The Research Seminar Series in Philosophy invites you to a seminar with Andrew Peet, "Testimony as Cognitive Influence".
It is natural to think of testimony by analogy to gift giving. When a speaker testifies they transmit a proposition p from their mind to the hearer's with the assurance that p is true. The hearer, if they trust the speaker, accepts this gift by believing p. In this talk I discuss two problems for the gift giving model and I provide the beginnings of an alternative. The problems are as follows: 1. The gift giving model gives us no way to make sense of the idea that we sometimes have moral reasons to accept testimony. 2. The gift giving model presupposes an implausible and overly idealized model of communication. According to the alternative, testifiers don’t offer audiences anything – rather, they act upon audiences. The audience is faced with the choice to resist or consent to such external influence. I argue that this resolves the problems facing the gift giving model, and has (at least) two important knock-on consequences: 1. It dissolves the longstanding dispute between reductionists and anti-reductionists about testimony, 2. It makes the interpersonal acquisition of understanding continuous with the interpersonal acquisition of knowledge.
All interested are welcome to this meeting.
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