The epistemology of testimony has experienced a growth in interest over the last twenty-five years that has been matched by few, if any, other areas of philosophy. _Testimony: A Philosophical Introduction _provides an epistemology of testimony that surveys this rapidly growing research area while incorporating a discussion of relevant empirical work from social and developmental psychology, as well as from the interdisciplinary study of knowledge-creation in groups. The past decade has seen a number of scholarly monographs on the epistemology of (...) testimony, but there is a dearth of books that survey the current field. This book fills that gap, assessing the strengths and weaknesses of all major competing theories. All chapters conclude with Suggestions for Further Reading and Discussion Questions. (shrink)

How does the monitoring of a testifier's credibility by recipients of testimony bear upon the epistemic licence accruing to a recipient's belief in the testifier's communications? According to an intuitive and philosophically influential conception, licensed acceptance of testimony requires that recipients of testimony monitor testifiers with respect to their credibility. I argue that this conception, however, proves to be untenable when confronted with the wealth of empirical evidence bearing on the ways in which testifiers and their interlocutors actually interact.

In what follows, I appeal to Charles Babbage’s discussion of the division of mental labor to provide evidence that—at least with respect to the social acquisition, storage, retrieval, and transmission of knowledge—epistemologists have, for a broad range of phenomena of crucial importance to actual knowers in their epistemic practices in everyday life, failed adequately to appreciate the significance of socially distributed cognition. If the discussion here is successful, I will have demonstrated that a particular presumption widely held within the contemporary (...) discussion of the epistemology of testimony—a presumption that I will term the personalist requirement—fails to account for those very practices of knowers that I detail here. I will then conclude by suggesting that an alternate account of testimonial warrant, one that has heretofore been underappreciated, ought to be given more serious consideration—in particular because it is well suited to account for those actual practices of knowers that the personalist requirement leaves unrecognized. (shrink)

In this paper I focus on John Locke as a representative figure of English Enlightenment theorizing about the legitimacy of cognitive authority and examine the way in which a greater attention to the cultural milieu in which Locke worked can lead to a profound reexamination of his writings on cognitive authority. In particular, I suggest that an inattention to the rise of a culture of reading and the growing availability of books in Early Modern England has led historians of philosophy (...) largely to misrepresent Locke's theory of testimonial justification. At the core of my paper are two interrelated claims. First, with respect to the history of ideas, I argue that the Locke's interest in testimony as a source of justification was in fact greater than that of his Scholastic forebears, and that this fact has a simple, if as yet unacknowledged, cultural cause -- viz., the rise of the book as a mass commodity in the late 17th century. Second, with respect to the history of philosophy more particularly, I argue that this failure to acknowledge the cultural movements that led to a consideration of testimony as a topic of interest to epistemologists in the Modern era has led to a misreading of Locke's work on the subject. Indeed, Locke, though usually read as having attempted to denigrate testimony as a legitimate source of justification, in fact sought to devise an epistemology that would do justice to the centrality of testimony in the intellectual lives of growing numbers of his contemporaries in 17th and 18th century England and Scotland. (shrink)

In his recent paper ‘Knowing What Things Look Like’, Matthew McGrath offers a challenge to the idea that knowing an object by seeing it, ‘visual objectual knowledge’ is an instance of immediate knowledge. I offer supporters of the notion of immediate visual objectual knowledge two potential strategies for blocking McGrath’s argument: either by questioning McGrath’s claim about the role that knowing what an object looks like plays in visual objectual knowledge or by denying that any explanation of how knowing what (...) an object looks like plays that role must proceed through an appeal to factual knowledge involving that object’s looks. (shrink)

The debate concerning the role of intuitions in philosophy has been characterized by a fundamental disagreement between two main camps. The first, the autonomists, hold that, due to the use in philosophical investigation of appeals to intuition, most of the central questions of philosophy can in principle be answered by philosophical investigation and argument without relying on the sciences. The second, the naturalists, deny the possibility of a priori knowledge and are skeptical of the role of intuition in providing evidence (...) in philosophical inquiry. In spite of the seemingly stark and deep disagreement between the autonomist and the naturalist, in this paper I will attempt to suggest that there is a way to mount a partial defense of intuition-based philosophical practice on naturalist grounds. As will be seen, doing so will require a number of concessions that will satisfy few autonomists while simultaneously disappointing those naturalists who might have thought that all notions of the a priori had been successfully laid to rest. However, I will argue that the account proposed here will preserve those features of traditional philosophical practice that matter most and better explain the history of successes and failures of that practice, thus answering the worries of the autonomist, and that the rejection of the No A Priori Thesis attendant with the account presented here is indeed demanded by the current theories of our best scientific understanding of the mind, thus pacifying the rabid naturalistic critic of any version of apriorism. (shrink)

Much of what we know results from information sources on which we epistemically rely. This fact about epistemic reliance, however, stands in tension with a very powerful intuition governing knowledge, an intuition that Pritchard (e.g., 2010) has termed the “ability intuition,” the idea that a believer's “reliable cognitive faculties are the most salient part of the total set of causal factors that give rise to [their] believing the truth” (Vaesen, 2011, p. 518; compare Greco, 2003; 2009; 2010). In this paper (...) I suggest that this tension may indeed be ineliminable. I proceed by canvassing some representative attempts to reconcile epistemic reliance and the ability intuition. In doing so, I suggest that all of these attempts founder on one or the other of two elements of what I've previously described (Shieber, 2013, 2015) as a “personalist presumption” in discussions of social epistemology: an excessive focus on (i) reliability filters within the persons who are the recipients of information or (ii) on reliable truth‐tracking and ‐conveying abilities in the persons who are the transmitters of information. In conclusion, I suggest how best to resolve the tension: by abandoning the ability intuition. (shrink)

The theory of epistemic vigilance posits that -- to quote the eponymous paper that introduced the theory -- “humans have a suite of cognitive mechanisms for epistemic vigilance, targeted at the risk of being misinformed by others." Despite the widespread acceptance of the theory of epistemic vigilance, however, I argue that the theory is a poor fit with the evidence: while there is good reason to accept that people ARE vigilant, there is also good reason to believe that their vigilance (...) is NOT epistemic. Rather, the evidence actually supports an alternative theory, one that I dub the theory of "Machiavellian vigilance": humans have a suite of cognitive mechanisms for Machiavellian vigilance, targeted at tracking others' relative social status and maintaining or enhancing one's own status. The evidence against epistemic vigilance stems from three sources: (a) data demonstrating that people are terrible at detecting honesty or competence, (b) data demonstrating that our vigilance is phylogenetically prior to the development of homo sapiens, and therefore was not designed to be sensitive to linguistic communication, and (c) data demonstrating that people's sources of information are distributed, and not detectable through individual vigilance. The evidence in favor of Machiavellian vigilance is the mirror image of the evidence against epistemic vigilance: (a) data demonstrating that people are very accurate at detecting status, (b) data demonstrating that social species, including bonobos and chimps, track the social status of their conspecifics, and (c) data demonstrating that people can quickly track status even in new social groups. (shrink)

In this paper I discuss some underlying motivations common to most strands of experimental philosophy, noting that most forms of experimental philosophy have a commitment to the claim that certain empirical evidence concerning the level of agreement on intuitive judgments across cultures, ethnic groups or socioeconomic strata impugns the role that intuitions play in traditional “armchair” philosophy. I then develop an argument to suggest that, even if one were to grant the truth of the data adduced by experimentalists regarding the (...) level of agreement—or lack thereof—regarding intuitive judgments among various groups, this would nevertheless not yet provide sufficient basis to reject the role of intuitions in traditional philosophical theorizing. Though this argument, if successful, will not prove fatal to all forms of experimental philosophy, it would limit the scope of experimental philosophical criticisms of traditional philosophical practice. (shrink)

In this paper, I take up an argument advanced by Keith DeRose (Philosophical Review, 111:167–203, 2002) that suggests that the knowledge account of assertion provides the basis of an argument in favor of contextualism. I discuss the knowledge account as the conjunction of two theses—a thesis claiming that knowledge is sufficient to license assertion KA and one claiming that knowledge is necessary to license assertion AK. Adducing evidence from Stalnaker’s account of assertion, from conversational practice, and from arguments often raised (...) in favor of the knowledge account, I suggest that neither the AK nor the KA theses are plausible. That is, I argue that the knowledge account of assertion to which DeRose appeals is in fact not suitable as an account of assertion. Given that DeRose’s argument stands and falls with the knowledge account, I claim that the argument therefore fails. (shrink)

In this paper, I develop and discuss an argument intended to demonstrate that the Molinist notion of middle knowledge, and in particular the concept of counterfactuals of freedom, is incompatible with the notion of personal responsibility (for created creatures). In Sect. 1, I discuss the Molinist concepts of middle knowledge and counterfactuals of freedom. In Sect. 2, I develop an argument (henceforth, the Transfer of Negative Responsibility Argument, or TNRA) to the effect that, due to their construal of the concepts (...) of middle knowledge and counterfactuals of freedom, Molinists are not entitled to the notion that individuals are personally responsible—even for those actions that they freely perform. I then discuss the only two promising strategies for rejecting the argument in Sects. 3 and 4. Finally, in Sect. 5, I contend that, although TNRA may be unsuccessful as an internal argument against the Molinist, either of the possible strategies for rejecting TNRA poses a difficulty for the Molinist. Both response strategies force the Molinist into adopting a popular compatibilist strategy for rejecting a common negative argument against compatibilism. Thus, if Molinism represents a libertarian—i.e., incompatibilist—account of human freedom (as, e.g., Flint claims in his recent Divine Providence: The Molinist Account , noting that libertarianism is one of the “twin bases of Molinism”), then the discussion of TNRA poses, if not a dilemma , at the very least a serious challenge for the Molinist. (shrink)

Ernest Sosa has suggested that we distinguish between animal knowledge, on the one hand, and reflective knowledge, on the other. Animal knowledge is direct, immediate, and foundationally structured, while reflective knowledge involves a knower's higher‐order awareness of her own mental states, and is structured by relations of coherence. -/- Although Sosa's distinction is extremely appealing, it also faces serious problems. In particular, the sorts of processes that would be required for reflective knowledge, as Sosa understands it, are not processes that (...) are instantiated in human cognition. -/- I argue that the problems facing Sosa's notion of reflective knowledge stem from treating human cognitive processes individualistically. They stem from what I will term Sosa's perspective of methodologically individualistic noetic explanation—or MINE. -/- I suggest that these problems disappear if we expand the scope of what counts as cognitive processes to include socially distributed cognitive processes, if we adopt a framework of other‐derived united reflective self‐evaluation—or OURS. -/- In other words, I'll suggest that a solution to the problems facing the distinction between animal and reflective knowledge may be found in a shift of perspective from MINE to OURS. (shrink)

Most discussions of the epistemology of testimony include personalist requirements. These include either requirements that stipulate certain features that individual testifiers must have in order to count as transmitters of knowledge, or that stipulate certain features that individual recipients of testimony must have in order to count as acquiring knowledge on the basis of that testimony. For example, in the former case, many views require that testifiers be competent and honest, whereas, in the latter case, many views require that recipients (...) of testimony employ faculties for reliably assessing the competence and honesty of testifiers. After presenting and discussing problems for both of these personalist requirements, in this chapter we consider a social epistemology of testimony based on socially distributed cognitive systems, an epistemology of testimony that eschews both forms of personalist requirement. (shrink)

This paper uses recent research in developmental psychology regarding the acquisition of the concept of belief in young children to explore the contrast between a disposition-based account of the principles underlying linguistic communication and the representative and highly influential intention-based accounts of assertional practice advanced by David Lewis and Donald Davidson. Indeed, evidence from recent work in developmental psychology would seem to suggest that disposition-based accounts are not only possible accounts of the acquisition of competence in assertional practice, but are (...) in fact better than their rivals in explaining the way such competence is actually acquired. (shrink)

In this paper I consider one of the influential challenges to the notion that perceptual experience might be completely conceptually structured, a challenge that rests on the idea that conceptual structure cannot do justice to the fineness of grain of perceptual experience. In so doing, I canvass John McDowell's attempt to meet this challenge by appeal to the notion of demonstrative concepts and review some criticisms recently leveled at McDowell's deployment of demonstrative concepts for this purpose by Sean D. Kelly. (...) Finally, I suggest that, though Kelly's criticisms might challenge McDowell's original presentation of demonstrative concepts, a modified notion of demonstrative concepts is available to the conceptualist that is proof against Kelly's criticisms. (shrink)

This is an early, alternative version of the paper that became Shieber 2013, “Toward a truly social epistemology: Babbage, the division of mental labor, and the possibility of socially distributed warrant,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 86(2), pp. 266-294. This paper differs from the later paper in a few notable respects. In this earlier paper – written in 2008-9 – I use Hutchins to illustrate the phenomenon of socially distributed cognitive processes, rather than Babbage, and I discuss the attributes of such (...) cognitive processes in greater detail. (shrink)

In a number of recent articles, Hartry Field has attempted to reclaim the a priori for his own brand of non‐factualist epistemology by introducing a non‐epistemic notion of the a priori based purely upon the position of individual beliefs within belief systems. In this article we examine (i) whether a robust enough notion of aprioricity is available to Field, and, by extension, to the radical empiricist and (ii) whether it is possible to connect up the non‐epistemic notion of aprioricity with (...) questions about the epistemic status of those beliefs that happen to be a priori in the non‐epistemic sense. (shrink)

An introduction to the theory of knowledge in a 24-lecture audio/video series with accompanying book.