Getting Told and Being Believed

Richard Moran

doi:10.1093/oso/9780190873325.003.0002

Abstract

This chapter argues for the centrality of believing the speaker (as distinct from believing the statement) in the epistemology of testimony, and develops a line of thought from Angus Ross which claims that in telling someone something, the kind of reason for belief that a speaker presents is of an essentially different kind from ordinary evidence. Investigating the nature of the audience’s dependence on the speaker’s free assurance leads to a discussion of Grice’s formulation of non-natural meaning in an epistemological light, concentrating on just how the recognition of the speaker’s self-reflexive intention is supposed to count for her audience as a reason to believe P. This is understood as the speaker’s explicitly assuming responsibility for the truth of her statement, and thereby constituting her utterance as a potential reason to believe its content.

Highlights

Recent interest in the epistemology of testimony has focused attention on what justification we may commonly have in the vast areas of life where we are dependent on what other people tell us. This dependence is not restricted to what we are told in face-to-face encounters, for we take ourselves to know all sorts of things that only reached us through a long chain of utterances and documents, whose evidential status we have never investigated for ourselves and will never be in a position to investigate
The content of such knowledge is not confined to the arcana of specialized studies but includes such mundane matters as the facts of one’s own birth and parentage, the geographical and institutional facts of one’s immediate environment, and the general facts that make up one’s basic sense of what the world is like. In part it is the enormity of this dependence that makes for the interest in the subject of testimony, combined with the apparent clash between the kind of epistemic relations involved here and the classic empiricist picture of genuine knowledge basing itself either on direct experience of the facts or on working out conclusions for oneself
In part it is the enormity of this dependence that makes for the interest in the subject of testimony, combined with the apparent clash between the kind of epistemic relations involved here and the classic empiricist picture of genuine knowledge basing itself either on direct experience of the facts or on working out conclusions for oneself.1. It isn’t just that the bulk of what we take ourselves to know is so highly mediated, as even knowledge gained through a microscope or other scientific instrument must be; rather it is that the vehicle of mediation here—what other people say—seems so flimsy, unregulated, and is known in plenty of cases to be unreliable, even deliberately so

Summary

Introduction

I wish to argue that any account of testimony that seeks to resist the (Humean) assimilation of its epistemic status to that of an evidence-like correlation between one set of phenomena and another will have to give a central place to the distinctive relation of believing another person.5 Only in this way can we account for what is distinctive about acquiring beliefs from what people say, as opposed to learning from other expressive or revealing behavior of theirs.

Results

Conclusion