Testimony

A Philosophical Introduction

Joseph Shieber

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317449652
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Historia y teoría filosóficas

The epistemology of testimony has experienced a growth in interest over the last twenty-five years that has been matched by few, if any, other areas of philosophy. Testimony: A Philosophical Introduction provides an epistemology of testimony that surveys this rapidly growing research area while incorporating a discussion of relevant empirical work from social and developmental psychology, as well as from the interdisciplinary study of knowledge-creation in groups. The past decade has seen a number of scholarly monographs on the epistemology of testimony, but there is a dearth of books that survey the current field. This book fills that gap, assessing the strengths and weaknesses of all major competing theories. All chapters conclude with Suggestions for Further Reading and Discussion Questions.

1 INTRODUCTION

DOI: 10.4324/9781315697376-1

1.1 The Pervasiveness of Testimony

It is estimated that more than 500 million people watched the live television broadcast on the evening of July 20, 1969 as the first humans walked on the moon. Even as they watched, however, not all of the viewers believed that what they were watching was genuine.

In his autobiography, Bill Clinton relates a conversation he had with one such doubter, a local carpenter with whom he worked putting up prefab homes near Clinton’s home in Arkansas:

The old guy worked me into the ground every day and shared a lot of his homespun wisdom and country skepticism with me. Just a month before, Apollo 11 astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong had left their colleague, Michael Collins, aboard spaceship Columbia and walked on the moon, beating by five months President Kennedy’s goal of putting a man on the moon before the decade was out. The old carpenter asked me if I really believed it had happened. I said sure, I saw it on television. He disagreed; he said that he didn’t believe it for a minute, that “them television fellers” could make things look real that weren’t. Back then, I thought he was a crank. During my eight years in Washington, I saw some things on TV that made me wonder if he wasn’t ahead of his time.

(Clinton 2004, 156)

As Clinton’s concluding sentence suggests, it would perhaps be wrong to tar such suspicions like those of the carpenter as utterly irrational. Many of the viewers of the moon landing would have been aware of Orson Welles’s famous “War of the Worlds” radio hoax, perpetrated in the 1930s. And indeed, as the old carpenter quoted by Clinton noted, television producers were—even in the late 1960s—capable of creating remarkably realistic illusions.

In fact, in a talk given just a few months after the moon landing, in December of 1969, and reported on in the New York Times, Julian Scheer, NASA’s assistant administrator for public affairs at the time, sketched how it would have been possible for NASA to fake the landing. In his talk—admittedly intended as a sophisticated joke to mock flat-earthers and other skeptics—Scheer “narrated films showing what appeared to be the moon’s cratered crust outside a spacecraft window and astronauts walking on a bleak moonlike surface, loping about in one-sixth gravity and floating in raw space.” Though the movies “were almost indistinguishable from movies of the real thing,” they were actually “of simulations at space agency training facilities” (Wilford 1969, 30).

Nor is such skepticism unheard of today. A 2009 poll by the UK magazine Engineering and Technology, for example, suggested that fully 25 percent of the British public doubted that the moon landing ever occurred (Daily Telegraph, July 17, 2009). Each new milestone of space exploration—such as the Mars “Curiosity” Rover mission—invites new conspiracy theories to complement the theory that that first moon landing was a hoax.

The persistence of such conspiracy theories underscores just how much of the information that we receive depends on our trusting in sources of information. In the case of the moon landing, as the example of Bill Clinton’s story of the Arkansas carpenter demonstrates, trust in the television reports was not the only option. However, for all of those other than the astronauts who stepped on the moon themselves, trust is indeed the only option if one is to accept that humans walked on the moon.

Our knowledge of the moon landing, of course, is merely one example of a far more widespread phenomenon. Once we begin to analyze the information that we possess, it is likely that we will quickly determine that much—if not most—of it derives from something we read in a book, magazine, or newspaper, saw on the television, heard on the radio, gleaned from the internet, or learned from someone in our circle of friends or family. Indeed, even beliefs as central to our identity as those regarding our own name, where and when we were born, and our family history were acquired at second-hand, from others.

Furthermore, many of the most pressing issues facing contemporary societies today—including Ebola, global warming, the effectiveness of vaccinations, or whether or not to invade Middle Eastern countries on the basis of the presence of weapons of mass destruction—hinge on the question of when to trust testimony, and to what extent. To take the example of vaccinations, the current rise of childhood diseases previously thought to be virtually eradicated speaks to the real danger of too great a skepticism regarding expert testimony (cf. Specter 2009).

We don’t merely want to believe indiscriminately, however; presumably, we have an interest in having appropriate, but not profligate, trust in the testimony of others. This is why Bill Clinton lumps in the old carpenter’s “country skepticism” with “homespun wisdom”: the skeptic certainly avoids the risk of being taken in by false or misleading information. This leaves us, however, in a quandary. Though certainly not indiscriminate in his acceptance of the testimony of others, the skeptic accepts too little information, since almost all information comes from sources in which he would need to trust. Once one resolves to trust the sources of information, however, one leaves oneself open to being misled.

What we need, then, is an account of when it is that recipients of testimony appropriately accept that testimony: when they achieve an acceptable balance between excessive skepticism and indiscriminate belief.

1.2 The Aim of this Book

1.2.1 Accepting testimony and the Adequacy Goal

In order to evaluate what it is that constitutes appropriate acceptance of testimony, it will be useful briefly to consider the aims of testimony—that is, the aims of testifiers in testifying and the aims of recipients in believing on the basis of testimony.

Of course, there are many goals that a testifier might pursue in performing a communicative action that purports to be an instance of testimony. The testifier might indeed be performing such an action at “face value,” as it were: in other words, doing so in order to transmit information that the testifier herself believes to be accurate. But the testifier might also be attempting to deceive her interlocutor, or to pass the time, or to signal that she belongs to a certain group of like-minded people, etc. Or she might be testifying to something because she is paid to do so, like a press secretary or spokeswoman. The testifier might even be testifying to something as a way of convincing herself of its truth. And depending on the goal that the testifier is pursuing, her testimony might be a more or less reliable indicator of the truth of the matter about which she is communicating.

Just as testifiers have many goals in testifying, recipients of testimony may have many goals in accepting testimony. This is a fact that is seldom appreciated in discussions of testimony, but that makes it no less true. Of course, recipients often have an interest in accepting testimony because they want to believe true information, and testimony is a (potential) source of true beliefs. But recipients of testimony are only human; they are credulous and often want to believe. Part of the reason for this might be that recipients are under strong social pressure to conform, and that sharing a testifier’s belief is a way of conforming with the testifier. A further part of the reason for this might be that humans are what we might term “informationally acquisitive”—they simply like to add new beliefs to the storehouse of beliefs that they already possess, and they add those beliefs often without submitting them to any sort of explicit review as to whether the beliefs are likely to be true (cf. Gilbert 1991). Furthermore, part of the reason for this might be that recipients of testimony at least sometimes believe testimony in the pursuit of better understanding testifiers.

It will be worthwhile to spend a moment considering this last point, because it impinges upon a number of interesting issues. Why should it be that recipients might accept a testifier’s testimony because of a goal of better understanding that testifier?

First, it is plausible that we often use a working assumption that a testifier is speaking truly in order to help us better understand what a testifier is saying. Consider this example. Suppose, in noisy conditions, you see your friend looking at a large, hairless dog with huge fangs and a gaping maw. Your friend says something like, “That is a big, **ry dog.” Because of the noise, you weren’t really able to hear the word “**ry.” However, you assume that your friend couldn’t have said “hairy,” because the dog is clearly hairless. So you assume that your friend said “scary,” because the dog is an obvious terror. As this somewhat artificial example demonstrates, we often use the assumption that testifiers are saying something true as a way of grasping the content of what it is that the testifier is saying (cf. Marslen-Wilson 1981).

Of course, this by itself would not be sufficient to establish that recipients at least sometimes actually come to believe a testifier’s testimony in the process merely of attempting better to understand the testifier. However, there is strong evidence to support the fact that it is hard to relinquish the assumption that a given communication is true once the content of the communication is grasped. Indeed, a number of experiments have substantiated the idea that, if experimental subjects are told that a piece of information that they’ve read and understood is false, those subjects then have a hard time relinquishing their belief in that information, despite having been explicitly told of its falsity (Gilbert 1991).

Taking these two propensities together—the propensity on the part of recipients to assume that testifiers are speaking truly as a strategy for understanding what the testifier is saying, and the general propensity to have trouble relinquishing an assumption that a given content is true, once one understands that content—we can appreciate why it might be that recipients could come to accept a testifier’s testimony as a byproduct of merely attempting to understand what the testifier is trying to communicate.

If there are a number of goals that recipients might pursue in accepting testimony, however, this will have a bearing on our evaluation of the strategies, practices or mechanisms that recipients of testimony employ in determining whether to accept a given piece of testimony. For, depending on the goals under consideration, our evaluation might very well differ. If the goal, for example, is to maximize conformity, this will likely yield different rules for the acceptance of testimony than if the goal is to acquire information through testimony in ways that are conducive to acquiring knowledge.

In this book, we will focus on this latter goal: using strategies conducive to acquiring knowledge through testimony. Let’s state this goal more precisely. Let’s define a person’s grounds for a particular belief as the total truth-conducive support that belief has (cf. Goldberg 2007, 139). Furthermore, let’s say that a person has adequate grounds—or, alternatively, epistemically adequate grounds—for a given belief that p just in case that person’s grounds are sufficient to underwrite knowledge that p (if p is true). Given these characterizations, the goal that interests us is that of finding strategies of the acceptance of testimony that insure that recipients of testimony have adequate grounds for the beliefs they form on the basis of testimony. We’ll call this the Adequacy Goal. In other words, what we’ll be seeking to do in subsequent chapters is to determine which strategies, practices or mechanisms should govern a recipient’s acceptance of testimony, under the assumption that our sole interest is the Adequacy Goal. (For another project that examines a wide variety of social epistemological questions from the point of view of a related goal, see Goldman 1999.)

It is important to emphasize that this formulation of the investigative goal for this book is an intentional simplification. The claim, in other words, is not that the sole interest of actual recipients in accepting testimony is according with the Adequacy Goal. Indeed, as we have just pointed out, just as there are a number of interests that testifiers may pursue in communicating testimony, there are a number of other interests that recipients might legitimately pursue in accepting testimony on the part of their interlocutors.

1.2.2 Some remarks on the Adequacy Goal

In subsequent discussions, then, we’ll focus on evaluating a recipient’s acceptance of testimony from the point of view of the aim to maximize the likelihood that the recipient believe a proposition only if that proposition is true. That is, we’ll focus on when a recipient’s acceptance of testimony is appropriate, under the assumption that our sole interest is the Adequacy Goal. A few points about this investigative emphasis on the Adequacy Goal are in order, however, before we proceed.

First, it is important to note that it is we, the theorists, who are adopting an evaluative stance with the Adequacy Goal in mind. That is, we can employ the Adequacy Goal in evaluating a certain recipient’s believing on the basis of testimony, even if that recipient is not herself interested in the Adequacy Goal. To see this, consider an example. Suppose Betty has fallen in with a crowd of people who derive all of their conversational topics from reading articles in The New York Times, the New Yorker, and the Economist, as well as from reading non-fiction books that have been well-reviewed in The Times Literary Supplement. Betty doesn’t care about whether her beliefs are true or not; she cares about being taken seriously by her new circle of friends. However, if we, in evaluating Betty’s belief-forming strategy, come to find that accepting what one believes reads in The New York Times, the Economist, etc., accords with the Adequacy Goal, then we should say that Betty is behaving appropriately in accepting testimony from those sources—despite the fact that Betty herself isn’t accepting testimony from those sources with the Adequacy Goal in mind.

Second, it is open that someone could accord with the Adequacy Goal if she forms her belief solely on the basis of information of which she has—or perhaps even could have—no conscious awareness. In other words, the Adequacy Goal as stated takes no position in the debate between internalists and externalists in discussions of justification or knowledge.

Third, someone can accord with the Adequacy Goal even in cases when they are not intentionally pursuing any belief-forming strategy or consciously following any explicit set of rules, but are rather forming beliefs on the basis of some unconscious cognitive mechanism of which they are wholly unaware. To see this, consider a neurotypical twelve-month-old who, in the company of her mother, is investigating a new and uncertain environment....

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table Of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Evidence From Social Psychology
• 3 Non-Presumptivism
• 4 Presumptivism
• 5 Assurance Theory
• 6 Anti-Individualism
• Index