Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-8mjnm Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-28T00:38:54.793Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Wikipedia and the Epistemology of Testimony

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 January 2012

Abstract

In “Group Testimony” (2007) I argued that the testimony of a group cannot be understood (or at least cannot always be understood) in a summative fashion; as the testimony of some or all of the group members. In some cases, it is the group itself that testifies. I also argued that one could extend standard reductionist accounts of the justification of testimonial belief to the case of testimonial belief formed on the basis of group testimony. In this paper, I explore the issue of group testimony in greater detail by focusing on one putative source of testimony, that of Wikipedia. My aim is to the answer the following questions: Is Wikipedia a source of testimony? And if so, what is the nature of that source? Are we to understand Wikipedia entries as a collection of testimonial statements made by individuals, some subset of individuals, or is Wikipedia itself (the organization or the Wikipedia community) the entity that testifies? If Wikipedia itself is a source of testimony, what resources do we have for assessing the trustworthiness of such an unusual epistemic source? In answering these questions I hope to further elucidate the nature of collective epistemic agency (Tollefsen 2006), of which group testimony is a paradigm example.

When a mans Discourse begineth…at some saying of another, of whose ability to know the truth, and of whose honesty in not deceiving, he doubteth not; and then the Discourse is not so much concerning the Thing, as the Person; and the Resolution is called Beleefe, and Faith: Faith in the man. (1651/1991, Ch. 7; p. 48)

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2009

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Adler, J. 1994. “Testimony, Trust, Knowing.” The Journal of Philosophy 91(5): 264–75.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Beatty, J. 2006. “Masking Disagreement Among Experts.” Episteme, A Journal of Social Epistemology 3(1–2): 5267.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Burge, T. 1993. “Content Preservation.” Philosophical Review 102(4): 456–89.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Coady, C. A. J. 1992. Testimony: A Philosophical Study. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Fallis, D. 2008. “Toward an Epistemology of Wikipedia.” Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 59: 1662–74.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fricker, E. 1995. “Telling and Trusting: Reductionism and Anti-reductionism in the Epistemology of Testimony.” Mind 104: 393411.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fricker, M. 2007. Epistemic Injustice. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hobbes, T. 1651/1991. Leviathan. Tuck, R. (ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Hughes, J. 1984. “Group Speech Acts.” Linguistics and Philosophy 7: 379–95.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lackey, J. 2006. “The Nature of Testimony.” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 87: 177–97.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Magnus, P. D. 2006. “Epistemology and the Wikipedia.” Paper presented at the North American Computing and Philosophy conference. Retrieved November 22, 2007 from http://hdl.handle.net/1951/42589Google Scholar
Meijers, A. 2007. “Collective Speech Acts.” In Tsohatzidis, S. (ed.), Intentional Acts and Institutional Facts: Essays on John Searle's Social Ontology, pp. 93112. New York: Springer.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Moran, R. 2006. “Getting Told and Being Believed.” In Lackey, J. and Sosa, E. (eds.), The Epistemology of Testimony, pp. 272306. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Newman, M. L., Pennebaker, J. W., Berry, D. S., and Richards, J. M.. 2003. “Lying Words: Predicting Deception from Linguistic Styles.” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 29: 665–75.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Sosa, E. 1991. Knowledge in Perspective: Selected Essays in Epistemology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tollefsen, D. 2006. “The Need for Collective Epistemology.” In Schulte-Ostermann, K., Stekeler-Weithofer, P. and Psarros, N. (eds.), Facets of Sociality: Philosophical Approaches to Co-Operative Action, pp. 309–30. Frankfurt, Germany: Ontos Verlag.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tollefsen, D. 2007. “Group Testimony.” Social Epistemology 21(3): 299311.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wikipedia contributors. “Wikipedia: About.” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved November 6, 2008, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:AboutGoogle Scholar
Williams, B. 2002. Truth and Trustfulness: An Essay in Genealogy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar