David Barnett | Union College, Schenectady (original) (raw)
Please see my website at: www.davidjamesbar.net
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An important philosophical tradition treats the deliverances of one’s own internal faculties as a... more An important philosophical tradition treats the deliverances of one’s own internal faculties as analogous to the deliverances of external sources of testimony. Pushing back against this tradition in the special case of the deliverances of one’s own memory, I aim to highlight the broader interaction between an internal (or first-person) and an external (or third-person) perspective that one might adopt towards one’s own states of mind. According to what I call the ‘diary model’ of memory, one’s memory ordinarily serves as a means for one’s present self to gain evidence about one’s past states of mind, much as testimony from another person can provide one with evidence about that person’s states of mind. I reject the diary model’s analogy between memory and testimony from one’s former self, arguing first that memory and a diary differ with respect to their psychological roles, and second that this psychological difference underwrites important downstream epistemic differences.
If the reliability of a source of testimony is open to question, it seems epistemically illegitim... more If the reliability of a source of testimony is open to question, it seems epistemically illegitimate to verify the source's reliability by appealing to that source's own testimony. Is this because it is illegitimate to trust a questionable source's testimony on any matter whatsoever? Or is there a distinctive problem with appealing to the source's testimony on the matter of that source's own reliability? After distinguishing between two kinds of epistemically illegitimate circularity-bootstrapping and self-verification-I argue for a qualified version of the claim that there is nothing especially illegitimate about using a questionable source to evaluate its own reliability. Instead, it is illegitimate to appeal to a questionable source's testimony on any matter whatsoever, with the matter of the source's own reliability serving only as a special case.
An important philosophical tradition treats the deliverances of one’s own internal faculties as a... more An important philosophical tradition treats the deliverances of one’s own internal faculties as analogous to the deliverances of external sources of testimony. Pushing back against this tradition in the special case of the deliverances of one’s own memory, I aim to highlight the broader interaction between an internal (or first-person) and an external (or third-person) perspective that one might adopt towards one’s own states of mind. According to what I call the ‘diary model’ of memory, one’s memory ordinarily serves as a means for one’s present self to gain evidence about one’s past states of mind, much as testimony from another person can provide one with evidence about that person’s states of mind. I reject the diary model’s analogy between memory and testimony from one’s former self, arguing first that memory and a diary differ with respect to their psychological roles, and second that this psychological difference underwrites important downstream epistemic differences.
If the reliability of a source of testimony is open to question, it seems epistemically illegitim... more If the reliability of a source of testimony is open to question, it seems epistemically illegitimate to verify the source's reliability by appealing to that source's own testimony. Is this because it is illegitimate to trust a questionable source's testimony on any matter whatsoever? Or is there a distinctive problem with appealing to the source's testimony on the matter of that source's own reliability? After distinguishing between two kinds of epistemically illegitimate circularity-bootstrapping and self-verification-I argue for a qualified version of the claim that there is nothing especially illegitimate about using a questionable source to evaluate its own reliability. Instead, it is illegitimate to appeal to a questionable source's testimony on any matter whatsoever, with the matter of the source's own reliability serving only as a special case.