In Philosophy testimony refers to evidence delivered through the words or utterances of others. This definition may be distinguished from the legal notion of testimony in that the speaker does not have to make a declaration of the truth of the facts (See Testimony). Testimonial evidence contrasts with the evidence of the senses and memory.

The role of testimony in acquiring belief and knowledge has been a relatively neglected philosophical issue. Coady¹ believes that this is because traditional epistemology has had a distinctly individualist flavour.

However, it seems that many of the beliefs that we hold have been gained through accepting testimony. For example, one may only know that Kent is a county of Englandor that David Beckham earns $30 million per year because one has learned these things from other people. A more striking example is the belief about one's own birthdate. If you know your birthdate, the evidence for your belief was almost certainly received through testimony.

One of the problems with acquiring knowledge through testimony is that it does not seem to live up to the standards of knowledge (see knowledge in philosophy ). As Owens notes², it does not seem to live up to the Enlightenment ideal of rationality captured in ‘the motto of the Royal Society – Nullius in verba (no mans word)’. Crudely put the question is; 'How can testimony give us knowledge since when we have no reasons of our own?'

Coady sugests that there are two approches to this problem.

• Reductivism, which seeks to ‘reduce’ or re-describe our behaviour such that it is not at odds with the traditional view

and

• Anti-Reductivism, which seeks to fit our behaviour in with a different concept of knowledge, for example; we may compare it to an account of how perception gives us knowledge or how memory gives us knowledge directly.

Hume is one of the few early philosophers to offer anything like a sustained account of testimony, this can be found in his ‘An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding’ in the section on miracles. The basic idea is that is our justification for believing what people tell us comes from our experience of the ‘…constant and regular conjunction’³ between the state of affairs as people describe them and the actual state of affairs (i.e. our observation that they match). On Coady's schema he is a reductivist.

Coady offers an anti-reductivist account of testimony. He claims that testimony is like perception, we don't have to have reasons for believing it, only an absence of reasons not to believe it. On Coady's account we are justifed in being credulious.

Also somewhat significant is Bertrand Russell, for whom knowledge by acquisition played an important part in epistemology.

Notes

1. Coady 1992
2. Owens, 2000, Pg. 163
3. Hume, 1993, Pg. 74

References

• Coady C.A.J. (1992), ‘Testimony; A Philosophical Study’, Clarendon Press, Oxford. ISBN 0198235518
• Owens, D. (2000), ‘Reason without Freedom: The Problem of Epistemic Normatively’, Routledge, London. ISBN 041522389X
• Hume, D. (1993), ‘An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding’, Hackett Publishing Company, Cambridge. ISBN 0915144166

Also See

• Lipton, P. (1998), ‘The Epistemology of Testimony’
• Ross, (1986), ‘Why Do We Believe What We Are Told?’
• Faulkner, P. (2002), ‘On the Rationality of Our Response to testimony’