Tim Kenyon

University of Waterloo

Epistemic Kinds of Testimony

24 February 2017, 16:00

Faculdade de Letras de Lisboa

Sala Mattos Romão (Departamento de Filosofia)

Abstract: There are many ways of dividing or disaggregating testimony into different kinds on epistemic grounds. Probably the most influential such distinction in the contemporary literature on testimony has been that proposed between testimony that is reasonably accepted by default, automatically, and testimony accepted on the basis of some reasoning about its felicity. Philosophers with very different general approaches to social epistemology have nevertheless agreed, typically on the basis of a range of cases or examples, that this distinction in the cognitive or doxastic testimonial phenomena reflects a fairly significant underlying epistemic difference between (roughly) evidential/justifica-tory and non-evidential/entitlement epistemologies. I reject this disaggregative view in favour of a unitary conception of testimony. Cognitive phenomena at the point of testimonial uptake leave out a great deal of what matters to the reasonableness of accepting testimony; when we consider more of the relevant factors, the seeming distinctions evaporate. And when we consider the range of testimonial phenomena in their real diversity, we find a far more fine-grained set of distinctions or a continuum of cases, rather than a difference answering to a single evidential/non-evidential divide.