The philosophy of testimony (also, epistemology 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. This definition may be distinguished from the legal notion of testimony in that the speaker does not have to make a declaration of the truth of the facts. The role of

testimony Testimony is a solemn attestation as to the truth of a matter. Etymology The words "testimony" and "testify" both derive from the Latin word ''testis'', referring to the notion of a disinterested third-party witness. Law In the law, testimon ...

in acquiring belief and knowledge has been a relatively neglected philosophical issue. CAJ (Tony) Coady believes that this is because traditional

epistemology Epistemology is the branch of philosophy that examines the nature, origin, and limits of knowledge. Also called "the theory of knowledge", it explores different types of knowledge, such as propositional knowledge about facts, practical knowle ...

has had a distinctly individualist flavour. However, it seems that many of the beliefs that we hold have been gained through accepting testimony. For example, one may only know that

Kent Kent is a Ceremonial counties of England, ceremonial county in South East England. It is bordered by Essex across the Thames Estuary to the north, the Strait of Dover to the south-east, East Sussex to the south-west, Surrey to the west, and Gr ...

is a county of

England England is a Countries of the United Kingdom, country that is part of the United Kingdom. It is located on the island of Great Britain, of which it covers about 62%, and List of islands of England, more than 100 smaller adjacent islands. It ...

or that David Beckham earns $30 million per year because one has learned these things from other people. A more striking example is the belief about one's own birthdate. If you know your birthdate, the evidence for your belief was almost certainly received through testimony. One of the problems with acquiring knowledge through testimony is that it does not seem to live up to the standards of knowledge (see justification of knowledge in philosophy ). As Owens notes, it does not seem to live up to the Enlightenment ideal of rationality captured in the motto of the

Royal Society The Royal Society, formally The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, is a learned society and the United Kingdom's national academy of sciences. The society fulfils a number of roles: promoting science and its benefits, re ...

– ‘Nullius in verba (Into the word of no one)’. The Royal Society interprets this as "take nobody's word for it." Crudely put, the question is: 'How can testimony give us knowledge when we have no reasons of our own?' Coady suggests that there are two approaches to this problem: *Reductivism, which seeks to ‘reduce’ or re-describe our behaviour such that it is not at odds with the traditional view of knowledge and *Anti-reductivism, which seeks to fit our behaviour in with a different concept of knowledge. For example, we may compare it to an account of how

perception Perception () is the organization, identification, and interpretation of sensory information in order to represent and understand the presented information or environment. All perception involves signals that go through the nervous syste ...

gives us knowledge or how

memory Memory is the faculty of the mind by which data or information is encoded, stored, and retrieved when needed. It is the retention of information over time for the purpose of influencing future action. If past events could not be remembe ...

gives us knowledge directly. Hume is one of the few early philosophers to offer anything like a sustained account of testimony, this can be found in his ''‘An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding’'' in the section on miracles. The basic idea is that our justification for believing what people tell us comes from our experience of the ‘...constant and regular conjunction’Hume, 1993, p. 74 between the state of affairs as people describe it and the actual state of affairs (i.e. our observation that they match). On Coady's schema he is a reductivist. Coady offers an anti-reductivist account of testimony. He claims that testimony is like perception, we don't have to have reasons for believing it, only an absence of reasons not to believe it. On Coady's account we are justified in being credulous. Proponents of anti-reductivism in the history of philosophy include

Augustine of Hippo Augustine of Hippo ( , ; ; 13 November 354 – 28 August 430) was a theologian and philosopher of Berber origin and the bishop of Hippo Regius in Numidia, Roman North Africa. His writings deeply influenced the development of Western philosop ...

and Thomas Reid. Perhaps also significant is that

Bertrand Russell Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, (18 May 1872 – 2 February 1970) was a British philosopher, logician, mathematician, and public intellectual. He had influence on mathematics, logic, set theory, and various areas of analytic ...

argued that knowledge by acquaintance played an important part in epistemology.

Notes

References

* Coady, C.A.J. (1992), ''‘Testimony; A Philosophical Study’'', Clarendon Press, Oxford. * Gelfert, A. (2014), ''‘A Critical Introduction to Testimony’'', Bloomsbury Academic, London. * Owens, D. (2000), ''‘Reason without Freedom: The Problem of Epistemic Normativity’'', Routledge, London. * Shieber, J. (2015), "Testimony: A Philosophical Introduction", Routledge, London. * Hume, D. (1748), ''‘An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding’'', Hackett Publishing Company, Cambridge.

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