Abstract
Our dependence upon the word of others can be shown to be extensive and deep. We exhibit such dependence, though seldom acknowledge it explicitly, in our confident knowledge claims and actions in everyday life as well as in our more theoretical pursuits. In everyday life, we automatically relay sporting scores and judicial verdicts, we accept new financial burdens on the basis of reported pay increases, and we plan holidays on the basis of geographical, transport and accommodation information from others. In the sciences, we talk of what is known and has been proved in hosts of instances where we have not done the proving or “done the knowing”, and often this is in contexts where we wouldn’t have the individual resources for the relevant investigations anyway.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
J. L. Mackie, “The Possibility of Innate Knowledge”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society (1970) p. 254.
A more comprehensive assault upon the model is contained in my book Testimony: A Philosophical Study, Oxford University Press, 1992. The present article is a revised version of a chapter in the book and contains a radically rewritten account of my original critique of Hume’s views which first appeared as “Testimony and Observation” in the American Philosophical Quarterly 10(1973). That article has been extensively cited in the growing literature on testimony, and the present extended, clarified and developed version may be of particular interest because of that.
Sect. 88, David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Oxford, 1957. All quotations hereafter from this work are taken from L. A. Selby-Bigge’s Second Edition of the Enquiriespublished by Clarendon Press, Oxford. Bracketed page references in my text are to that edition.
J. L. Mackie, op. cit., p. 254.
See, in addition to the contributions in this volume, Bimal Krishna Matilal, The Word and the World: India’s Contribution to the Study of Language, Oxford University Press, 1990, especially, Chapter 6.
Ibid.
Ibid.
It may appear that part of this difficulty could be met by recourse to the qualification “report of a so-called expert” but this is mere appearance since we require some assurance that we are checking the reports of those who are not merely self-styled experts but widely acknowledged as such and this sort of assurance could only be had by reliance upon testimony.
There is perhaps a problem in working out what he is up to and hence a puzzle as to how we are even entitled to speculate that his utterance means thisbut suppose that there is enough about his behaviour to permit us to conclude that he is soliloquizing in the fashion of one who is struck by the existence of that particular tree in that particular garden.
My remarks are specifically about public languages. I do not mean to deny the possibility of private languages. Whatever sense can be given to the idea of a private language, the possibility or indeed existence of such languages is irrelevant to the problems about testimony discussed, since testimony essentially involves communication in a public language. Wittgenstein’s objections to be possibility of a (certain sort of) private language have never seemed to me persuasive though I cannot be certain that I have understood the argument(s).
I have not of course proved that our reliance on testimony may not be “justified” in some other manner. Bertrand Russell, for one, has attempted in Human Knowledge; its Scope and Limits, (New York, 1948) to justify testimony by recourse to a principle of analogy and H. H. Price in Belief(London and New York, 1969) by recourse to a methodological rule. I discuss their views in my book.
Part of Elizabeth Fricker’s argument for the view that testimony is “a secondary and not a primary epistemic link” seems to depend on the assumption that the sort of evidence a person must have for the reliability of a witness if he is to be credited with knowledge of some reported fact has to be non-testimonial. See her “The Epistemology of Testimony” in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume LX1 (1987), especially section III, and particularly pp. 75–78. Her general position puts her close to Hume (with certain important qualifications) and her claim that “testimony is not an autonomous source of knowledge” (p. 78) is very much in the spirit of the outlook I am criticising.
An analogy between the difficulties facing Hume’s purported justification of testimony and those facing such a justification of memory is drawn by George Campbell in his perceptive essay A Dissertation on Miraclespublished in 1762 by Kincaid and Bell, Edinburgh. Campbell’s critique of Hume is mostly concerned to vindicate theological reliance upon some miracles but his first three sections offer a penetrating critique of Hume’s philosophical assumptions concerning testimony. Some of his comments foreshadow part of my case against Hume. He detects, for instance, the ambiguity inherent in Hume’s use of “experience” and accuses him of arguing in a circle if relying upon communal experience (which he calls “derived”) to justify testimony and of restricting the scope of our knowledge absurdly if relying upon personal experience to turn the trick. The first point he handles well but the second is not properly developed. He does not discuss the language or correlation problems raised here at all. I became acquainted with Campbell’s essay only when rewriting my original article “Testimony and Observation” (American Philosophical Quarterly, 1973). The dissertation has recently been rescued from long and unjustified neglect by Lewis White Beck and reprinted by Garland Publishing (New York, 1983).
I have discussed some of the issues associated with intellectual autonomy in my book and there is an interesting discussion of cognitive autonomy in Frederick F. Schmitt, “Justification, Sociality and Autonomy” in Synthese, Vol. 73 (1987). I have benefited from reading Margaret M. Coady’s Master of Education thesis “Authority, Reason and Education” (University of Melbourne, 1972) and her paper, “Autonomy and Individualism” in the Cambridge Journal of Education (1974). Another good article on intellectual autonomy, which deserves to the better known and which is sensitive to the difficulties faced by reductive approaches to be epistemology of testimony, is Anthony Quinton’s paper, “Authority and Autonomy in Knowledge” in Proceedings of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain, Supplementary Issue, Vol. 5 No. 2, 1971.
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
Coady, C.A.J. (1994). Testimony, Observation and “Autonomous Knowledge”. 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_11
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-2018-2_11
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-90-481-4287-3
Online ISBN: 978-94-017-2018-2
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive