This chapter aims to correct two common and related misconceptions in discussions of the epistemology of testimony. The first misconception is that testimonial knowledge is an epistemically distinct kind of knowledge only if there are testimony-specific epistemic principles implicated in the justification of beliefs formed through testimony. The second misconception is that anyone who endorses a reductionist position regarding the epistemic status of testimony, and so denies the existence of testimony-specific epistemic principles, ipso facto ought to be hostile to the hypothesis that testimonial knowledge is epistemically distinctive. The chapter argues against both misconceptions by arguing for the distinctiveness hypothesis in a way that involves no premise any reductionist should want to deny.
Elsewhere I and others have argued that evidence one should have had can bear on the justification of one's belief, in the form of defeating one's justification. In this paper, I am interested in knowing how evidence one should have had (on the one hand) and one's higher-order evidence (on the other) interact in determinations of the justification of belief. In doing so I aim to address two types of scenario that previous discussions have left open. In one type of scenario, there is a clash between a subject's higher-order evidence and the evidence she should have had: S's higher-order evidence is misleading as to the existence or likely epistemic bearing of further evidence she should have. In the other, while there is further evidence S should have had, this evidence would only have offered additional support for S's belief that p. The picture I offer derives from two “epistemic ceiling” principles linking evidence to justification: one's justification for the belief that p can be no higher than it is on one's total evidence, nor can it be higher than what it would have been had one had all of the evidence one should have had. Together, these two principles entail what I call the doctrine of Epistemic Strict Liability: insofar as one fails to have evidence one should have had, one is epistemically answerable to that evidence whatever reasons one happened to have regarding the likely epistemic bearing of that evidence. I suggest that such a position can account for the battery of intuitions elicited in the full range of cases I will be considering.
We expect certain things of each other as epistemic subjects, and it is the normativity of these expectations that underwrites the normativity of epistemic assessment itself. In developing this claim Sanford C. Goldberg aims to honor the insights of both internalist and externalist approaches to epistemic justification. With the internalist he embraces the idea that knowledgeable belief requires belief that is formed and maintained in an epistemically responsible fashion; with the externalist he embraces the idea that knowledgeable belief requires belief that is formed and sustained through a reliable process. In this book Goldberg proposes to marry these two dimensions into a single account of the standards of epistemic assessment. This marriage reflects our profound and ineliminable dependence on one another for what we know of the world—a dependence which is rationalized by the expectations we are entitled to have of one another as epistemic subjects. The expectations in question are those through which we hold each other accountable to standards of both (epistemic) reliability and (epistemic) responsibility. The resulting theory has far-reaching implications not only for the theory of epistemic normativity, but also for our understanding of epistemic defeat, the theory of epistemic responsibility, and for a full appreciation of the various social dimensions of knowledge.
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