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Switch to: References
Citations of:
Reid on the credit of human testimony
In Jennifer Lackey & Ernest Sosa (eds.), The epistemology of testimony. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 50-75 (2006)
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Humans massively depend on communication with others, but this leaves them open to the risk of being accidentally or intentionally misinformed. To ensure that, despite this risk, communication remains advantageous, humans have, we claim, a suite of cognitive mechanisms for epistemic vigilance. Here we outline this claim and consider some of the ways in which epistemic vigilance works in mental and social life by surveying issues, research and theories in different domains of philosophy, linguistics, cognitive psychology and the social sciences. |
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The child objection is a major challenge for reductionism, which requires hearers to have positive reasons for testimonial justification. However, it has been pointed out that anti-reductionism, which requires only the absence of negative reasons, or defeaters, suffers from the same kind of problem. The child objection presupposes the empirical thesis that “children do not have the capacity to consider reasons,” but the plausibility of this assumption may be revealed by developmental psychology research on selective trust. This paper uses recent (...) |
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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 (...) |
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This volume focuses on Berkeley's doctrine of signs. The 'doctrine of signs' refers to the use that Berkeley makes of a phenomenon that is central to a great deal of everyday discourse: one whereby certain perceivable entities are made to stand in for (as 'signs' of) something else. Things signified might be other perceivable entities or they might also be unperceivable notions - such as the meanings of words. From his earliest published work, A New Theory of Vision in 1710, (...) |
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A prima facie plausible and widely held view in epistemology is that the epistemic standards governing the acquisition of testimonial knowledge are stronger than the epistemic standards governing the acquisition of perceptual knowledge. Conservatives about testimony hold that we need prior justification to take speakers to be reliable but recognise that the corresponding claim about perception is practically a non-starter. The problem for conservatives is how to establish theoretically significant differences between testimony and perception that would support asymmetrical epistemic standards. (...) |
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My paper offers a new interpretation of Reid’s account of social operations of the mind. I argue that it is important to acknowledge the counterpart structure of social operations. By this I mean that for Reid every social operation is paired with a counterpart operation. On the view that I ascribe to Reid, at least two intelligent beings take part in a social operation and the social operation does not come into existence until both the social operation and its counterpart (...) |
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The paper is concerned with the epistemological status of testimony and the question of what may confer justification on true testimonial beliefs and enable us to call such beliefs knowledge. In particular, it addresses certain anti-reductionist arguments in the epistemology of testimony and their incompatibility with the grammatical categories of egophoricity (conjunct/disjunct marking) and evidentiality (information source marking) present in the architecture of natural languages. First, the tradition of epistemological individualism and its rationale are discussed, as well as certain attempts (...) |
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‘Injustiça epistêmica’ é o termo usado por Miranda Fricker para descrever um tipo de injustiça que ocorre quando excluímos a contribuição de uma ou mais pessoas à produção, disseminação e manutenção do conhecimento. Em seu livro de mesmo nome (2007), e em uma série de outros trabalhos, Fricker examina de que modo interações interpessoais e sistemas sociais estruturais podem ser responsáveis por influenciar nossa prática cotidiana, consciente ou não, de atribuir status epistêmico a membros de uma comunidade. Seu trabalho se (...) |
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An infuential twenty-first century philosophical project posits a central role for knowledge: knowledge is more fundamental than epistemic states like belief and justification. So-called “knowledge first” theorists find support for this thought in identifying central theoretical roles for knowledge. I argue that a similar methodology supports a privileged role for more specific category of basic knowledge. Some of the roles that knowledge first theorists have posited for knowledge generally are better suited for basic knowledge. |
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Almost everyone agrees that many testimonial beliefs constitute knowledge. According to non-reductionists, some testimonial beliefs possess positive epistemic status independent of that conferred by perception, memory, and induction. Recently, Jennifer Lackey has provided a counterexample to a popular version of this view. Here I argue that her counterexample fails. |
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This chapter states the contrast between presumptivism about testimonial warrant (often called anti-reductionism) and strict reductionism (associated with Hume) about testimonial warrant. Presumptivism sees an analogy with modest foundationalism about perceptual warrant. Strict reductionism denies this analogy. Two theoretical frameworks for these positions are introduced to better formulate the most popular version of persumptivism, a competence reliabilist account. Seven arguments against presumptivism are then stated and critiqued: (1) The argument from reliability; (2) The argument from reasons; (3) the argument from (...) |
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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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Despite the recent growth of studies in virtue epistemology, the intellectual virtue of epistemic collaborativeness has been overlooked by scholars working in virtue theory. This is a significant gap in the literature given the import of well-motivated and skillful epistemic collaboration for the flourishing of human societies. This paper engages in an in-depth examination of the intellectual virtue of epistemic collaborativeness. It argues that the agent who possesses this acquired character trait is (i) highly motivated to engage in epistemic collaboration (...) |
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Social knowledge, for the most part, is knowledge through testimony. This essay is an overview of the epistemology of testimony. The essay separates knowledge from justification, characterizes testimony as a source of belief, explains why testimony is a source of knowledge, canvasses arguments for anti-reductionism and for reductionism in the reductionism vs. anti-reductionism debate, addresses counterexamples to knowledge transmission, defends a safe basis account of testimonial knowledge, and turns to social norms as a partial explanation for the reliability of testimony. |
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In this paper, I spell out a new challenge for epistemic internalism that emerges out of the current debate on testimonial justification. Based on recent developments within this debate, one might argue as follows: Epistemic internalism can’t account for the justification of our testimony-based beliefs, because (1) we should conceive of testimonial justification along anti-reductionist lines and (2) anti-reductionism is incompatible with epistemic internalism. In response to this challenge, I show that, despite initial appearances, epistemic internalism and anti-reductionism are compatible (...) |
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This paper offers a brief survey of the philosophical literature on assertion, presenting each contribution to the RIFL special issue "Assertion and its social significance" within the context of the contemporary debate in which it intervenes. The discussion is organised into three thematic sections. The first one concerns the nature of assertion and its relation with assertoric commitment – the distinctive responsibility that the speaker undertakes in virtue of making a statement. The second section considers the epistemic significance of assertion, (...) |
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Under which conditions are we epistemically justied to believe that what other people tell us is true? Traditionally, the answer has either been reductionist or anti-reductionist: Either our justication reduces to non-testimonial reasons, or we have a presumptive, though defeasible, right to believe what we are told. However, different cases pull in different directions. Intuitively, someone asking for the time is subject to different epistemic standards than a surgeon consulting a colleague before a dangerous operation. Following this line of thought, (...) |
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Na filosofia moderna, Thomas Reid (1710-1796) foi um dos filósofos que olhou com atenção para o problema da vagueza das palavras quando utilizadas para expressar nosso pensamento ao outro. Ao tratar da concepção de linguagem, Reid parece abordar o tema da ambiguidade e da vagueza das palavras de modo a afastar os erros que a linguagem carrega consigo, apurando-a no sentido de torná-la mais adequada à representação dos fenômenos mentais e, desta forma, tornar possível o avanço sobre o estudo acerca (...) |
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In this article, I extract Mary Shepherd's social epistemology primarily from her attack on Hume's dismissive account of miracle reports. On my reading, she adopts a nonreductionist position on testimony, arguing that the hearer is both caused and justified to regard testimonies as true by default, that is, in the absence of any undefeated defeater. In contrast to Humean reductionism, we do not need to provide positive evidence for the truth of the testified proposition, for instance, by appealing to the (...) |
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Suppose you assert a proposition p that you falsely believe to be false with the intention to deceive your audience. The standard view has it that you lied. This paper argues against orthodoxy: deceptive lying requires that p be in actual fact false, in addition to your intention to deceive by means of untruthfully asserting that p. We proceed as follows. First, an argument is developed for such falsity condition as the non-psychological component of lying. The problem with the standard (...) |
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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 (...) |
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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, (...) |
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The common sense that heavily informs the epistemology of Thomas Reid has been recently hailed as instructive with regard to some of the most fundamental issues in epistemology by a burgeoning segment of analytic epistemologists. These admirers of Reid may be called dogmatists. I highlight three ways in which Reid's approach has been a model to be imitated in the estimation of dogmatists. First, common sense propositions are taken to be the benchmarks of epistemology inasmuch as they constitute paradigm cases (...) |
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The case of very young children is a test case for the plausibility of reductionism about testimonial warrant. Reductionism requires reductive reasons, reductively justified and actively deployed for testimonial justification. Though nascent language-users enjoy warranted testimony based beliefs, they do not meet these three reductionist demands. This paper clearly formulates reductionism and the infant/child objection. Two rejoinders are discussed: an influential conceptual argument from Jennifer Lackey’s paper “Testimony and the Infant/Child Objection” and the growing empirical evidence from developmental psychology on (...) |
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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 (...) |
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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 (...) |
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In this paper I will be implicitly defending the following thesis: An individual X obtains knowledge of scientific claim p in virtue of being a member of a community A that regards claim p as knowledge. The thesis states is that a claim p only becomes scientific knowledge once it's been through a process of validation by a scientific community. This is meant to be contrasted with the claim that individuals first obtain scientific knowledge perception or inference, and then transmit (...) |
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