Internalism in the Epistemology of Testimony Redux
Erkenntnis 81 (4):741-755 (2016)
Abstract
In general, epistemic internalists hold that an individual’s justification for a belief is exhausted by her reflectively accessible reasons for thinking that the contents of her beliefs are true. Applying this to the epistemology of testimony, a hearer’s justification for beliefs acquired through testimony is exhausted by her reflectively accessible reasons to think that the contents of the speaker’s testimony is true. A consequence of internalism is that subjects that are alike with respect to their reflectively accessible reasons are alike with respect to what they have justification to believe. Testimony should be thought no different: hearers that are alike with respect to reflectively accessible reasons to think that a speaker’s testimony is true are alike with respect to their justification for beliefs based upon that testimony. But it has been recently argued that this view faces powerful counterexamples. So the central question is this: assuming that a hearer can acquire justification to believe a proposition through the testimony of a speaker, can epistemic internalism provide the resources to explain how such justification is possible? My aim in this paper is to address these counterexamples, and in so doing, defend epistemic internalist accounts of testimony.Author's Profile
DOI
10.1007/s10670-015-9765-7
My notes
Similar books and articles
Internalism and Externalism in the Epistemology of Testimony.Mikkel Gerken - 2013 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 87 (3):532-557.
Monitoring and Anti-Reductionism in the Epistemology of Testimony.Sanford Goldberg & David Henderson - 2006 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 72 (3):600 - 617.
Re-Thinking the Duplication of Speaker/Hearer Belief in the Epistemology of Testimony.Joel Buenting - 2005 - Episteme: Journal of Social Epistemology 2 (2):43-48.
Epistemic Internalism, Justification, and Memory.B. J. C. Madison - 2014 - Logos and Episteme 5 (1):33-62.
Testimony and Epistemic Risk: The Dependence Account.Karyn L. Freedman - 2015 - Social Epistemology 29 (3):251-269.
Moral Reasons for Moral Beliefs: A Puzzle for Moral Testimony Pessimism.Andrew Reisner & Joseph Van Weelden - 2015 - Logos and Episteme 6 (4):429-448.
Aesthetic testimony: What can we learn from others about beauty and art?Aaron Meskin - 2004 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 69 (1):65–91.
A defense of reductionism about testimonial justification of beliefs.Tomoji Shogenji - 2006 - Noûs 40 (2):331–346.
Epistemic Internalism, Content Externalism and the Subjective/Objective Justification Distinction.J. Adam Carter & S. Orestis Palermos - 2016 - American Philosophical Quarterly 53 (3):231-244.
Beliefs and Testimony as Social Evidence: Epistemic Egoism, Epistemic Universalism, and Common Consent Arguments.Joshua Rollins - 2015 - Philosophy Compass 10 (1):78-90.
A metaphilosophical dilemma for epistemic externalism.Pierre Le Morvan - 2005 - Metaphilosophy 36 (5):688-707.
Analytics
Added to PP
2015-08-14
Downloads
626 (#15,021)
6 months
60 (#20,814)
2015-08-14
Downloads
626 (#15,021)
6 months
60 (#20,814)
Historical graph of downloads
Author's Profile
Citations of this work
Epistemological problems of testimony.Jonathan E. Adler - 2006 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
What epistemologists of testimony should learn from philosophers of science.Sanford C. Goldberg - 2021 - Synthese 199 (5-6):12541-12559.
Eight journals over eight decades: a computational topic-modeling approach to contemporary philosophy of science.Christophe Malaterre, Francis Lareau, Davide Pulizzotto & Jonathan St-Onge - 2020 - Synthese 199 (1-2):2883-2923.
Epistemic internalism and testimonial justification.Jonathan Egeland - 2020 - Episteme 17 (4):458-474.
References found in this work
The Structure of Empirical Knowledge.Laurence BonJour - 1985 - Cambridge, MA, USA: Harvard University Press.