Why this book?
- To understand the place of testimony as an important source of knowledge.
- To examine when trusting what others say is epistemically justified.
- To explore the relationship between trust, a speaker's credibility, and the transmission of knowledge.
- To become acquainted with a major topic in social epistemology and contemporary analytic philosophy.
About the book
Testimony is a collection of philosophical essays on the role that the statements, reports, and information provided by others play in the formation of our knowledge. Its starting point is a simple but important fact: much of what we know is not the result of our own direct observation or reasoning but something we have learned from others. History, science, geography, much everyday information, and even parts of our knowledge of our own past and identity depend on the testimony of other people.
This dependence raises fundamental epistemological questions. Can the mere fact that someone tells us something give us a reason to believe it? To be justified in trusting testimony, must we possess independent evidence of the speaker's honesty and competence? How can knowledge be transmitted from one person to another, and what factors undermine the reliability of that transmission? The essays in this collection revolve around questions of this kind.
The contributions of Jennifer Lackey, John Greco, and Paulina Sliwa connect the volume with contemporary debates in epistemology, especially social epistemology. Testimony is not merely an abstract problem in this field: our trust in experts, teachers, witnesses, the media, and other members of society is bound up with the question of when another person's word can provide us with justified belief or knowledge.
The collection is suitable for students and researchers in philosophy, particularly those interested in epistemology and analytic philosophy. Readers concerned with trust, the credibility of sources, and our epistemic dependence on one another can also approach testimony as a key point of intersection between individual and social epistemology.