Abstract
According to so-called “credit views of knowledge,” knowledge is an achievement of an epistemic agent, something for which an agent is creditable or responsible. One influential criticism of the credit view of knowledge holds that the credit view has difficulty making sense of knowledge acquired from testimony. As Jennifer Lackey has argued, in many ordinary cases of the acquisition of testimonial knowledge, if anyone deserves credit for the truth of the audience’s belief it is the testimonial speaker rather than the audience, and so it isn’t clear that testimonial knowers are appropriately creditable for the truth of their beliefs. I argue that the credit view of knowledge can be saved from Lackey’s objection by focusing on the way in which testimonial knowledge is the result of an essentially social epistemic ability. While there is indeed a sense in which a testimonial knower is only partially epistemically responsible for her testimonial belief, this is consistent with the truth of her belief being creditable to her in another sense. The truth of her belief is most saliently explained by, and hence is fully creditable to, an essentially social epistemic ability, an ability that is only partially seated in the knowing subject.
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Notes
Riggs (2009) questions whether testimonial knowledge is actually acquired in the case that Lackey describes.
For further defense of the credit view, see Riggs (2009).
Lackey doesn’t explicitly consider such a possibility. She considers the possibility of “part of the correctness of a given belief being fully attributable to a competence seated in the subject”, and she considers the possibility of “the full correctness of a given belief being partially attributable to a competence seated in the subject” (2009: 40), but she doesn’t explicitly consider the possibility of the full correctness of a given belief being fully attributable to a competence only partially seated in the knowing subject.
I am not claiming that Greco is himself a reductionist. Greco (2007a, b) proposes an agent reliabilist account of the epistemology of testimony that may in fact be opposed to reductionism as traditionally construed. All I am claiming here is that, in the above passage, Greco floats this traditional reductionist view as an easy way of demonstrating how testimonial knowers are creditable for the truth of their beliefs. If one is attracted to this kind of reductionist view, then Lackey’s claim that Morris is not creditable for the truth of his belief in CHICAGO VISITOR will seem quite mysterious.
One might very well question whether perceptual knowledge is best construed as true belief that is creditable to an epistemic agent. I am not here in a position to defend such an account of perceptual knowledge. My point is simply that if one accepts that perceiving things accurately is an example of a cognitive ability capable of making a subject creditable for the truth of her belief, as Greco does, and if one construes the kind of reason for belief provided by comprehension of a speaker’s testimony as analogous to the kind of prima facie reason for belief provided by perceptual representation, as many anti-reductionists about testimony do, then Lackey’s claim that Morris is not creditable for the truth of his belief in CHICAGO VISITOR will seem quite mysterious.
Riggs (2009) argues that both reductionism and anti-reductionism about testimony have the resources for attributing epistemic credit to testimonial knowers. As I have argued above, I think that this is correct. However, I agree with Lackey that there is an interesting and distinctive problem with attributing epistemic credit to testimonial knowers. Moreover, I think that this problem helps us to appreciate the way in which the epistemology of testimony is not adequately modeled on the epistemology of either perception or inductive inference. I will have more to say about this in Sect. IV below, but to anticipate, testimonial knowers are entitled to pass the epistemic buck or defer justificatory responsibility for their beliefs back to the testimonial speaker, while ordinary perceptual and inductive knowers are not.
It isn’t clear whether Lackey has something specific in mind by her appeal to the language of faculties. Adherents of the credit view of knowledge typically refer to cognitive virtues, competences, or abilities, and so I am here reading Lackey as denying that there is any specific such virtue, competence, or ability when it comes to testimony. Note also that reductionists about testimony could wholeheartedly agree that there is no distinctive testimonial faculty while still holding that testimonial knowers are fully creditable for the truth of their beliefs. This is because reductionists hold that testimonial knowledge is acquired on the basis of ordinary inductive inference.
When it comes to the epistemology of testimony, Reid is most famous for the analogy that he draws between testimony and perception in Chap. 6, Sect. 24 of An Inquiry into the Human Mind (1997). There he argues that the process of acquiring beliefs on the basis of testimony is analogous to the process of acquiring beliefs on the basis of perception in that it involves the mind’s immediately and non-inferentially passing from a sign, the speaker’s testimony that p, to belief in the thing signified, belief that p. Contemporary anti-reductionists about testimony typically follow Reid in trying to draw analogies between testimony and other non-inferential sources of knowledge like perception and memory. Something that is seldom emphasized, however, is that even though Reid clearly thinks that the capacities for perception and for learning from testimony are analogous in virtue of being non-inferential, he nevertheless thinks that they are disanalogous in other important respects. In his Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, Reid claims that testimonial knowledge and belief is disanalogous to knowledge and belief based on perception in that it is the result of what he calls a social operation of mind.
Some operations of our mind, from their very nature, are social, others are solitary. By the first, I understand such operations as necessarily suppose an intercourse with some other intelligent being. A man may understand and will; he may apprehend, and judge, and reason, though he should himself know of no intelligent being in the world besides himself. But, when he asks information, or receives it; when he bears testimony, or receives the testimony of another; when he asks a favour, or accepts one; when he gives a command to his servant, or receives one from a superior: when he plights his faith in a promise or contract; these are acts of social intercourse between intelligent beings, and can have no place in solitude. They suppose understanding and will; but they suppose something more, which is neither understanding nor will; that is, society with other intelligent beings. They may be called intellectual, because they can only be in intellectual beings: But they are neither simple apprehension, nor judgment, nor reasoning, nor are they any combination of these operations. (2002: 68)
Here Reid claims that the social operations of mind—like giving and receiving testimony, giving and receiving promises, giving and receiving commands, and asking and receiving favors—are mental capacities that “necessarily suppose an intercourse with some other intelligent being”. Unfortunately, he doesn’t have much to say about what such intercourse with other intelligent beings involves. At least two things are clear, however. First, the way in which the social operations of mind necessarily suppose an intercourse with other intelligent beings is supposed to be sufficient to distinguish the social operations from the solitary operations of apprehension, judgment, and reasoning, all of which may be said to depend on others in various ways (for example, if social externalism about representational content is true). Second, the intercourse with other intelligent beings characteristic of the social operations of mind is not something that can be reduced to some combination of the exercise of the solitary operations. With respect to the operation of giving and receiving testimony, therefore, Reid appears to hold that this is an operation the exercise of which necessarily supposes a distinctive kind of interaction with others that can’t be reduced to or modeled on the operation of the solitary capacities.
Goldberg (2009) also argues that adherents of the credit view can respond to the testimony problem along roughly these lines, though without himself endorsing the credit view.
Lackey seems blind to this possibility in her response to Sosa’s social competence defense of the credit view. She seems to assume that all social competences must be mere aggregates of individual competences, and she argues that such aggregates cannot be adequately distinguished from Gettier cases. The point of Sosa’s social competence defense, however, seems to be that there is a distinctive social competence associated with the giving and receiving of testimony that distinguishes the partial credit deserved by testimonial knowers from the partial credit deserved by subjects in Gettier cases, including Gettier cases that involve a mere aggregate of individual abilities as in Lackey’s TWO JOKES (2009: 40–41). In the remainder of this paper I try to motivate the idea that there is indeed such a distinctively social testimonial ability at work in the acquisition of testimonial knowledge, an ability that cannot be reduced to a mere aggregate of individual abilities.
For a much more detailed account of the nature of epistemic deference, see McMyler (2011).
An audience may very well form a belief based on the testimony of a speaker without taking anything on the speaker’s authority. The audience might treat the speaker as a mere truth-gauge. In such a case, however, the audience is not entitled to defer epistemic challenges. Though an audience may very well treat what a speaker says as ordinary inductive evidence rather than as an authoritative directive, if a third-party challenges the audience’s belief, the audience will not then be entitled to defer the challenge. The audience will be rationally required to either meet the challenge herself or else give up her belief.
For a more detailed account of the way in which the phenomenon of epistemic buck-passing tells against standard reductionist and anti-reductionist accounts of testimony, see McMyler (2011). Goldberg (2006) argues that the phenomenon of buck passing is actually consistent with reductionism about testimony, though he construes the reductionist position in such a way that it does not seem to require commitment to the idea that testimonial justification is inferential.
Following Hieronymi (2008), I take it that epistemic responsibility doesn’t require that belief be voluntary. Rather, the fact that we are responsible for our beliefs is a simple result of the fact that belief is a commitment-constituted attitude. Insofar as belief is an attitude constituted by a subject’s commitment to things being thus and so, a subject is answerable for her being so committed.
I have here offered in a very condensed form an essentially interpersonal account of the epistemology of testimony that I develop in much more detail in McMyler (2011). Similar accounts have been offered by Moran (2005), Hinchman (2005), and Faulkner (2007). My purpose here is to show that adherents of the credit view of knowledge can effectively respond to the testimony problem by appealing to such an account. If such an account is suitably developed in the way that I have proposed, it can both save the credit view from the testimony problem and explain the intuitive force of the problem in a way that Lackey’s own view cannot. Lackey (2008, Chap. 8) has herself offered several objections to interpersonal accounts of the epistemology of testimony, all of which I believe involve misconstruing the position, but I cannot adequately respond to these objections here.
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Acknowledgments
I am grateful to audiences at the Free University of Amsterdam and the National Autonomous University of Mexico as well as to several anonymous referees for extremely helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper.
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McMyler, B. Responsibility for Testimonial Belief. Erkenn 76, 337–352 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-011-9285-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-011-9285-z