The reductionist and anti-reductionist debate features prominently within
the larger canon of literature devoted to the epistemology of testimony. Reductionism
is the thesis, roughly, that testimonial knowledge is reducible to some other, more
general, form(s) of knowledge. We take anti-reductionism’s thesis to be the denial of
reductionism. In this note, we develop an attempted counterexample to reductionism
by way of discussing animal testimony. We don’t mean to suggest that the
reductionist i…
Read moreThe reductionist and anti-reductionist debate features prominently within
the larger canon of literature devoted to the epistemology of testimony. Reductionism
is the thesis, roughly, that testimonial knowledge is reducible to some other, more
general, form(s) of knowledge. We take anti-reductionism’s thesis to be the denial of
reductionism. In this note, we develop an attempted counterexample to reductionism
by way of discussing animal testimony. We don’t mean to suggest that the
reductionist is without a response to the counterexample proposed, but we think it’s
about time epistemologists start focusing on how broad we should understand
testimony and to what degree, animals might guide our process in developing our
epistemology of testimony.
