Abstract
It is a thesis traditional in Indian philosophy, advanced, for example, by D. M. Datta in Book VI of his The Six Ways of Knowing 1 and recently refurbished and redeployed by Arindam Chakravarti in this volume, that testimony (śabda) is an irreducible source and ground of knowledge. Western philosophers for the most part 2 have not so much refuted this thesis as underestimated its importance, anchoring their epistemologies in perception and inference. I think this is to be regretted, for it seems to me to be both important and true. Philosophers must come to terms with the central fact that most of our beliefs are based on testimony.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
University of Calcutta, 1960; first published in 1932.
Two twentieth century exceptions, W. P. Montagu in The Ways of Knowing(Macmillan, 1925) and H. H. Price in Belief(Allen and Unwin, 1969), are very much worth reading on this topic.
The Analysis of Mind(Allen and Unwin, 1921), p. 160.
Discourse on Method, first part.
Most historians appear simply to have ignored it, and still more the often elaborate refutations and reconstructions which a few philosophers managed to provide. On the other hand, doubts about the reliability of testimony seem to have been a factor in the effort from the 17th century on to find physicalevidence to corroborate the claims they made (the study of ancient coins was of particular importance in this connection). A more contemporary worry is that the documents left behind reflect the interests and perspective of particular social-economic classes or “elites” and thus are to be mistrusted.
One source of scepticism more generally about history than about the testimonial evidence on which it is based is that “history is written by the victors.” It is worth noting that Thucydides was a loser, although this fact too biases his account in the eyes of certain of his commentators who see in it an expression of thoroughgoing pessimism.
Following some suggestions of Collingwood, The Idea of History(Oxford University Press, 1946), pp. 25ff.
Book I, Chapter I, 22, from the Crawley translation.
I suspect, but certainly cannot prove, that historical practice from its beginning has been much more influenced by rules of evidence and legal practices than by the data-gathering methods of the natural sciences, not surprising in that it, like the court system, depends essentially on testimony (if also occasionally on hearsay). The wordhistor originally meant something like “judge” or “witness” (someone who resolves a difference of opinion between contesting parties) and was connected with the Greek court system. See Gerald A Press,The Development of the Idea of History in Antiquity ( McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1982 ), Chapter II.
Thucydides does not, in fact, give his own initial reports of what he witnessed privileged status. “And with reference to the narrative of events, far from permitting myself to derive it from the first source that came to hand, I did not even trust my own impressions… ” Personal experience does not take precedence over testimony.
Herodotus, too, makes obvious in the opening sentence of his Historythat he wants to set down the events connected with the Persian Wars before they are forgotten, but he is willing to extend his account to a remote past, a willingness (and a looseness) for which Thucydides criticises him. His acceptance of the testimony of Greek-speaking informants about the Asiatic background of the wars is not entirely uncritical (see I.5: “These are the stories of the Persians and the Phoenecians. For my part I am not going to say about these matters that they happened thus and thus… ”). Still, he passes along in a rather credulous way their explanations and descriptions of fantastic practices. Perhaps he was interested not so much in the truth of the explanations and descriptions as in the states of mind which they expressed (on the assumption that what people believe, not what they know, determines their behavior), perhaps he thought, like Hume much later, that all human beings share a common core of belief (e.g., II.3, “all men know equally about the gods” may be construed in this way), a thought that would allow him to admit cross-cultural and time-spanning testimony. See the very insightful introduction by David Grene to his translation of The History(University of Chicago Press, 1987).
Thus according to Thucydides, the ancient days of which the poets treat are “out of the reach of evidence” and time has “robbed most of them of historical value by enthroning them in the region of legend.”
A Treatise of Human Nature, edited by Selby-Bigge (Clarendon Press, 1888), page 83. It is significant, I think, that Hume has replaced Thucydides’ agreement among eye-witnesses with agreement among historians (who have sifted the evidence according to their critical standards) and theirtestimony. What might be called “second-level” agreement is now tantamount to truth, a further indication of our removefrom the past.
Ibid.
Treatise of Human Nature, Book I, Part III, Section XIII; Selby-Bigge edition, pp. 144–45.
Ibid., Selby-Bigge edition, p. 146.
Indeed, the word “copy” already suggests that no variation or interpretation is involved. 18 Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Section X; the Green and Grose edition of the Works(London, 1974) volume IV, pp. 90–91.
The apparent praise of testimony, coming as it does in the essay “Of Miracles,” a chief point of which is to show that “no testimony for any kind of miracle has ever amounted to a probability, much less to a proof,” has in fact struck some commentators as ironic. But for Hume to be ironic here would be to subvert all of his work as an historian.
That Hume himself was troubled by his assimilation of inference from testimony to causal reasoning is indicated by words that I have omitted: “This species of reasoning, perhaps, one may deny to be founded on the relation of cause and effect. I shall not dispute about a word.”
In the widely consulted The Modern Researcher(Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc., 1970), p. 149, Barzun and Graff summarize the critical method (as Hume might have understood it, and they continue to) as follows: “Faced with a piece of evidence, the critical mind of the searcher for truth asks the fundamental questions: Is this object or piece of writing genuine? Is its method trustworthy? How do I know? This leads to an unfolding series of subordinate questions: Who is its author or maker? What does it state? What is the relation in time and space between the author and the statement, overt or implied, that is conveyed by the object? How does the statement compare with other statements on the same point? What do we know independently about the author and his credibility?” And so on. Some points of method, in fact, go back to Thucydides. “The value of a piece of testimony usually increases in proportion to the nearness in time and space between the witness and the events about which he testifies…. A single witness may be quite accurate, but two witnesses, if independent, increase the chances of eliminating human fallibility.”
If Kant curbed the pretensions of reason in order to make room for faith, so we might say that Hume undermined physics so as to legitimate history.
Collingwood, The Idea of History, p. 74.
According to Hume anyone who wanted to know the character of the French and English had only to consult the history of the Greeks and Romans. As we have already seen, his defense of testimony rested in part on the existence of general laws concerning human behavior, these same general laws providing the basis for explanations of historical events. In Belief, pp. 112ff., Price raises some interesting questions about the grounds of the most immediately relevant of such putative “laws,” that most people tell the truth most of the time.
Thus Barzun and Graff, The Modern Researcher, p. 55: “… whether history is put to use in the present, or simply garnered out of curiosity, or enjoyed as an object of contemplation, we can frame its inclusive definition by saying: History is vicarious experience.”
Collingwood sometimes makes the point in a metaphysical way, by suggesting that since we can think the same thought as the author of the document, i.e., since thoughts are timeless, there is no need of an inference from present to past. But no metaphysical assumptions about thoughts and time are necessary. It is enough that in reconstructing the author’s context we must at the same time take into consideration what from our point of view are biases, etc.
“Hermeneutics and the Role of History,” New Literary History, 7 (1975–76), p. 214. 28 The American Historical Review, June, 1989, is devoted to it. I have drawn heavily on several of the articles included, notably David Harlan’s “Intellectual History and the Return of Literature.”
Narratives become “diversified, multifold, and full of contradictions” when fully understood. Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition(University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. xxiv.
“Linguistically, the author is never more than the instance writing, just as I is nothing more than the instance saying I;language knows a subject, not a person… ” Roland Barhes, Image, Text, Music(Hill and Wang, 1977), p. 145.
“The names of authors or of doctrines have here no substantial value. They indicate neither identities nor causes. It would be frivolous to think that ‘Descartes,’ ‘Leibniz,’ ’Rousseau,’ ’Hegel,’ etc., are names of authors, of the authors of movements or displacements that we thus designate. The indicative value that I attribute to them is first the name of a problem,” Jacques Derrida,Of Grammatology (Johns Hopkins, 1976 ), p. 99.
... the reconstruction of the Original circumstances, like all such restoration, is a pointless understaking in view of the historicity of our being. What is reconstructed, a life brought back from the lost past, is not the original. In its continuance in an estranged state it acquires only a secondary, cultural existence.“ Hans Georg Gadamer,Truth and Method (Seabury Press, 1975 ), p. 245.
“ writing is the deconstruction of every voice, of every point of origin, Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing.” Barthes, Image, Music, Text, p. 142.
The classic texts are J. L. Austin,How to Do Things With Words (Harvard University Press, 1963) and John Searle,Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language (Cambridge University Press, 1972 ).
Oral testimony is primary in the Indian tradition to which Datta and others belong. Thus his account is in a chapter entitled “The Validity of Verbal Knowledge,” and the whole discussion is framed in terms of the relations between speakers and hearers.
«,. the reader is absent from the act of writing; the writer is absent from the act of reading. The text thus produces a double eclipse of reader and writer.“ Paul Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences(Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 146.
It is clear at several places that he must have had access to letters and decrees.
There is a kind of ironic reversal here. In the perspective which the emphasis on writing and its problems forces on us, the oral tradition resumes its ancient epistemological priority (at a price for history long since noted), while Hume’s documentary tradition and the mainstream concept of “critical” history is undermined.
According to the traditional view, “whereas writers of fiction invented everything in their narratives… historians invented nothing but certain rhetorical flourishes or poetic effects… Recent theories of discourse, however, dissolve the distinction between realistic and fictional discourses based on the presumption of an ontological difference between their respective referents, real and imaginary… In these… theories of discourse, narrative is to be a particularly effective system of discursive meaning production by which individuals can be taught to live a distinctively ‘imaginary relation to their real conditions of existence,’ that is to say, an unreal but meaningful relation to the social formations in which they are indentured to live out their lives and realize their destinies as social subjects.” Hayden White, The Content of the Form(Johns Hopkins, 1987), p. x.
“ifrecent developments in literary criticism and the philosophy of language have indeed undermined belief in a stable and determinable past, denied the possibility of recovering authorial intention, and challenged the plausibility of historical representation, then contextualist-minded historians should stop insisting that every historian’s ‘first order of business’ must be to do what now seems undoable.” Harlan, “Intellectual History and the Return of Literature,” pp. 608–09.
There are other options and other theories of meaning. As one instance, Michael Walzer, Exodus and Revolution(Basic Books, 1985), p. 7: “In returning to the original text, I make no claims about the substantive intentions of its authors and editors, and I commit myself to no specific view of the actual history. What really happened? We don’t know. We have only this story, written down centuries after the events it describes.” We are, Walzer continues, “to discover its meaning in what it has meant” to subsequent generations. In proceeding thus, Walzer seems to admit both the old scepticism, that testimony (transmitted orally for the first several centuries) does not provide us with knowledge of the past, and the new, that the intentions in terms of which that testimony is to be interpreted and eventually understood are not recoverable.
Interested historians seem to have written much more about the implications of post-structuralist theory for their disciplines than they have written post-structuralist histories. Historians who, following Foucault, have emphasized the centrality of “discourses” in understanding the past have generallygrounded their claims in the usual old-fashioned way, by appealing to documents and reading them with aneye to their author’s (sometimes unconscious) intentions. For a notable recent example, see Josiah Ober,Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens (Princeton University Press, 1989 ).
See Alan Nevins, “The Case of the Cheating Documents,” in Robin Winks (ed.),The Historian as Detective (Harper and Row, 1968 ), pp. 201–02.
What follows is inspired by Donald Davidson’s well-known critique of cultural relativism; it is not intended as an accurate summary of his views. See “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme,” inInquiries into Truth and Interpretation ( Oxford University Press, 1984 ). Davidson’s discussion is framed in terms of a basic speaker-hearer situation. But I see no reason why it does not apply equally to the interpretation of documents and other texts. At the very least, it does not trade on the assumptions of speech act theory listed earlier, e.g., possession of a common language and the possibility of ostension.
Even the discovery of differences of any kind thus presupposes a very large degree of commonality. For amplification of this point and its application to the social sciences see Michael Root, “Davidson and Social Science,” in LePore (ed.),Truth and Interpretation (Basil Blackwell, 1986 ).
Our success also typically depends on such other factors as how well we can reconstruct the context in which the author wrote, although that too depends on interpreting still other testimony and rendering it reasonable in terms of our own styles of life.
In his chapter on testimony in Belief, Price clearly appreciates the difficulties with the Humean approach, but his own rather traditional empiricism prevents him (on my reading) from going far enough, to a frank admission that, if we are to understand others at all, we have no choice (at least initially) but to accept what they tell us as true.
I understand that to some the notion of a “literal level” is paradoxical, that there is nothing but metaphor, and so on. This point deserves extended discussion. But my short reply is to say that at the very least metaphors are parasitic on literal meanings. It is as if, to echo Frege’s criticism of Hilbert, all of the expressions in a language were to be implicitly defined.
This familiar point is, of course, due to W. V. Quine. See Word and Object(John Wiley, 1960), pp. 57ff.
An inscription discovered at Lyon, France, in 1528, gives part of an actual speech of the Emperor Claudius to the Senate which Tacitus reports in theAnnals 11.24. Moses Hadas, Introduction toThe Complete Works of Tacitus (Random House, 1942), p. xvi, asserts that they are quite different. In fact, although Tacitus gives no more than a summary of the speech, he seems to preserve at least some of Claudius’ concerns. See Document 175 inAncient Roman Statutes by Johnson, Coleman-Norton, and Bourne (University of Texas Press, 1961 ), pp. 145–46.
Tacitus himself, of course, never doubts the possibility of historical truth, although he adds in the first chapter of his Historiesthat “The truthfulness of history has been impaired in many ways; at first through men’s ignorance of public affairs, which were now wholly strange to them, then through their passion of flattery, or, on the other hand, their hatred of their masters.” From the Hadas edition, p. 419.
James Allard and Arindam Chakrabarti have made a number of very useful comments on an earlier draft of this paper, although neither would want to be in the least responsible for what remains.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1994 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Brittan, G. (1994). History, Testimony, and Two Kinds of Scepticism. 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_13
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-2018-2_13
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-90-481-4287-3
Online ISBN: 978-94-017-2018-2
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive