Author: Jennifer Lackey
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199276005
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Author: C. A. J. Coady
Publisher: Clarendon Press
ISBN: 0191519987
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
The role of testimony in the getting of reliable belief or knowledge is a central but neglected epistemological issue. Western philosophical tradition has paid scant attention to the individual thinker's reliance upon the word of others; yet we are in fact profoundly dependent on others for a vast amount of what any of us claims to know. Professor Coady begins by exploring the nature and depth of our reliance upon testimony, addressing the complex definitional puzzles surrounding the idea. He analyses the tradition of debate on the topic in order to reveal the epistemic individualism which has given rise to an illusory ideal of `autonomous knowledge', and to gain a deeper understanding of the issues. He concludes this part of the book by showing what a feasible justification of testimony as a source of knowledge could be. In the second half of the book the author uses this new view of testimony to challenge certain widespread assumptions in the fields of history, mathematics, psychology, and law.

Author: Joseph Shieber
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317449657
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
The epistemology of testimony has experienced a growth in interest over the last twenty-five years that has been matched by few, if any, other areas of philosophy. Testimony: A Philosophical Introduction provides an epistemology of testimony that surveys this rapidly growing research area while incorporating a discussion of relevant empirical work from social and developmental psychology, as well as from the interdisciplinary study of knowledge-creation in groups. The past decade has seen a number of scholarly monographs on the epistemology of testimony, but there is a dearth of books that survey the current field. This book fills that gap, assessing the strengths and weaknesses of all major competing theories. All chapters conclude with Suggestions for Further Reading and Discussion Questions.

Author: Jennifer Lackey
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191614564
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
Testimony is an invaluable source of knowledge. We rely on the reports of those around us for everything from the ingredients in our food and medicine to the identity of our family members. Recent years have seen an explosion of interest in the epistemology of testimony. Despite the multitude of views offered, a single thesis is nearly universally accepted: testimonial knowledge is acquired through the process of transmission from speaker to hearer. In this book, Jennifer Lackey shows that this thesis is false and, hence, that the literature on testimony has been shaped at its core by a view that is fundamentally misguided. She then defends a detailed alternative to this conception of testimony: whereas the views currently dominant focus on the epistemic status of what speakers believe, Lackey advances a theory that instead centers on what speakers say. The upshot is that, strictly speaking, we do not learn from one another's beliefs - we learn from one another's words. Once this shift in focus is in place, Lackey goes on to argue that, though positive reasons are necessary for testimonial knowledge, testimony itself is an irreducible epistemic source. This leads to the development of a theory that gives proper credence to testimony's epistemologically dual nature: both the speaker and the hearer must make a positive epistemic contribution to testimonial knowledge. The resulting view not only reveals that testimony has the capacity to generate knowledge, but it also gives appropriate weight to our nature as both socially indebted and individually rational creatures. The approach found in this book will, then, represent a radical departure from the views currently dominating the epistemology of testimony, and thus is intended to reshape our understanding of the deep and ubiquitous reliance we have on the testimony of those around us.

Author: Martin Kusch
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199251371
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 318

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Book Description
Martin Kusch puts forth two controversial ideas: that knowledge is a social status (like money or marriage) and that knowledge is primarily the possession of groups rather than individuals. He defends the radical implications of his views: that knowledge is political, and that it varies with communities. This bold approach to epistemology is a challenge to philosophy and the wider academic world.

Author: Sybille Krämer
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1783489774
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
What is the epistemological value of testimony? What role does language, images, and memory play in its construction? What is the relationship between the person who attests and those who listen? Is bearing witness a concept that is exclusively based in interpersonal relations? Or are there other modes of communicating or mediating to constitute a constellation of testimony? Testimony/Bearing Witness establishes a dialogue between the different approaches to testimony in epistemology, historiography, law, art, media studies and psychiatry. With examples including the Holocaust, the Khmer Rouge Killing Fields and the Armenian genocide the volume discusses the chances and limits of communicating epistemological and ethical, philosophical and cultural-historical, past and present perspectives on the phenomenon and concept of bearing witness.

Author: Axel Gelfert
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1441193502
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
A critical survey of the contemporary philosophical debate about the word of others as a source of knowledge, pointing to areas of future research.

Author: Benjamin McMyler
Publisher: OUP USA
ISBN: 0199794332
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 187

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Book Description
Testimony, Trust, and Authority develops and defends an interpersonal theory of testimony according to which a speaker's testimony provides an audience with a distinctively second-personal reason for belief.

Author: Steven Reynolds (Associate Professor of Philosophy)
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107197759
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
This book explains how the concept of knowledge functions to improve our system of linguistic information exchange, by comparison with social norms.

Author: I. Niiniluoto
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9781402019852
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 1074

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Book Description
The twenty-eight essays in this Handbook, all by leading experts in the field, provide the most extensive treatment of various epistemological problems, supplemented by a historical account of this field. The entries are self-contained and substantial contributions to topics such as the sources of knowledge and belief, knowledge acquisition, and truth and justification. There are extensive essays on knowledge in specific fields: the sciences, mathematics, the humanities and the social sciences, religion, and language. Special attention is paid to current discussions on evolutionary epistemology, relativism, the relation between epistemology and cognitive science, sociology of knowledge, epistemic logic, knowledge and art, and feminist epistemology. This collection is a must-have for anybody interested in human knowledge, and its fortunes and misfortunes.