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Internalism in the Epistemology of Testimony

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Abstract

This paper objects to internalist theories of justification from testimony on the grounds that they can’t accommodate intuitions about a pair of cases. The pair of cases involved is a testimonial version of the cases involved in the New Evil Demon Argument. The role of New Evil Demon cases in motivating contemporary internalist theories of knowledge and justification notwithstanding, it is argued here that testimonial cases make an intuitive case against internalist theories of justification from testimony.

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Notes

  1. See Goldman (1999), Goldberg (2010), Graham (2000a, b, 2006), Lackey (2008) and Sosa (2006).

  2. See Burge (1993), Coady (1992), Faulkner (2011), Keren (2007), Wright (2014).

  3. It’s important that the required relation is one of basing rather than inferring. In this way internalist theories of justification from testimony, like internalist theories of justification in general can (at least in principle) be either foundationalist or nonfoundationalist. I’m grateful to a reviewer for Erkenntnis for pointing this out to me.

  4. See Fricker (1994, 1995, 2006a, b), Fumerton (2006) and Lehrer (2006).

  5. This restricts the case to accessibilist theories and excludes mentalist theories. The reasons for this are twofold. The first is that applying mentalism to testimony yields a theory that resembles a transmission theory by another name. See Williamson (2000). The second is that the distinctively internalist intuitions motivate accessibilism over mentalism. See Bergmann (2006).

  6. In both (I) and (TI), the notion of something being reflectively accessible to the listener in question involves the listener being aware of it.

  7. See Adler (2002), Lyons (1997) and Shogenji (2006). It's traditional, though controversial, to trace this view back to Hume. Kusch and Lipton (2002) do just this.

  8. See Fricker (1994, 1995, 2006a) Lipton (2007) and Malmgren (2006).

  9. Gibbons then goes on to try and do exactly this. Brueckner (2011) argues that he doesn't succeed.

  10. Of course, an internalist theory might attempt to claim that the listeners are alike with respect to justification but aren’t alike with some other epistemic property relevant to, say knowledge. This still amounts to a serious concession from the internalist, however, since it devalues justification, as internalists conceive of it, detaching it from knowledge.

  11. By “the full facts of the situation” here, I mean the full facts about the speakers and their diagnostic competences. The fact that each of them actually has condition α is excluded from “the full facts” for obvious reasons.

  12. The brain will presumably form some true beliefs, such as the belief that Paris is the capital of France, that gold has the atomic number 79 and that whales are mammals. Importantly, however, these are ones that are not formed through reliable perceptual processes.

  13. This view is also shared by Pritchard (2012) and Sutton (2005, 2007), albeit in different ways. Sutton holds that only knowledge can provide justification for beliefs because justification just is knowledge. This claim is also shared by Unger (1975) and Williamson (2000). The idea is that since brains in vats don’t have knowledge, nor do they have justification. Pritchard’s reasons for rejecting the internalist characterisations in the New Evil Demon cases come primarily from the idea that justification needs to be truth-conducive. Something like this intuition is what motivates the claim here, but Pritchard ultimately puts it to work in motivating the epistemological disjunctivist theory, which I’m not arguing for in the case of testimony here.

  14. See Fricker (1994, 1995). Arguments from gullibility are analogous to clairvoyant arguments for internalist theories of justification in general. I say “analogous” rather than identical to, because those that defend internalist theories of testimony often think that the intuitions are particularly strong when applied to testimony.

  15. By ‘competent at diagnosing’ in this context I mean someone who has the appropriate capabilities to pass the relevant examinations for admission into the medical profession. This idea is that condition β is just too complicated for this.

  16. I am grateful to Marthe Kerkwijk for pointing this out to me.

  17. Faulkner (2011) argues this point against McDowell (1994).

  18. Note that this doesn’t involve withdrawing the claim that the falsity of a listener’s belief might be internal.

  19. See McKinsey (1991). Pritchard (2012) argues that something similar can be argued away in the case of visual perception, but it's far from clear that any analogous strategy is available in the case of testimony.

  20. See Wright (2014).

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Acknowledgments

As well as two anonymous reviewers for Erkenntnis, I am grateful to Paul Faulkner, Miranda Fricker, Rob Hopkins, Duncan Pritchard, Eric Olson and an audience at the Early Career Philosophers’ Workshop at the University of Sheffield, particularly Paul Giladi and Marthe Kerkwijk.

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  1. University College, High Street, Oxford, OX1 4BH, UK

    Stephen Wright

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Wright, S. Internalism in the Epistemology of Testimony. Erkenn 81, 69–86 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-015-9729-y

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