On Understanding and Testimony

Abstract

Testimony spreads information. It is also commonly agreed that it can transfer knowledge. Whether it can work as an epistemic source of understanding is a matter of dispute. However, testimony certainly plays a pivotal role in the proliferation of understanding in the epistemic community. But how exactly do we learn, and how do we make advancements in understanding on the basis of one another's words? And what can we do to maximize the probability that the process of acquiring understanding from one another succeeds? These are very important questions in our current epistemological landscape, especially in light of the attention that has been paid to understanding as an epistemic achievement of purely epistemic value. Somewhat surprisingly, the recent literature in social epistemology does not offer much on the topic. The overarching aim of this paper is to provide a tentative model of understanding that goes in-depth enough to safely address the question of how understanding and testimony are related to one another. The hope is to contribute, in some measure, to the effort to understand understanding, and to explain two facts about our epistemic practices: (1) the fact that knowledge and understanding relate differently to testimony, and (2) the fact that some pieces of testimonial information are better than others for the sake of providing one with understanding and of yielding advancements in one's epistemic standing.

What do we want from Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI)? – A stakeholder perspective on XAI and a conceptual model guiding interdisciplinary XAI research

“…The overall goal of XAI is to advance human understanding of artificial systems in order to satisfy a given desideratum. There is an ongoing debate in the philosophical literature about what constitutes understanding [143][144][145], and a comprehensive review of this concept is beyond the scope of the current paper (see, for instance, [144] for a review on understanding, [146,147] for papers on the concept of understanding, [138,148,149] for the relation between explanations and understanding, or [150] for the related topic of cognitive processes in knowledge acquisition; furthermore, see [151] for a broad overview on the theoretical basics of understanding relevant for XAI research). Some aspects of understanding, however, are typically agreed upon: There are different depths and breadths of understanding (in the following, we will use the term degree of understanding to address depth and breadth of understanding, similar to [144,152]), and there are different kinds of understanding [20,146].…”

We Owe It to Others to Think for Ourselves

“…For example, if you know that your friend has an early class to teach, and that your friend knows that there is construction on the road to the university, then it involves little effort to understand why your friend left their house especially early this morning (Boyd 2017: 14). Malfatti (2020; see also Malfatti 2019) argues that understanding can be transmitted through testimony without significantly more effort on the receiver's end than in cases of knowledge through testimony. However, Malfetti's argument would not undermine the current solution to the Puzzle of Epistemic Autonomy since it would, in conjunction with the argument below, simply show that there is a wider range of epistemic states (viz.…”

When is epistemic dependence disvaluable?

“…However, if Paulina Sliwa is right when she claims that " [u]ltimately, what matters is that we do the right thing" (Sliwa, 2012: p. 194)while it is not as important that all our actions meet success-it could be concluded, somewhat paradoxically, that we should be equipped with neuromedia provided it only answers our moral questions. 3 ORCID Benoit Gaultier https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4189-9791 ENDNOTES 1 See (Malfatti, 2019). 2 Let us note that if not only innate knowledge but also innate understanding are possible-within the meaning of understanding that a creature has from the moment of its birth-it is possible that neurodevices such as neuromedia provide us with understanding.…”