Testimonial beliefs

 

Is there anything you know entirely off your own bat? Your knowledge depends pervasively on the word of others. Knowledge of events before you were born or outside your immediate neighborhood are the obvious cases, but your epistemic dependence on testimony goes far deeper than this--even quite personal fact--such as your birthday or the identity of your biological parents.

Testimonial beliefs are central to our lives; through understanding and accepting the utterances of others we form beliefs ranging from commonplace, our belief in our birth-date, or the identity of our parents, to the fanciful. Our knowledge of the world and the past, our knowledge of other minds and knowledge of our own minds are each and all interwoven with testimonial knowledge.

The analogy between testimony and memory, however, is strongest for what could be termed  fossilized testimony. That is, testimony that has not passed through many hands but has been preserved in its original form, either as written or audio record, after the speaker's death. In our literate culture such fossilized testimony is the basis of most of our knowledge of past.

A speaker is artless if he believes the proposition he intends to communicate and artful if he does not. Lies and, at least ordinarily, jokes are artful utterances. We speak for many reasons; we might intend to persuade, reassure, flatter, hurt, joke, pass the time, generate intimacy or create an impression. Thus it is perfectly rational to speak artfully. [Qur’ān negates it]

"Another topic in the epistemology of testimony that particularly interests us concerns the acquisition of non-propositional knowledge, skill or know-how. How does this form of learning differ from the standard cases considered in the literature on testimony?"

 

In the epistemologists' snse, testimony is not restricted to the courtroom. Nevertheless, not everything we say counts as testimony: even the most generous accounts of what testimony is restrict it to assertions, declarative statements or communications of information, as opposed to genuine questions and imperatives.

There is a clear practical difference between knowing how to swim and knowing a list of theoretical propositions about swimming - your reading about swimming won't by itself result in your knowing how to swim - and this may suggest that knowledge how is non-propositional knowledge.

 

Grand Qur’ān on testimonial beliefs