What is a Testimony?
The philosophy of testimony considers the nature of language and knowledge's confluence, which occurs when beliefs are transferred between speakers and hearers through testimony. Testimony constitutes words, gestures, or utterances that convey beliefs. Reasoning is associated with the acts of thinking and cognition, and involves using one's intellect.
Testimony used in analytic philosophy the expression is used as a label for the process by which knowledge or belief is gained from understanding and believing the spoken or written reports of others generally, regardless of setting. In a modern society testimony thus broadly understood is one of the main sources of belief.
WHAT ARE THE PHILOSOPHICAL ISSUES CONCERNING TESTIMONY?
When testimony is trustingly accepted by an individual, she acquires beliefs through it. In a modern society, very much of an individual's beliefs are derived directly from testimony, or depend for their grounding on other beliefs so derived. The primary concern of philosophy regarding testimony is epistemological: to explain the status as potentially justified and knowledgeable of beliefs depend on testimony. Suppose we say that, strictly, the epistemology of testimony concerns the epistemic status of a hearer H's belief that P, acquired through H being told that P by a testifier T, and H trusting T. Normative epistemology will tell us the conditions, if any, under which a belief acquired through testimony could and would be justified, and whether and how a belief system with extensive dependence on testimony can be so. Descriptive psychology will tell us what human belief acquisition through testimony is actually like, and what extent of dependence on testimony our belief systems actually exhibit.
Given this distinction, we can divide our central issue about testimony along two dimensions, yielding four distinct questions to investigate, thus:
- Descriptive Local Question:
How do human hearers typically form belief in response to testimony? In particular, do they just trust their informant unthinkingly, blindly; or do they somehow (consciously, or sub-consciously) evaluate the informant for trustworthiness, and believe what they are told only if the evaluation is positive? (The process of testimony).
- Normative Local Question:
In what conditions, and with what controls, should a mature adult hearer believe what she is told, on some particular occasion? (Fresh instances of testimony, for an adult hearer.)
- Descriptive Global Question:
What is the actual place of testimony-beliefs overall, in a person's structure of empirical belief? What is the extent of dependence on testimony for grounding (epistemic dependence) of our beliefs? And what is the relation between testimony and our other sources of empirical belief: perception, memory, and deductive and inductive inference from empirical premisses?
- Normative Global Question:
How, if ever, can a system of beliefs with uneliminated epistemic dependence on testimony be justified?
For a philosopher who is ready to accept skeptical conclusions, where they arise from our initial suppositions, these descriptions and the normative issues are distinct. But for one, like yourself, who regards it as a datum to which our theorizing is answerable, that an epistemically responsible human believer's belief system is, broadly, justified, the philosophical task is to provide an epistemological account of testimony which explains this, rather than challenging it. We should accept the Attainability Constraint as such: take it as a fact that knowledge, and justified belief,can be and sometimes are gained through testimony. The Attainability Constraint links the descriptive with the normative: our normative theorizing is constrained by it to harmonize with the actual structure of dependence on testimony in our belief system, and with the actual process of testimony, including the psychology of human acquisition of belief through testimony. Thus, even if our driving interest is in normative matters, we had better pay close attention to these facts about the psychology of acquisition of belief through testimony.
THE SCOPE OF TESTIMONY
The methodological assumption in this case is that there are some illuminating general things to be said about how the process of telling yields justified belief and knowledge, when it does; and as a corollary, the circumstances in which beliefs acquired through this process, and still dependent on it for their grounding - what we called testimonybeliefs - are justified or are knowledge. (Compare this with the parallel assumption for perception). In contrast with, places restrictions first, on what the belief is, which is formed as a result of observing the assertion: only a belief in the content that has been asserted is a testimony-belief, a belief acquired through testimony, in our intended sense. (Though, to repeat: a hearer may acquire many other justified beliefs as a result of observing a piece of testimony - that the speaker is in a bad temper, that she comes from a certain region, and so forth). Our hope is, that there is something illuminating and general to be said, about how a justified belief or knowledge can sometimes be acquired through the process of understanding what one is told, and trusting the teller - believing what she says, on her say-so. In fact, tellings are a sub-class of assertions, and believing what one is told is the central paradigm of the kind picked out by. What a hearer will typically be able to perceive to be the case is this: that S has asserted that P to her. To build into the definition of testimony that it is from an expert, or is true, would mask this epistemological problem faced by the hearer.
REFERENCE : ELIZABETII FRICKER (TESTIMONY- KNOWING THROUGH BEING TOLD)
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