Abstract
One main school in the Indian classical tradition of philosophy insists that testimony — ‘learning from words’ — is a source or type of knowledge sui generis, one which cannot be reduced to any other type — not to perception, memory, or inference nor, we may add, to combinations of these. Such an irreducibility thesis could take diverse specific forms. One form it may take is as the thesis that a hearer has a presumptive epistemic right to trust an arbitrary speaker. We may essay an initial formulation of this thesis thus:
PR thesis: On any occasion of testimony, the hearer has the epistemic right to assume, without evidence, that the speaker is trustworthy, i.e. that what she says will be true, unless there are special circumstances which defeat this presumption. (Thus she has the epistemic right to believe the speaker’s assertion, unless such defeating conditions obtain.)
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Notes
I am grateful here to accounts, both written and spoken, of the doctrines of the school, from Arindam Chakrabarti and Bimal Matilal. This pair of theses seems also to be implicit in the anti-reductionist stance of C. A. J. Coady ‘Testimony and Observation’,Amer. Phil. Quart . 10, No. 2, April 1973, pp. 149–55.
Thus for me, the issue of what it takes for a testimony belief to be justified is one with the issue what it takes for it to be knowledge. Those for whom those issues are not the same — since they favour some other conception of knowledge — may read my account as being simply about justification.
I.e. a belief originally acquired through testimony, and whose status as knowledge still rests on that pedigree. In Fricker `The Epistemology of Testimony’,Proc. Aris. Soc. Suppl. vol. for 1987, pp. 57–83, I set out a framework which exhibits the complicated interrelations involved here, between original causation, sustaining, and available justifying support of a belief.
This argument seems to be implicit in Coady op. cit.
In this paper I am assuming that knowledge that such-and-such has been asserted is often had by hearers, and am focusing on the epistemology of the step from there, to knowledge of its truth. See §11.
If this is shown, then it has been shown that testimony is not just a way of acquiring beliefs, but is moreover one which is capable of yielding knowledge, what we may call an epistemic link. Cf. Fricker op. cit.
Throughout my discussion, `H’, `S’, and `O’ are to be regarded as names for an arbitrary hearer, speaker, and occasion respectively. `P’ in contrast must be considered merely a schematic letter holding a place to be occupied by an indicative sentence. Whether outside or inside quotes, `S’, ‘H’, and ’O’, and the possible substitution-instances for which ’P’ is schematic, re to be considered expressions of the metalanguage we are using to describe testimony situations. Thus schematic sentences enclosed in quotes, such as ’S’ asserted that P’, constitute (schematic) specifications by us, in our terms, of the content of a earer’snowledge.
Instances of 6. are sentences of a metalanguage which we use to describe what H knows. There is of course no guarantee a priori that we can thus identify a single justificatory schema which covers all and only cases of knowledge through testimony. But it turns out that we can do pretty well. See §5 for how we should define the epistemic link of `testimony’ to this end.
Cf. David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Ch. 10. An adequate
treatment of such collisions of contrary evidence would introduce probabilities, as a more detailed model of knowledge through testimony would do throughout.
Of course the grounds justifying a belief need not be so strong as to entail it. The reason for insisting nonetheless that the elements of T be chosen so as to together entail P, is pragmatic and ad hoc: this represents the best strategy for finding a single characteristic justificatory schema, and the resulting account is illuminating. The possibility of grounds for belief weaker than entailment is allowed for, in this set-up, in the fact that H need only have, and cite, evidence, which may be less than conclusive, that the relevant instances of °T obtain. What may afford this last is endlessly variable, and we cannot hope for a general description circumscribing the possibilities.
Note however that it is a desideratum, rather than an absolute constraint, that we thus succeed in characterising knowledge through testimony just by means of our choice of a set T. Clearly, one cannot find a °T which is epistemically independent of the content of S’s assertion whatever the latter may be: c.f., when it is T2 itself, or evidence for T2. But these are special cases, and we may hope to find a °T which is epistemically independent of the content of S’s assertion apart from such cases. As we shall see in §7, it proves difficult to achieve even this perfectly.
Equally, of course, when she knows that S has not asserted that P on O! But this case need not concern us, since there is no question of H gaining knowledge through S’s testimony, nor of all the elements of obtaining.
An appropriate semantics for this conditional will make it strictly stronger than the material conditional, and with no supposition of falsity of the antecedent. Roughly, it will be true just if all the nearest S-asserts-that-P worlds are P-worlds, where the nearness relation is reflexive. It would be nice if a case could be made for a nearness metric which does not have the consequence that the conditional is ensured true whenever P’ is a nomological truth. I think the ordinary language locution is rightly heard thus; but finding a regimented semantics with this consequence is another matter. It would, very likely, involve relativising the standard of nearness to the identity of the antecedent. ‘a It is no part of the reductionist position I am arguing for, to claim that empirical warrant for trusting the speaker is available on every occasion of testimony. This is clearly false. In cases where it is not, the anti-reductionist and reductionist will disagree over whether the hearer is entitled to trust the speaker, and, in the event she does believe what is asserted, can be said to gain knowledge.
A really strong general claim, to the effect that all, or virtually all assertions are true, would suffice to justify belief in an arbitrary assertion, in the absence of further `defeaters’; and might indeed be employed in a meta-level argument to show the existence of a PR at object level. But a generalisation of this strength is obviously false. (A fortiori is not a conceptual truth about language, as one attempted argument for a PR would claim.) 15 As I understand it, this is an element in the Indian anti-reductionist case. And Coady op. cit. assumes the anti-reductionist must establish generalisations about the reliability of testimony.
Is this connection causal? Its latter stages which are our primary concern always are, but whether the speaker’s initial acquisition of her belief can be thought of as caused by its subject matter depends on what kind of thing that is, and how her belief arose.
If the reader is unhappy with this view of the problem of induction, she may consider the justification of deduction instead, which surely takes this form.
Is this unkind to children? The upshot of my casual discussions with developmental psychologists is that they (children) acquire the ability to lie, and so maybe the grasp of CSL which shows this possibility, remarkably early. But a feeling that my theory is too demanding on hearers may anyway be an intuition against the requirement that knowledge requires justification, rather than against my account of what it takes for a testimony-belief to be justified.
Freak cases are possible — where a would-be deceiver happens to have a compensatingly false belief. But for our project, of giving a systematic general account of how knowledge is gained through testimony, we may set these aside, taking the normal case as our domain.
That S understands her own utterance we may consider to be packed into the fact that it is a serious assertion. The epistemology of such knowledge is outside the scope of this paper.
Note that the definition of competence given does not allow any inference ‘backwards’ to sincerity, from knowledge of competence and the truth of what is asserted; but a stronger definition — ‘If S were to believe that P, then it would be the case that P’, would do so. Intuitively, this kind of ‘backwards’ knowledge of sincerity can occur. There is another difficulty, viz. that one may also know competence backwards, when ‘P’ expresses a necessary truth and one knows this fact; and equally, in the absence of a semantics which avoids this, when one knows it to express a nomological truth (see footnote in §3 above). But there is no alternative which meets our requirements better than the °I consisting of T1 and Trus(S, U); so we must perforce complete our characterisation of knowledge through testimony by putting restrictions on how sincerity and competence are known by H, which rule out these cases of ‘backward’ confirmation.
The present account thus differs from the one I offered in Fricker op. cit. There I opted for a material conditional expressing ‘competence with respect to P’, for the prima facie reason in its favour, that it is the weakest further premise which validates the inference to ‘P’. I now hold that earlier choice to be wrong because it fails the test of epistemic independence.
That it takes some care to arrive at a correct theoretical definition of trustworthiness in no way undermines this claim. The difficulty of formulating explicitly conditions of which we all have a sure implicit grasp, is the general experience with analyses of ordinary concepts.
If Russell’s chicken had only interpreted its feeder, her murderous intent on that last day would not have come as such a surprise!
And with them, simultaneously, semantic concepts, of course. My discussion here is too brief to bring in explicitly the fact that, in any ascription of psychological states to an individual, the meaning of the sentences she utters are always, at least in principle, also in the melting pot. But nothing I say here is in neglect of this fact, which does not invalidate the argument of this section, in particular the claims that any conceptually-ensured lower bounds on false belief, and false utterance, are quite low.
If considerations about interpretation do not suffice on their own to justify a default position in favour of trustworthiness, then a fortiori they do not serve to justify a PR thesis. This is one of the attempted `positive arguments’ which, in my view, does not work.
My views here have been influenced by discussions with Prof. Mike Gilsenan, about his experiences as an anthropologist studying Middle Eastern societies. There is of course much more to be said on these matters.
It is itself part of that broader domain, rather than reducing to it, in that, as already noted, semantic and psychological concepts hang together, fitting simultaneously onto a subject.
See Fricker op. cit., pp. 74–5.
I am grateful for comments from Michael Bacharach, John Campbell, Bill Child, Dale Jamieson, Philip Pettit, and Tim Williamson. I am also particularly indebted to Arindam Chakrabarti, whose vigorous defence of the Indian view provoked this paper.
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Fricker, E. (1994). Against Gullibility. In: Matilal, B.K., Chakrabarti, A. (eds) Knowing from Words. Synthese Library, vol 230. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-2018-2_8
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