Learning from Others

Abstract

John McDowell begins his essay ‘Knowledge by Hearsay’ (1993) by describing two ways language matters to epistemology. The first is that, by understanding and accepting someone else's utterance, a person can acquire knowledge. This is what philosophers call ‘knowledge by testimony’. The second is that children acquire knowledge in the course of learning their first language—in acquiring language, a child inherits a conception of the world. In The Formation of Reason (2011), and my writings on Russian socio‐historical philosophy and psychology, I address issues bearing on the second of these topics, questions about the child's development through initiation into language and other forms of social being. In this article, I focus on the first: the epistemology of testimony. After expounding a view of testimony inspired by McDowell, and supplemented by ideas from Sebastian Rödl, I consider how such an account illuminates two issues in philosophy of education: the extent of an individual's epistemic dependence upon others, and the nature of teaching.

Lines of Testimony

“…We do not, as Elizabeth Anscombe puts it, ‘hope that our pupils believe us , but rather, that they will come to see that what we say is true—if it is’ (Anscombe, 1979, p. 145). Similarly, he draws on arguments from Benjamin McMyler (2011) and Richard Moran (2006) to the effect that a distinction is to be drawn between ‘ telling someone that p and arguing that p ’ (Bakhurst, 2013, p. 198). In the former case, the speaker asks her audience to believe her , whereas in the latter, the audience is asked to attend to reasons or evidence for believing that p .…”

“…Hence, the students are not to believe her , they are to believe the discipline. The teacher is there to present what is believed and why, and only incidentally to say what she thinks (see Bakhurst, 2013, p. 198). But in response to the criticism that this downplays the influence of the teacher's personality on her ability as a teacher, he now prefers, with Rödl, to see the teacher as an embodiment, or personification, of her discipline.…”

“…I can come to know if it is raining in Liverpool because someone who knows tells me that it is. This is what philosophers call ‘knowledge by testimony’ (thereby using testimony more broadly than in everyday discourse) (Bakhurst, 2013, p. 187).…”

Cognitive Goods, Open Futures and the Epistemology of Education

“…1717It should be noted that nothing important here turns material adequacy of a further epistemological doctrine associated with McDowell's epistemology, and also embraced by Bakhurst—namely, McDowell's epistemological disjunctivism about perceptual knowledge (see, for example, McDowell, 1995; Bakhurst, 2013 and 2018). …”

Epistemology in Excess? A Response to Williams

“…may cause those conclusions to be false . I should here acknowledge David Bakhurst (, pp. 192–193), who chastises me for claiming that it is our beliefs or claims, rather than we ourselves, that are fallible.…”