DEFICIENT TESTIMONY IS DEFICIENT TEAMWORK

Abstract

AbstractJennifer Lackey presents a puzzle to which she argues there is no current solution. Lackey's claim is that testimonial knowledge can have something conspicuously wrong with it and still be knowledge. Testimonial knowledge can be ‘deficient’. Given that knowledge is a normative category, that it describes what it is for a belief to go right, there is a puzzle that comes with accounting for how a testimonial belief could be knowledge and yet go wrong in the ways Lackey has in mind. In this paper, I argue that the deficiency is one of teamwork, and that Lackey's puzzle offers one a window into the respect in which testimony is a kind of team achievement.