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What epistemologists of testimony should learn from philosophers of science

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Abstract

The thesis of this paper is that, if it is construed individualistically, epistemic justification does not capture the conditions that philosophers of science would impose on justified belief in a scientific hypothesis. The difficulty arises from beliefs acquired through testimony. From this I derive a lesson that epistemologists generally, and epistemologists of testimony in particular, should learn from philosophers of science: we ought to repudiate epistemic individualism and move towards a more fully social epistemology.

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Notes

  1. See Wellbourne (1986), Hardwig (1991), Faulkner (2000), Lackey (2006), Schmitt (2006), and Goldberg (2010). Interestingly, the topic has received a bit more sustained attention in the philosophy of science literature. See e.g. Solomon (2001), Longino (2002) and Miller (2015).

  2. The literature here is vast. For seminal work see Fricker (1987, 1994), Coady (1992), Burge (1993), and Audi (1997).

  3. See E. Fricker (1987; 1995; 2006a; 2006b); Fumerton (2006); Audi (1997); and many others. These views are critically discussed in Wright (2016); Madison (2016) replies to Wright.

  4. See Goldman (2001) and Kenyon (2012).

  5. See Lehrer (2006).

  6. See Tucker (2016), Philips et al. (unpublished MS).

  7. See Shogenji (2006).

  8. See Lipton (2007).

  9. See A. Goldman (1999) and many others. Of course, such reliabilist views hold that the reliability properties of the process-type by which an audience A apprehends and monitors testimony will be affected by the preponderance of true testimonies in A’s environment. Still, this is seen as an environmental condition (akin to the perceptual invariances in one’s perceptual environment), rather than as an admission that others’ epistemic perspective bears on the epistemic goodness of one’s own beliefs.

  10. I thank an anonymous referee of this journal for indicating the need to address this.

  11. I thank an anonymous referee for urging that I consider this concern; I am borrowing some of the language in which I am formulating the concern from the referee report itself.

  12. I do not assume here that the non-testimonial case cannot involve any testimony; only that it does not involve a testimony of H itself.

  13. See e.g. Longino (2002).

  14. For a description of a real-life example of something in this vicinity, see Miller (2015).

  15. As Branden Fitelson has emphasized (2008: pp. 618–19), any attempt to connect ‘justification’ in the philosophy of science sense (or at least that which was in play in confirmation theory a la Carnap) with that in epistemology will require significant “bridging principles.” The point I will be making in what follows is consistent with Fitelson’s point.

  16. I thank an anonymous referee for pointing out the need to make this point.

  17. The claim that they are required is the reductionist position. My present point is simply that one can still wonder whether this is so even after INDIVIDUALISM is rejected. Of course, if INDIVIDUALISM is rejected, then to embrace reductionism is to hold that adequate positive reasons rationalize acceptance without ensuring that the resulting belief is justified. But such ‘hybrid’ views are familiar; see e.g. Faulkner (2000) and Lackey (1999).

  18. See the references in footnotes 3–9.

  19. By ‘the scientific evidence itself’ I have in mind the sort of evidence that is gathered in scientific inquiry.

  20. The point here was first made by Hardwig (1991). Hardwig took the point to indicate the ineliminable role of trust in scientific communities. I take the point to indicate something slightly different (for which see below).

  21. See Longino (2002), Meeker (2004), Wylie and Nelson (2007), Elgin (2017), and Anderson (2020, Sect. 6).

  22. This point was emphasized by Longino (2002) and is discussed at length in Kitcher (2011).

  23. This was the absurdity of the idea that a non-scientist S can have better, more probative evidence for a scientific hypothesis than the source scientist on whose testimony S is relying.

  24. See Goldberg (2014) for an articulation of this notion and a defense of its applicability to the case of testimony.

  25. In presenting this notion of reliance, I am following Holton (1994).

  26. Such reasons are relevant to the rationality of my reliance; but they don’t serve to vindicate that reliance.

  27. I offered an extended defense of the argument to follow in Goldberg (2010).

  28. This was the picture on which the de re nature of our reliance in testimony cases is only manifest when it comes to the knowledgeableness of a testimonial belief.

  29. This is why they analyze INADEQUATE SCIENTIFIC TESTIMONY in a manner analogous to STOPPED CLOCK: a case in which the badness in the source affects knowledge but not justification.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to express my gratitude to various people with whom I have discussed these topics over the past several years: Peter Graham, Kareem Khalifa, Chris Kelp, Tim Kenyon, Jennifer Lackey, Jack Lyons, Boaz Miller, Carry Osborne, Baron Reed, and Mona Simion. Thanks as well to three referees from this journal, for their very thoughtful comments on earlier versions.

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  1. Department of Philosophy, Northwestern University, Evanston, USA

    Sanford C. Goldberg

  2. Arché Research Center, University of St. Andrews, St Andrews, Scotland

    Sanford C. Goldberg

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This article belongs to the topical collection “New Directions in Social Epistemology”, edited by Adam Carter and Christoph Kelp.

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Goldberg, S.C. What epistemologists of testimony should learn from philosophers of science. Synthese 199, 12541–12559 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-021-03342-x

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