Testimonial worth

This paper introduces and argues for the hypothesis that judgments of testimonial worth are central to our practice of normatively appraising speech. It is argued that judgments of testimonial worth are central both to the judgement that an agent has lied, and to the acceptance of testimony. The hypothesis that, in lying, an agent necessarily displays poor testimonial worth, is shown to resolve a new puzzle about lying, and the recalcitrant problem raised by the existence of bald faced lies, and selfless assertions. It is then shown that the notion of testimonial worth allows us to capture the distinction between taking a speaker at their word, and treating them as a mere indicator of the truth in a way other theories fail to do

Knowledge-yielding communication

A satisfactory theory of linguistic communication must explain how it is that, through the interpersonal exchange of auditory, visual, and tactile stimuli, the communicative preconditions for the acquisition of testimonial knowledge regularly come to be satisfied. Without an account of knowledge-yielding communication this success condition for linguistic theorizing is left opaque, and we are left with an incomplete understanding of testimony, and communication more generally, as a source of knowledge. This paper argues that knowledge-yielding communication should be modelled on knowledge itself. It is argued that knowledge-yielding communication occurs iff interlocutors coordinate on truth values in a non-lucky and non-deviant way. This account is able to do significant explanatory work: it sheds light on the nature of referential communication, and it allows us to capture, in an informative way, the sense in which interlocutors must entertain similar propositions in order to communicate successfully

Normal Knowledge: Toward an Explanation-Based Theory of Knowledge

In this paper we argue that knowledge is characteristically safe true belief. We argue that an adequate approach to epistemic luck must not be indexed to methods of belief formation, but rather to explanations for belief. This shift is problematic for several prominent approaches to the theory of knowledge, including virtue reliabilism and proper functionalism (as normally conceived). The view that knowledge is characteristically safe true belief is better able to accommodate the shift in question

Lost in transmission: Testimonial justification and practical reason

Transmission views of testimony hold that a speaker's knowledge or justification can become the audience's knowledge or justification. We argue that transmission views are incompatible with the hypothesis that one's epistemic state, together with one's practical circumstances, determines what actions are rationally permissible for an agent. We argue that there are cases where, if the speaker's epistemic state were transmitted to the audience, then the audience would be warranted in acting in particular ways. Yet, the audience in these cases is not so warranted, as their strength of justification does not come close to the speaker's

Testimony, context, and miscommunication.

This thesis integrates the epistemology of testimony with work on the epistemology, psychology, and metaphysics of language. Epistemologists of testimony typically ask what conditions must be met for an agent to gain testimonial justification or knowledge that p given that p has been asserted, and this assertion has been understood. Questions regarding the audience's ability to grasp communicated contents are largely ignored. This is a mistake. Work in the philosophy of language (and related areas) suggests that the determination and recovery of communicated contents is far from straightforward, and can go wrong in many ways. This thesis investigates the epistemology of testimony in light of this work, with a special focus on miscommunication. The introduction provides a brief overview of some relevant work on testimony, the philosophy of language, and psychology, and argues that there is good reason to investigate the three. One obvious problem in this area is that if testimonial knowledge requires knowledge of what is said then the risk of miscommunication will block testimonial knowledge. Chapter two argues that testimonial knowledge does not require knowledge of what is said. The remaining four chapters discuss problems which do to arise from miscommunication. Chapters three and four focus on the epistemic uncertainty of communication with context sensitive terms. Chapter three argues that many beliefs formed on the basis of context sensitive testimony are unsafe and insensitive. Chapter four argues that speakers often have plausible deniability about the contents of their assertions. Chapters five and six explore types of miscommunication which arise as a result of background mental states affecting our linguistic understanding. Chapter five explores the social/ethical consequences of this, arguing that certain groups are disproportionately subject to harmful misinterpretation. Chapter six argues that testimonial anti-reductionists make the wrong predictions about a range of cases of cognitive penetration

Testimony, pragmatics, and plausible deniability

I outline what I call the ‘deniability problem’, explain why it is problematic, and identify the range of utterances to which it applies (using religious discourse as an example). The problem is as follows: To assign content to many utterances audiences must rely on their contextual knowledge. This generates a lot of scope for error. Thus, speakers are able to make assertions and deny responsibility for the proposition asserted, claiming that the audience made a mistake. I outline the problem (a limited version of which Fricker 2012 discusses), before explaining why it is problematic. Firstly it blocks testimonial knowledge according to assurance views. Secondly it prevents epistemic buck passing (the importance of which is emphasized by Goldberg 2006 and McMyler 2013). Finally, it removes a key disincentive to dishonesty. The recent literature on context sensitivity (particularly Cappelen and Lepore 2004) seems to entail that the problem applies to a very wide range of utterances. I consider a series of responses which fail to provide a solution, but which help us narrow down the scope of the problem

Epistemic injustice in utterance interpretation

This paper argues that underlying social biases are able to affect the processes underlying linguistic interpretation. The result is a series of harms systematically inflicted on marginalised speakers. It is also argued that the role of biases and stereotypes in interpretation complicates Miranda Fricker's proposed solution to epistemic injustice

Defective Contexts

In this chapter I hope to persuade you that defective contexts are more ubiquitous than we typically assume. In doing, so I will draw attention to a number of pressing social and theoretical issues which arise once we start to consider defective contexts. I will proceed by pointing to a number of ways in which defective contexts can emerge without self-correcting in the manner envisioned by Stalnaker. First I will consider situations in which some, but not all interlocutors recognise that the context is defective. I will then consider cases of opaquely defective contexts, and the question of what it is for a context to be “close enough” to being non-defective

Testimony and the epistemic uncertainty of interpretation

In the epistemology of testimony it is often assumed that audiences are able to reliably recover asserted contents. In the philosophy of language this claim is contentious. This paper outlines one problem concerning the recovery of asserted contents (the ‘recovery problem’), and argues that it prevents audiences from gaining testimonial knowledge in a range of cases (even when the speaker is both sincere and a reliable belief former). The recovery problem, in essence, is simply that due to the collective epistemic limitations of the speaker and audience speakers will, in certain cases, be insensitive to the ways in which they may be misinterpreted. As a result audiences’ beliefs will often fail the safety and sensitivity conditions on knowledge. Once the problem has been outlined and distinguished from several related problems in the philosophy of language and the epistemology of testimony, a series of responses are considered. The first response holds that audiences possess defeaters in recovery problem cases, and thus wouldn’t form beliefs. The second response holds that the beliefs audiences form are very coarse grained, meaning they are not very vulnerable to failures of safety and sensitivity. The final response holds that the objects of speaker meaning are not propositional. All three responses are found to be unsatisfactory

Assertoric Content, Responsibility, and Metasemantics

That we assert things to one another, and that our doing so is central to our linguistic practice, seems beyond question. When we assert, there is typically something we can be said to have asserted. This is what we might think of as the truth conditional content of our assertion. Yet, as I will illustrate in the earlier portions of this paper, it is not immediately clear what communicative function assertoric content actually plays. I suggest that assertoric content functions as a means for us to track the responsibilities undertaken communicators when they speak. However, this, by itself, is not very illuminating. There any many things we take responsibility for when we speak, and many ways in which we undertake such responsibilities. Not all of the responsibilities we undertake when we assert will correspond to the intuitive notion of assertiotic content. I suggest that assertoric commitments are distinguished by their mode of generation: they obtain directly (either compositionally or via bridge principles) in virtue of the words the speaker uses and their manner of combination. But this raises two further questions: Firstly, why are speakers responsible for the content thus generated? And secondly, why is it important for us to distinguish between communicative commitments in terms of the manner in which they are generated? My primary focus will be on the first question: I argue that a plausible metasemantic theory must be able to make sense of the fact that speakers are committed to the assertoric contents of their utterances. Some metasemantic theories are better equipped to do this than others. I present a metasemantic theory that is particularly well equipped to do so: the value a term receives in context corresponds to the use it is most fitting (i.e. there is the most reason) to hold the speaker to in light of their utterance. I turn to the second question in the conclusion