Testimony and Knowledge

3 Credits · Level: Graduate

This seminar will look at issues around testimonial knowledge and the transmission of knowledge via testimony and other vehicles. A central issue in the contemporary literature is whether testimonial knowledge/justification/evidence can be reduced to some other epistemic kind, such as inductive knowledge/justification/evidence. A related issue is whether the transmission of knowledge must be understood as a distinctive epistemic phenomenon, requiring its own theoretical treatment, or whether transmission can be understood using the usual categories of traditional epistemology. Other topics include: the role of trust in testimonial knowledge; the transmission of understanding; social epistemic dependence in science; the transmission of religious knowledge; common knowledge.