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Abstract

This paper argues that as a name for a speech act, epistemologists typically use ‘testimony’ in a specialist sense that is more or less synonymous with ‘assertion’, but as a name for a distinctive speech act type in ordinary English, ‘testimony’ names a unique confirmative speech act type. Hence, like any good English word, ‘testimony’ has more than one sense. The paper then addresses the use of ‘testimony’ in epistemology to denote a distinctive kind of evidence: testimonial evidence. Standing views of a hearer’s testimonial evidence see it as partly supervening on a speaker’s assertion that P. The paper argues for a broader account that sees a hearer’s (receiver’s) testimonial evidence as partly supervening instead on the hearer’s representation as of a speaker meaning that P. This broader account is the comprehension view of testimonial evidence. The upshot is that not all so-called “testimony-based beliefs” are caused by a speaker’s testimony.

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Notes

  1. Lackey (2006) (as I interpret her) argues for the view that a speaker S testifies (simpliciter) that P by expression E iff (1) S intends to inform an audience that P partly in virtue of the conventional meaning of E or (2) partly in virtue of the conventional meaning of E, S’s utterance E helps explain how it is that a hearer H comes to believe or know that P. These are individually sufficient but disjunctively necessary for a speaker to testify (simpliciter) that P. She calls the first disjunct speaker’s-testimony and the second hearer’s-testimony. I think by speaker’s-testimony she simply means the speaker means that P to some A (or some still very broad subcategory of meaning that P to A). That is, by speaker’s-testimony she simply means S asserts (or more broadly constates) that P. Thus, her category of speaker’s-testimony is no exception to the point just made in the next. I shall make a comment on her category of hearer’s-testimony in the following note.

  2. Recall from the previous note that Lackey (2006) (as I interpret her) holds that a speaker S testifies (simpliciter) that P by expression E iff (1) S intends to inform an audience that P partly in virtue of the conventional meaning of E or (2) partly in virtue of the conventional meaning of E, S’s utterance E helps explain how it is that a hearer H comes to believe or know that P. She calls (2) hearer’s-testimony. Here I think she has in mind the hearer’s evidence, as defined by the broad view of testimonial evidence in the text. So her “disjunctive” view of testimony would be this: a speaker either testifies (simpliciter) that P by meaning that P to A, or provides testimonial evidence to another (intentionally or not) by meaning that P. Why does Lackey use this notion of hearer’s-testimony in her definition of a speaker’s testimony simpliciter? I think she reasons as follows: a testimony-based belief that P is based on testimonial evidence for P where that supervenes on a speaker having testified that P. So in her diary case, where she thinks the belief is testimony-based, it follows that the speaker must have testified (simpliciter) that P. But her argument for why the belief is testimony-based is the one I have just paraphrased in the text, an argument that supports a much broader interpretation of so-called “testimonial” evidence and “testimony-based” belief. So just as she argues that a hearer can have testimonial evidence that P even when there was no speaker that asserted that P to an audience, I argue that a hearer can have testimonial evidence that P even when no-one meant that P. By her own lights the broader, comprehension view of testimonial evidence is the better view.

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Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the anonymous referees for constructive comments that led to significant improvements, to valuable discussion with members of the Cologne Center for Epistemology and the Kantian Tradition at the University of Cologne, and to a research award from the Humboldt Foundation for support.

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Correspondence to Peter J. Graham.

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This article belongs to the topical collection “New Directions in Social Epistemology” edited by Adam Carter and Christoph Kelp.

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Graham, P.J. Typing testimony. Synthese 199, 9463–9477 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-021-03210-8

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