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Circular testimony

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Abstract

According to internalist theories of testimony, beliefs based on what others say are justified by the reasons a listener uses in forming her belief. I identify a distinctive type of testimonial situation, which I call circular testimony and argue that a certain type of circular testimony establishes the incompleteness of internalist theories of testimony.

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Notes

  1. See Burge (1993, 1997), Faulkner (2006, 2011), Owens (2000) and Wright (2014, 2015b).

  2. See Dretske (1982), Goldberg (2010), Graham (2000, 2006, 2010), Lackey (2008) and Sosa (2010).

  3. Of course, if we don't find such a correlation, then it's highly plausible that our beliefs based on testimony aren't justified anyway.

  4. See also Hawley (2010). Indeed, by forming beliefs using testimony in this way, we might come to form a justified belief in something that a speaker did not say, as Goldberg (2001) observes.

  5. Some theories that identify themselves as internalist would deny this characterisation. Epistemological disjunctivists, such as McDowell (1994, 1995, 2002) and Pritchard (2012) deny this, as do mentalist theories, such as the one given by Conee and Feldman (2004).

  6. The idea that the lack of independence between Stacy's testimony and Agatha's perception prevents Agatha's overall justification being enhanced is widely endorsed elsewhere. It appears in discussions of coherentism as a theory of knowledge and justification in the work of BonJour (1985), Coady (1992), Cohen (1982), Elgin (2005), Lewis (1946) and Olsson (2005).

  7. Goldman (2001) describes this kind of unhesitating belief as similar to treating someone as an epistemic guru.

  8. In a case where there is such an increase, internalist theories are liable to mislocate the source of the increase in justification.

  9. This is the essence of Madison's (2015) response to Wright (2015a).

  10. Something like this intuition appears in MacFarlane's (2005) discussion of knowledge laundering, which is presented as an objection to transmission theories.

  11. There is also a second problem for this strategy. A case in which Agatha has no justification for thinking that Jesus College is on fire, but simply tells her friend it is could yield circular testimony with a similarly problematic characterisation for internalists. This cannot be explained in terms of perception swamping testimony because there is no perceptual justification in this picture.

  12. Alternative conceptions of the distinction between reductionism and anti-reductionism are given by Faulkner (2011) and Fricker (1994, 1995).

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  1. Jesus College, University of Oxford, Turl Street, Oxford, OXI 3DW, UK

    Stephen Wright

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Wright, S. Circular testimony. Philos Stud 173, 2029–2048 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-015-0595-x

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