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Testimony, Philosophical Problems OfIn Philosophy testimony is taken to mean anything you are told. This defintion is at odds with the legal or religious defintion. See Testimony The role of testimony in aquiring knowledge has been a relativly neglected philosophical issule. Coady1 belives that his is because traditional epistemology has had a distinctly individualist flavour. However, it seems that a lot of the beliefs that we hold have been agained through accepting testimony, for example, I only know that Kent is a county of England, that the First World War was horrendous and that David Beckham earns $30 million per year because I have learned these things from other people. One of the problems with aquiring knowledge through testimony is that it does not seem to live up to the standards of knowledge. (see knowledge in philosophy ) . As Owens notes2, it does not seem to live up to the motto of the Royal Society Nullius in verba (no mans word). Crudely put the question is; 'How can testimony give us knowledge since when we have no reasons of our own?' Coady sugests that there are two approches to this problem. - Reductivism, which seeks to reduce or re-describe our behaviour such that it is not at odds with the traditional view
and - Anti-Reductivism, which seeks to fit our behaviour in with a different concept of knowledge, for example; we may compare it to an account of how perception gives us knowledge or how memory gives us knowledge.
Hume is one of the few early philosophers to offer anything like a sustained account of testimony, this can be found in his An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding in the section on miracles. The basic idea is that is our justification for believing what people tell us comes from our experience of the constant and regular conjunction3 between the state of affairs as people describe them and the actual state of affairs (i.e. our observation that they match). On Coady's schema he is a reductivist. Also somewhat significant is Bertrand Russell, for whom knowledge by acquisition played an important part in epistemology. Coady offers an anti-reductivist account of testimony. He claims that testimony is like perception, we don't have to have reasons for believing it, only an absence of reasons not to believe it. On Coady's account we are justifed in being credulious. Notes 1. Coady 1992
2. Owens, 2000, Pg. 163
3. Hume, 1993, Pg. 74
References - Coady C.A.J. (1992), Testimony; A Philosophical Study, Clarendon Press, Oxford. ISBN 0198235518
- Owens, D. (2000), Reason without Freedom: The Problem of Epistemic Normatively, Routledge, London. ISBN 041522389X
- Hume, D. (1993), An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Hackett Publishing Company, Cambridge. ISBN 0915144166
Also See - Lipton, P. (1998), The Epistemology of Testimony
- Ross, (1986), Why Do We Believe What We Are Told?
*Faulkner, P. (2002), On the Rationality of Our Response to testimony
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