journalistic knowledge ‎generation. More specifically, conceptual challenges attend the emergence of big data and ‎algorithmic sources of journalistic knowledge. A family of frameworks apt to this challenge is ‎provided by “social epistemology”: a young philosophical field which regards society’s participation ‎in knowledge generation as inevitable. Social epistemology offers the best of both worlds for ‎journalists and media scholars: a thorough familiarity with biases and failures of obtaining ‎knowledge, and a strong (...) orientation toward best practices in the realm of knowledge-acquisition ‎and truth-seeking. This paper articulates the lessons of social epistemology for two central nodes of ‎knowledge-acquisition in contemporary journalism: human-mediated knowledge and technology-‎mediated knowledge. ‎. (shrink)

The scientific community, we hold, often provides society with knowledge—that the HIV virus causes AIDS, that anthropogenic climate change is underway, that the MMR vaccine is safe. Some deny that we have this knowledge, however, and work to undermine it in others. It has been common to refer to such agents as “denialists”. At first glance, then, denialism appears to be a form of skepticism. But while we know that various denialist strategies for suppressing belief are generally effective, little is (...) known about which strategies are most effective. We see this as an important first step toward their remediation. This paper leverages the approximate comparison to various forms of philosophical skepticism to design an experimental test of the efficacy of four broad strategies of denial at suppressing belief in specific scientific claims. Our results suggest that assertive strategies are more effective at suppressing belief than questioning strategies. (shrink)

Explaining phenomena is a primary goal of science. Consequently, it is unsurprising that gaining a proper understanding of the nature of explanation is an important goal of science education. In order to properly understand explanation, however, it is not enough to simply consider theories of the nature of explanation. Properly understanding explanation requires grasping the relation between explanation and understanding, as well as how explanations can lead to scientific knowledge. This article examines the nature of explanation, its relation to understanding, (...) and how explanations are used to generate scientific knowledge via inferences to the best explanation. Studying these features and applications of explanation not only provides insight into a concept that is important for science education in its own right, but also sheds light on an aspect of recent debates concerning the so-called consensus view of nature of science (NOS). Once the relation between explanation, understanding, and knowledge is clear, it becomes apparent that science is unified in important ways. Seeing this unification provides some support for thinking that there are general features of NOS of the sort proposed by the consensus view and that teaching about these general features of NOS should be a goal of science education. (shrink)

Much of what we learn from talking and listening does not qualify as testimonial knowledge: we can learn a great deal from other people without simply accepting what they say as being true. In this article, I examine the ways in which we acquire skills or knowledge how from our interactions with other people, and I discuss whether there is a useful notion of testimonial knowledge how.Keywords: Knowledge how; Practical knowledge; Tacit knowledge; Testimony; Skills; Assertion.

According to some, taking moral testimony is a potentially decent way to exercise one's moral agency. According to others, it amounts to a failure to live up to minimal standards of moral worth. What's the issue? Is it conceptual or empirical? Is it epistemological or moral? Is there a ‘puzzle’ of moral testimony; or are there many, or none? I argue that there is no distinctive puzzle of moral testimony. The question of its legitimacy is as much a moral or (...) political as an epistemological question. Its answer is as much a matter of contingent empirical fact as a matter of a priori necessity. In the background is a mixture of normative and descriptive issues, including the value of autonomy, the nature of legitimate authority, and who to trust. (shrink)

A view of knowledge—what I call the "Deserving Credit View of Knowledge" —found in much of the recent epistemological literature, particularly among so-called virtue epistemologists, centres around the thesis that knowledge is something for which a subject deserves credit. Indeed, this is said to be the central difference between those true beliefs that qualify as knowledge and those that are true merely by luck—the former, unlike the latter, are achievements of the subject and are thereby creditable to her. Moreover, it (...) is often further noted that deserving credit is what explains the additional value that knowledge has over merely lucky true belief. In this paper, I argue that the general conception of knowledge found in the DCVK is fundamentally incorrect. In particular, I show that deserving credit cannot be what distinguishes knowledge from merely lucky true belief since knowledge is not something for which a subject always deserves credit. (shrink)

Modern sovereignty is anthropocentric, constituted and organized by reference to human beings alone. Although a metaphysical assumption, anthropocentrism is of immense practical import, enabling modern states to command loyalty and resources from their subjects in pursuit of political projects. It has limits, however, which are brought clearly into view by the authoritative taboo on taking UFOs seriously. UFOs have never been systematically investigated by science or the state, because it is assumed to be known that none are extraterrestrial. Yet in (...) fact this is not known, which makes the UFO taboo puzzling given the ET possibility. Drawing on the work of Giorgio Agamben, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida, the puzzle is explained by the functional imperatives of anthropocentric sovereignty, which cannot decide a UFO exception to anthropocentrism while preserving the ability to make such a decision. The UFO can be "known" only by not asking what it is. (shrink)

We often prefer non-deferential belief to deferential belief. In the last twenty years, epistemology has seen a surge of sympathetic interest in testimony as a source of knowledge. We are urged to abandon ‘epistemic individualism’ and the ideal of the ‘autonomous knower’ in favour of ‘social epistemology’. In this connection, you might think that a preference for non-deferential belief is a manifestation of vicious individualism, egotism, or egoism. I shall call this the selfishness challenge to preferring non-deferential belief. The aim (...) of this paper is to meet the selfishness challenge by arguing that non-deferential belief is socially valuable. (shrink)

A natural view of testimony holds that a source's statements provide one with evidence about what the source believes, which in turn provides one with evidence about what is true. But some theorists have gone further and developed a broadly analogous view of memory. According to this view, which this essay calls the “diary model,” one's memory ordinarily serves as a means for one's present self to gain evidence about one's past judgments, and in turn about the truth. This essay (...) rejects the diary model's analogy between memory and testimony from one's former self, arguing first that memory and a diary differ with respect to their psychological roles, and second that this psychological difference underwrites important downstream epistemic differences. The resulting view stands opposed to prominent discussions of memory and testimony, which either, like the diary model, treat memory by analogy to what we naively wish to say about testimony, or which instead attempt to extend to testimony the epistemically preservative role of memory. (shrink)

There is a social or collective sense of ‘knowledge’, as used, for example, in the phrase ‘the growth of scientific knowledge’. In this paper I show that social knowledge does not supervene on facts about what individuals know, nor even what they believe or intend, or any combination of these or other mental states. Instead I develop the idea that social knowing is an analogue to individual knowing, where the analogy focuses on the functional role of social and individual knowing.

This paper suggests a new way of analysing testimony. The starting point of the analysis is ‘epistemological communitarianism’. This is the view that communities, rather than individuals, are the primary bearers of knowledge. The new perspective is developed through a discussion of four issues: the scope of testimony; the role of inferences in the reception and evaluation of testimony; the possibility of a global justification of testimony; and the question of whether testimony is a generative source of knowledge or a (...) mere means of transmission of already existing knowledge. The last-mentioned issue is given special prominence. It is argued that testimony is a generative source of knowledge.Author Keywords: Testimony; Communitarianism; Epistemology; Trust; Sociology of knowledge. (shrink)

This paper considers how we decide whether to believe what we are told. Inference to the Best Explanation, a popular general account of non-demonstrative reasoning, is applied to this task. The core idea of this application is that we believe what we are told when the truth of what we are told would figure in the best explanation of the fact that we were told it. We believe the fact uttered when it is part of the best explanation of the (...) fact of utterance. Having provided some articulation of this account of testimonial inference, the paper goes on to consider whether the account is informative and whether it is plausible. (shrink)

This essay argues that techniques for assessing testimonial credibility were well established in English legal contexts before they appeared in English natural philosophy. ‘Matters of fact’ supported by testimony referred to human actions and events before the concept was applied to natural phenomena. The article surveys English legal views about testimony and argues that the criteria for credible testimony in both legal and scientific venues were not limited to those of gentle status. Natural philosophers became concerned with testimony when they (...) shifted their attention from universal statements about nature to particular natural and experimental events. Testimony thus became important in the construction of natural and experimental histories constructed by English naturalists. The shift to a more Baconian approach to natural investigation, itself shaped in part by legal concepts and practice, made it possible for members of the Royal Society to adopt an already familiar and societally approved approach to testimony. However, the essay also suggests how the use of scientific instruments and the desire to avoid the adversarial processes of the law modified legal conditions for fact determination, and made it possible for later generations to associate the concept of fact, supported by credible testimony, with the natural rather than the human sciences.Author Keywords: Natural history; Natural philosophy; Testimony; Credibility; Science and law. (shrink)

The dismissive attitude of intellectuals toward conspiracy theorists is considered and given some justification. It is argued that intellectuals are entitled to an attitude of prima facie skepticism toward the theories propounded by conspiracy theorists, because conspiracy theorists have an irrational tendency to continue to believe in conspiracy theories, even when these take on the appearance of forming the core of degenerating research program. It is further argued that the pervasive effect of the "fundamental attribution error" can explain the behavior (...) of such conspiracy theorists. A rival approach due to Brian Keeley, which involves the criticism of a subclass of conspiracy theories on epistemic grounds, is considered and found to be inadequate. Key Words: conspiracy • conspiracy theories • conspiracy theorizing. (shrink)

A bi-level account of trust is developed and defended, one with relevance in ethics as well as epistemology. The proposed account of trust—on which trusting is modelled within a virtue-theoretic framework as a performance-type with an aim—distinguishes between two distinct levels of trust, apt and convictive, that take us beyond previous assessments of its nature, value, and relationship to risk assessment. While Ernest Sosa (2009; 2015; 2017), in particular, has shown how a performance normativity model may be fruitfully applied to (...) belief, my objective is to apply this kind of model in a novel and principled way to trust. I conclude by outlining some of the key advantages of the performance-theoretic bi-level account of trust defended over more traditional univocal proposals. (shrink)

The use of the term -˜fake news’ has recently become widespread; however, research on fake news is limited. This research intends to increase understanding of how users of social networking sites determine if they should confirm the validity of news content. Grounded in research on the epistemology of testimony, we develop and test a research model based on perceptions related to news authors, news sharers, and users to test verification behaviors of users. The findings indicate that social tie variety, perceived (...) cognitive homogeneity, trust in network, fake news awareness, perceived media credibility and intention to share influence an individual’s news verification behavior. We discuss the implications of our findings for SNS designers as well as users. We also integrate the theoretical perspectives of trust and testimony and demonstrate their value for explicating verification behaviors. (shrink)

Most philosophers agree that abduction (in the sense of Inference to the Best Explanation) is a type of inference that is frequently employed, in some form or other, both in everyday and in scientific reasoning. However, the exact form as well as the normative status of abduction are still matters of controversy. This entry contrasts abduction with other types of inference; points at prominent uses of it, both in and outside philosophy; considers various more or less precise statements of it; (...) discusses its normative status; and highlights possible connections between abduction and Bayesian confirmation theory. (shrink)

A epistemologia do testemunho tem reacendido forte interesse entre a classe dos atuais epistemólogos. Tem sido redescoberta a sua indispensabilidade epistêmica e reassumida a posição de que o testemunho é uma fonte de crenças penetrante e natural, no qual muitas das crenças nele fundamentadas constituem conhecimento e estão justificadas. Reducionistas e antirreducionistas se alternam, repetidamente, para explicar o papel epistêmico do testemunho na justificação da crença testemunhal, gerando um acirrado debate na epistemologia contemporânea. Advogada do Reducionismo local, Elizabeth Fricker refuta (...) a relevância da justificação com base no testemunho para crença testemunhal. Com base nisso, este artigo propõe apresentar algumas críticas aos argumentos de refutação reducionista de Fricker quanto à possibilidade epistêmica do testemunho.: The epistemology of testimony has rekindled strong reigniting interest among the train of current epistemologists. Its epistemic indispensability has been unearthed anew and the importance that the testimony is a natural and pervasive source of beliefs has been recaptured as well, considering that many of the beliefs based on itself constitute knowledge and are justified. Reductionists and Anti-Reductionists alternate, repeatedly, explaining the epistemic role of testimony in justification of testimonial belief, generating a heated debate in contemporary epistemology. Reductionism local lawyer, Elizabeth Fricker, refutes the relevance of justification with testimony-based to testimonial belief. Based on that, this paper aims at presenting some criticism to the reductive refutation of Fricker’s arguments as to the epistemic possibility of testimony. Keywords : Epistemology of testimony. Testimonial justification. Local Reductionism. Anti-Reductionism. Inferential Support. (shrink)

Some philosophers deny the existence of composite material objects. Other philosophers hold that whenever there are some things, they compose something. The purpose of this paper is to scrutinize an objection to these revisionary views: the objection that nihilism and universalism are both unacceptably uncharitable because each of them implies that a great deal of what we ordinarily believe is false. Our main business is to show how nihilism and universalism can be defended against the objection. A secondary point is (...) that universalism is harder to defend than nihilism. (shrink)

Our beliefs utilize various sources: perception, memory, induction, etc. We trust these sources to provide reliable information about the world around us. My dissertation investigates how this trust could be justified. Chapter one introduces background material. I argue that justification rather than knowledge is of primary epistemological importance, discuss the internalism/externalism debate, and introduce an evidentialist thesis that provides a starting point/framework for epistemological theorizing. Chapter two introduces a puzzle concerning justification. Can a belief source provide justification absent prior justification (...) for believing it's reliable? Any answer appears to either make justifying the reliability of a source intellectually unsatisfying or all together impossible. Chapter three considers and rejects a plethora of proposed solutions to our puzzle. Investigating these solutions illustrates the need to further investigate evidence, evidence possession, and evidential support. Chapter four discusses the metaphysics of evidence. I argue that evidence always consists of a set of facts and that fact-proposition pairs stand in confirmation relations isomorphic to those holding between pairs of propositions. Chapter five argues that justification requires what I call actually connected possession of supporting evidence: a subject must be aware of supporting evidence and of the support relation itself. Chapter six argues that the relation constitutive of a set of facts being justificatory evidence is a sui generis and irreducible relation that is knowable a priori. Chapter seven begins by showing how Richard Fumerton's acquaintance theory meets the constraints on a theory of justification laid down in previous chapters. I modify the theory so as to: make room for fallible foundational justification, and allow inferential justification absent higher-order beliefs about evidential connections. Chapter eight applies the developed theory of justification to our initial puzzle. I show how my modified acquaintance theory is in a unique position to vindicate the idea that necessarily a source provides a person with justification only if she is aware of evidence for the reliability of that source. However, this awareness of evidence for a source's reliability falls short of a justified belief and thereby avoids impalement from our dilemma's skeptical horn. (shrink)

We show that the contemporary debate surrounding the question “What is the norm of assertion?” presupposes what we call the quantitative view, i.e. the view that this question is best answered by determining how much epistemic support is required to warrant assertion. We consider what Jennifer Lackey ( 2010 ) has called cases of isolated second-hand knowledge and show—beyond what Lackey has suggested herself—that these cases are best understood as ones where a certain type of understanding , rather than knowledge, (...) constitutes the required epistemic credential to warrant assertion. If we are right that understanding (and not just knowledge) is the epistemic norm for a restricted class of assertions, then this straightforwardly undercuts not only the widely supposed quantitative view, but also a more general presupposition concerning the universalisability of some norm governing assertion—the presumption (almost entirely unchallenged since Williamson’s 1996 paper) that any epistemic norm that governs some assertions should govern assertions—as a class of speech act—uniformly. (shrink)

Intuitions are widely assumed to play an important evidential role in ethical inquiry. In this paper I critically discuss a recently influential claim that the epistemological credentials of ethical intuitions are undermined by their causal pedigree and functional role. I argue that this claim is exaggerated. In the course of doing so I argue that the challenge to ethical intuitions embodied in this claim should be understood not only as a narrowly epistemological challenge, but also as a substantially ethical one. (...) I argue that this fact illuminates the epistemology of ethical intuitions. (shrink)

Virtually everything we know depends in some way or other on the testimony of others—what we eat, how things work, where we go, even who we are. We do not, after all, perceive firsthand the preparation of the ingredients in many of our meals, or the construction of the devices we use to get around the world, or the layout of our planet, or our own births and familial histories. These are all things we are told. Indeed, subtracting from our (...) lives the information that we possess via testimony leaves them barely recognizable. Scientific discoveries, battles won and lost, geographical developments, customs and traditions of distant lands—all of these facts would be completely lost to us. It is, therefore, no surprise that the importance of testimony, both epistemological and practical, is nearly universally accepted. Less consensus, however, is found when questions about the nature and extent of our dependence on the word of others arise. Is our justified reliance on testimony fundamentally basic, for instance, or is it ultimately reducible to perception, memory, and reason? Is trust, or some related interpersonal feature of our social interaction with one another, essential to the acquisition of beliefs that are testimonially justified? Is testimonial knowledge necessarily acquired through transmission from speaker to hearer? Can testimony generate epistemic features in its own right? These are the questions that will be taken up in this paper and, as will become clear, their answers have far-reaching consequences for how we understand our place in the social world. (shrink)

This article proposes that a general theory of assessment of historical testimony should do justice to the long tradition of adjudication in accordance with maxims of reliability and competence. I argue that an explanatory genealogical theory (along lines first adumbrated by Charles Seignobos) satisfies this condition, and that it has further notable virtues: respect for the strengths of rival theories, regard for the links between adjudication of testimony and other basic procedures of historical inquiry, and the promise of profitable lines (...) of investigation. (shrink)

Special issue. With contributions by Luc Bovens and Stephan Hartmann, David Glass, Keith Lehrer, Erik Olsson, Tomoji Shogenji, Mark Siebel, and Paul Thagard.

Inference to the Best Explanation is usually employed in the Scientific Realism debates. As far as particular scientific theories are concerned, its most ready usage seems to be that of a theory of confirmation. There are however more uses of IBE, namely as an epistemological theory of testimony and as a means of categorising and justifying the sources of evidence. In this paper, I will present, develop and exemplify IBE as a theory of the quality of evidence - taking examples (...) from medicine and showing that IBE can thereby provide the epistemological underpinning and justify the criteria of grading quality of mechanistic evidence that have been recently provided in the Clarke et al. paper on how evidence of medical mechanisms is to be construed alongside population studies. (shrink)

According to internalist theories of testimony, beliefs based on what others say are justified by the reasons a listener uses in forming her belief. I identify a distinctive type of testimonial situation, which I call circular testimony and argue that a certain type of circular testimony establishes the incompleteness of internalist theories of testimony.

Durante los últimos años, el problema de cómo justificar aquellas creencias que se originan en testimonios ha ocupado un lugar central en la epistemología. Sin embargo, muy pocas de esas reflexiones son conocidas en el derecho probatorio. En el presente ensayo analizo la prueba testimonial a la luz de estas reflexiones con el fin de poner de manifiesto los supuestos epistemológicos de algunos principios procesales. En concreto, analizo la legislación colombiana y la estadounidense en el marco de la disputa entre (...) el reduccionismo y el antirreduccionismo en la filosofía del testimonio. Al final sugiero una nueva aproximación epistemológica que replantea los términos de la disputa y que tiene implicaciones importantes para la valoración de la prueba testimonial en los procesos judiciales. (shrink)

there seems to be some kind of asymmetry, at least in some cases, between moral testimony and non-moral testimony, between aesthetic testimony and non-aesthetic testimony, and between religious testimony and non-religious testimony. In these domains, at least in some cases, we object to deference, and for this reason expect people to form their beliefs on non-testimonial grounds, in a way that we do not object to deference in paradigm cases of testimonial knowledge. Our philosophical puzzle is therefore: what explains these (...) (apparent) asymmetries (or are they merely apparent)? My aim here is to criticize three accounts of these testimonial asymmetries and to suggest an alternative strategy for solving our puzzle. I’ll consider the idea that testimony cannot be a source of understanding (§2), the idea that testimony cannot be a source of acquaintance (§3), and the idea that testimonial belief is not conducive to moral virtue (§4). These accounts all explain the badness of testimonial belief, in the relevant cases, by appeal to its consequences for the believer—respectively, a lack of understanding, acquaintance, or moral virtue. I’ll conclude by suggesting a way forward (§5): we should try to understand the badness of testimonial belief, in the relevant cases, as deriving from its consequences for the believer’s society. (shrink)

Among contemporary epistemologists of testimony, David Hume is standardly regarded as a "global reductionist", where global reductionism requires the hearer to have sufficient first-hand knowledge of the facts in order to individually ascertain the reliability of the testimony in question. In the present paper, I argue that, by construing Hume's reductionism in too individualistic a fashion, the received view of Hume on testimony is inaccurate at best, and misleading at worst. Hume's overall position is more amenable to testimonial acceptance than (...) has traditionally been thought. In particular, Hume believes that indirect evidence of human nature and of the social world around us, can take the place of first-hand evidence of the track record of individual speakers or specific classes of testimony. In developing this interpretation of Hume's views on testimony, the present paper draws on discussions found in the Treatise, the Enquiry, and in Hume's writings on historical knowledge. (shrink)

Testimony is a vital and ubiquitous source of knowledge. Were we to refrain from accepting the testimony of others, our lives would be impoverished in startling and debilitating ways. Despite the vital role that testimony occupies in our epistemic lives, traditional epistemological theories have focused primarily on other sources, such as sense perception, memory, and reason, with relatively little attention devoted specifically to testimony. In recent years, however, the epistemic significance of testimony has been more fully appreciated. I shall here (...) focus on two questions that have received the most attention in recent work in the epistemology of testimony. First, is testimonial knowledge acquired only by being transmitted from speaker to hearer? Second, must a hearer have positive reasons to justifiedly accept a speaker's testimony? (shrink)

Despite decades of concerted efforts to communicate to the public on important scientific issues pertaining to the environment and public health, gaps between public acceptance and the scientific consensus on these issues remain stubborn. One strategy for dealing with this shortcoming has been to focus on the existence of scientific consensus on the relevant matters. Recent science communication research has added support to this general idea, though the interpretation of these studies and their generalizability remains a matter of contention. In (...) this paper, we describe results of a qualitative interview study on different models of scientific consensus and the relationship between such models and trust of science, finding that familiarity with scientific consensus is rarer than might be expected. These results suggest that consensus messaging strategies may not be effective. (shrink)

This paper studies the constellations of attitudes––sentimental, moral, epistemological, and social––that three leading psychologists active in turn-of-the-twentieth-century America took to be essential to the production of scientific knowledge. William James, G. Stanley Hall, and Edward Titchener located the virtues and traits proper to the scientific frame of mind, and combined them into normative images of the man of science, or, ‘scientific personae’ as I use the term here. I argue that their competing formulations of the scientific ethos informed their psychological (...) practice and epistemological commitments. James, Hall, and Titchener mobilized their representations of the man of science in order to reconfigure the field of psychology and redefine its boundaries, as well as to promote forms of sociability and define the proper role of scientists both within the academy and in the wider polity. (shrink)

Among contemporary epistemologists of testimony, David Hume is standardly regarded as a ‘global reductionist’, where global reductionism requires the hearer to have sufficient first-hand knowledge of the facts in order to individually ascertain the reliability of the testimony in question. In the present paper, I argue that, by construing Hume’s reductionism in too individualistic a fashion, the received view of Hume on testimony is inaccurate at best, and misleading at worst. Overall, Hume is much more willing to regard testimonial acceptance (...) as a natural response to testimony than has traditionally been thought. In particular, Hume believes that indirect evidence of human nature and of the social world around us, can take the place of first-hand evidence of the track record of individual speakers or specific classes of testimony. In developing this interpretation of Hume’s views on testimony, the present paper draws on discussions found in the Treatise, the Enquiry, and in Hume’s writings on historical knowledge. In der zeitgenössischen Debatte um den erkenntnistheoretischen Status zeugnisbasiertenWissens wird gern auf David Hume als den Urheber eines „globalen Reduktionismus“ verwiesen, demzufolge der Zeugnisempfänger über ausreichend empirische Belege für die Verlässlichkeit des betreffenden Zeugnisses verfügen muss. Im vorliegenden Aufsatz soll gezeigt werden, dass die in der Literatur vorherrschende Meinung ein übertrieben „individualistisches“ Bild von Humes Reduktionismus zeichnet; dadurch wird Humes Position in der gegenwärtigen Debatte ungenau und bisweilen irreführend wiedergegeben. Bei genauerer Betrachtung erweist sich Hume als ausgesprochen aufgeschlossen gegenüber dem Akzeptieren fremden Zeugnisses und sieht darin eine Art Grundmuster im testimonialen Umgang mit anderen. Insbesondere konzediert Hume, dass indirekt erworbenes Wissen um die menschliche Natur und die soziale Welt an die Stelle direkter Belege für die Verlässlichkeit einzelner Zeugen treten kann. Die im vorliegenden Aufsatz entwickelte Neuinterpretation stützt sich auf den Treatise, den Enquiry und auf Humes Schriften zum Problem der historischen Erkenntnis. (shrink)

This paper develops a descriptive and normative account of how people respond to testimony. It postulates a default pathway in which people more or less automatically respond to a claim by accepting it, as long as the claim made is consistent with their beliefs and the source is credible. Otherwise, people enter a reflective pathway in which they evaluate the claim based on its explanatory coherence with everything else they believe. Computer simulations show how explanatory coherence can be maximized in (...) real-life cases, taking into account all the relevant evidence including the credibility of whoever is making a claim. The explanatory-coherence account is more plausible both descriptively and normatively than a Bayesian account. (shrink)