Tim Kenyon: Testimony, belief, and real people

Abstract
You say something to me, briefly and casually, and I gain knowledge of a distant and unfamiliar situation. How does this happen? And how could I be rationally justified in gaining so much from so little? Philosophers have long been intrigued by our acquisition of knowledge through testimony, and have proposed a range of strikingly different theories of it. In this talk, I discuss an influential approach that epistemologists have taken recently: namely, that we have a kind of epistemic right to accept testimony in all cases, unless we have specific stronger reasons not to accept it. I argue that this idea owes its plausibility to the lack of detail in which philosophers have considered examples of testimony. If we pay closer attention to the realities and complications of human communication, in part by paying closer attention to social psychology, cognitive science, and language pragmatics, then we see the operations and the significance of testimony very differently.

Tim Kenyon is a Professor of Philosophy at University of Waterloo – Canada