The Social Character of Testimonial Knowledge (original) (raw)
2000, The Journal of Philosophy
Through communication, we form beliefs about the world, its history, others and ourselves. A vast proportion of these beliefs we count as knowledge. We seem to possess this knowledge only because it has been communicated. If those justifications that depended on communication were outlawed, all that would remain would be body of illsupported prejudice. The recognition of our ineradicable dependence on testimony for much of what we take ourselves to know has suggested to many that an epistemological account of testimony should be essentially similar to accounts of perception and memory. This premise I want to dispute. Most would deny that perceptual knowledge is mediated. The acquisition of knowledge through communication is mediated in one obvious sense. In a case of successful perception, one knows that the world is a certain way because one is aware of the world being that way. But if we come to know that the world is a certain way through communication, we have no comparable awareness of how the world is. We know that the world is a certain way only because another has represented the world as being that way. As such, our acquisition of knowledge can depend on why the speaker represented the world to be that way and whether or not the speaker knows that the world is how he represented it to be. Thus testimony is mediated in the sense that the intentions of
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