Testimony, induction and folk psychology

Lyons, Jack

doi:10.1080/00048409712347771

Cited by 80 publications

(24 citation statements)

References 7 publications

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“…Reductionist views hold that the justification of beliefs based on testimony is not special to testimony, but rather relies on the independent justifiability of beliefs based on perception, memory, or inductive inference. Reductionists in this sense include Hume (1972), Fricker (1994Fricker ( , 1995, Lipton (1998), andLyons (1997). Non-reductionists maintain that acceptance of testimony is justified in itself, unless there is some reason to think that the testimony is false.…”

Section: The Justification Of Testimony-based Beliefmentioning

confidence: 99%

Testimony, Credibility, and Explanatory Coherence

Thagard

2005

Erkenntnis

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ABSTRACT. This paper develops a descriptive and normative account of how people respond to testimony. It postulates a default pathway in which people more or less automatically respond to a claim by accepting it, as long as the claim made is consistent with their beliefs and the source is credible. Otherwise, people enter a reflective pathway in which they evaluate the claim based on its explanatory coherence with everything else they believe. Computer simulations show how explanatory coherence can be maximized in real-life cases, taking into account all the relevant evidence including the credibility of whoever is making a claim. The explanatorycoherence account is more plausible both descriptively and normatively than a Bayesian account.

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Section: The Justification Of Testimony-based Beliefmentioning

confidence: 99%

Testimony, Credibility, and Explanatory Coherence

Thagard

2005

Erkenntnis

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“…The epistemology that she develops is (as she herself emphasizes) well-supported by our "common sense" about testimony: it might even be viewed as a refinement of that common sense; and it is thus of broad appeal. A number of other authors (e.g., Henderson 2008, who cites, in addition to Fricker, Adler 1994, Faulkner 2000, and Lyons 1997 have in fact proposed similar views about the relative merits of monitoring and blind trust. Fricker's particular epistemology of testimony thus serves as a representative of a family of related, intuitively plausible epistemologies; the argument of the paper has implications for this family as a whole.…”

Section: Monitoring and Blind Trust In The Epistemology Of Testimonymentioning

confidence: 91%

In defence of gullibility: the epistemology of testimony and the psychology of deception detection

Michaelian

2009

Synthese

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Research in the psychology of deception detection implies that Fricker, in making her case for reductionism in the epistemology of testimony, overestimates both the epistemic demerits of the antireductionist policy of trusting speakers blindly and the epistemic merits of the reductionist policy of monitoring speakers for trustworthiness: folk psychological prejudices to the contrary notwithstanding, it turns out that monitoring is on a par (in terms both of the reliability of the process and of the sensitivity of the beliefs that it produces) with blind trust. The consequence is that while (a version of) Fricker's argument for the necessity of a reduction succeeds, her argument for the availability of reductions fails. This does not, however, condemn us to endorse standard pessimistic reductionism, according to which there is no testimonial knowledge, for recent research concerning the methods used by subjects to discover deception in non-laboratory settings suggests that only a more moderate form of pessimism is in order.

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“…12 Proponents of different versions of reductionism include Hume (1967) and Fricker (1987Fricker ( , 1994Fricker ( , 1995. For a variant of this approach, see Lyons (1997). For a nice discussion of Hume's version of reductionism, see Root (2001 Audi (1997, p. 415).…”

Section: IVmentioning

confidence: 97%

Testimony and the Infant/Child Objection

Lackey

2005

Philos Stud

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One of the central problems afflicting reductionism in the epistemology of testimony is the apparent fact that infants and small children are not cognitively capable of having the inductively based positive reasons required by this view. Since non-reductionism does not impose a requirement of this sort, it is thought to avoid this problem and is therefore taken to have a significant advantage over reductionism. In this paper, however, I argue that if this objection undermines reductionism, then a variant of it similarly undermines non-reductionism. Thus, considerations about the cognitive capacities of infants and small children do not effectively discriminate between these two competing theories of testimonial justification.

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Testimony, induction and folk psychology

Cited by 80 publications

References 7 publications

Testimony, Credibility, and Explanatory Coherence

Testimony, Credibility, and Explanatory Coherence

In defence of gullibility: the epistemology of testimony and the psychology of deception detection

Testimony and the Infant/Child Objection

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