In contemporary epistemology, ‘testimony’ serves as an umbrella term to refer to all those instances where we form a belief on the basis of being told. Like other epistemic sources—perception, memory, inference, introspection—testimony furnishes us with much of what we take ourselves to know; unlike them, however, it depends also on the mental operations of another person (e.g., the eyewitness’s sense perception, the speaker’s intention to share knowledge with us, etc.). Much of the philosophica…
Read moreIn contemporary epistemology, ‘testimony’ serves as an umbrella term to refer to all those instances where we form a belief on the basis of being told. Like other epistemic sources—perception, memory, inference, introspection—testimony furnishes us with much of what we take ourselves to know; unlike them, however, it depends also on the mental operations of another person (e.g., the eyewitness’s sense perception, the speaker’s intention to share knowledge with us, etc.). Much of the philosophical debate about testimony and the epistemic status of testimony-based beliefs stems from this tension. Reductionists take the evident dependence of testimony-based beliefs on sense perception (e.g., hearing, reading) to be a sign of their derivativeness, as far as their epistemic justification is concerned. Anti-reductionists, by contrast, argue that the speaker’s act of testifying itself confers justification on the hearer’s corresponding belief. Reductionist and anti-reductionist intuitions combine with externalist and internalist leanings to generate a complex taxonomy of philosophical positions. The present chapter surveys these positions and analyses resonances and interferences between them, paying special attention to hybrid positions that combine insights from both ends of the spectrum. One such position that is developed in some detail posits a dual role of abductive considerations in the justification and management of our testimony-based beliefs.
