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| The Epistemology of Testimony - Part 1/4
First part of Peter Lipton's three-part article "The Epistemology of Truth" from Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science, 29:1 pp 1-31_, 1998.
I. Introduction
Is there anything you know entirely off your own bat? Your knowledge depends pervasively on the word of others. Knowledge of events before you were born or outside your immediate neighborhood are the obvious cases, but your epistemic dependence on testimony goes far deeper that this. Mundane beliefs -- such as that the earth is round or that you think with your brain -- almost invariably depend on testimony, and even quite personal facts -- such as your birthday or the identity of your biological parents -- can only be known with the help of others. Science is no refuge from the ubiquity of testimony. At least most theories that a scientist accepts, she accepts because of what others say. The same goes for almost all the data, since she didn't perform those experiments herself. Even in those experiments she did perform, she relied on testimony hand over fist: just think of all those labels on the chemicals. Even her personal observations may have depended on testimony, if observation is theory-laden, since those theories that are doing the lading were themselves accepted on testimony. Even if observation were not theory-laden, the testimony-ladenness of knowledge should be beyond dispute. We live in a sea of assertions and little if any of our knowledge would exist without it.
If the role of testimony in knowledge is so vast, why is its role in the history of epistemology so slight? Why doesn't the philosophical canon sparkle with titles such as “Meditations on Testimony, A Treatise Concerning Human Testimony, and Language, Truth and Testimony?” The answer is unclear. One might try to explain the neglect of testimony by appeal to an individualistic bias in the history of western epistemology, but this bias though real is not very explanatory, since `epistemic individualism' is little more than another expression for the neglect of testimony. A more satisfying explanation might be that testimony has been seen as derivative, a means merely for the transmission and not the creation of knowledge, and so a factor that fundamental epistemology can safely ignore.
This may help to explain the neglect of testimony, but it does not justify that neglect. The transmission of knowledge is or ought to be of central epistemological interest. Knowledge that depends on memory, for example, might profitably be viewed as the transmission of knowledge from past to present self, but this would hardly suggest that the epistemology of memory is unimportant. In any case, testimony is a means for the creation of knowledge. From an individualistic perspective this is obvious, since what I learn from others is new knowledge for me; but it is almost as obvious from a social perspective, as one can see by trying to imagine science without communication. Testimony ought to be one of the central topics in the theory of knowledge.
Fortunately, the neglect of testimony may have come to an end, thanks in large measure to two recent books on the subject: Tony Coady's Testimony (1992) and Steven Shapin's A Social History of Truth (1994). Both provide sustained studies of the epistemology of testimony; both are fine pieces of work. Neither book, it must be said, provides ideal bedtime reading. Both authors like to circle their quarry, returning to the same issues again and again from various angles: their discussions are rich, dense and rewarding. My aim in this article is to develop some of my own thoughts about the epistemology of testimony by grappling with theirs.
The central theme that Coady and Shapin share is the one I have already endorsed: the ubiquity of testimony. A signal virtue of both books is the way they illuminate the enormous extent to which we rely on the each other's word, the extent to which the acquisition of knowledge is a collective enterprise. This theme is not just a common starting point, but a common motif that runs the length of both books. What the two authors make of this motif, however, is interestingly different. Coady mainly uses the ubiquity of testimony in two ways. The first is to argue against the possibility of any reductive account of the epistemology of testimony that would justify our reliance on testimony in terms that are themselves testimony-free. David Hume's attempt to reduce testimonial inference to simple enumerative induction in his discussion of miracles provides Coady's most important target. The upshot of Coady's attack on reductionism is a kind of fundamentalism about testimony, according to which testimony is an irreducible source of knowledge, in many respects on a par with perception, memory, and deductive inference. The second main use Coady makes of the ubiquity of testimony is to explore the prospects for non-reductive vindication of our reliance on testimony. The emphasis here is on a style of transcendental argument, which aims to show that testimony must be reliable if a public language is possible at all. These two strands of Coady's discussion seem to me the most central and important in his book, but it contains much more. Virtually every philosopher in the standard philosophical canon who has written on testimony is discussed, and there are chapters on empirical work on the reliability of testimony, the role of expert witnesses in the law, and much more besides.
For Coady the ubiquity of testimony raises the question of justification; for Shapin it raises the question of management. Given the extent to which science depends upon testimony, the crucial question for Shapin becomes: which testimony should one accept? This is a question that every scientific community must answer, but different communities may answer it in different ways. The community that Shapin analyses in depth is that of the Royal Society of 17th Century England, with Robert Boyle in the starring role. Shapin argues that the decision of what to believe is largely a question of what kind of person to trust and, in the community of the Royal Society, the answer to that question was, broadly speaking: a gentleman. Gentlemen were counted trustworthy because of their moral qualities. They were by their nature counted free and virtuous: free men had no motive to lie, and virtuous men were committed to truthfulness. Moreover, because of the honour code that governed gentlemanly society, the cost of not trusting another gentleman was impossibly high. Here too, the central themes of the book are embedded in a rich discussion that raises many other important issues. Shapin has a great deal to say about what made for gentlemanly status, about Boyle's career and the way that career was presented, about the handling of awkward testimony in the cases of hydrostatics and astronomy, about the practical and epistemic role of servants and laboratory assistants, and about much else.
In part because of Coady and Shapin's fundamental agreement over the ubiquity of testimony and their consequent agreement about need to reject individualistic epistemologies, the contrasts between the two authors in both approach and doctrine are particularly interesting. Shapin is a social constructivist and a relativist, at least on matters of method; Coady has no patience for relativism, though he no naive realist. Coady emphasises the lack of criteria for accepting testimony and the universality of a policy of largely undiscriminating trust; Shapin is especially interested in how discriminations in trust are made, and in the particularities of the way the universal need to discriminate is met differently by different communities. Coady's epistemological concerns are largely normative; Shapin, it seems to me, attempts a kind of reduction of epistemology to descriptive ethics. These are deep contrasts, but a number of them are complementary so that, read in tandem, these books often seem to fill out different parts of a large and largely shared picture than to offer incompatible representations of the role of testimony in our lives.
Where the two books are in tension, I found myself siding sometimes with one, sometimes with the other, though my own work and approach is much closer to Coady's than to Shapin's. It seems to me that Shapin doesn't care enough about truth and Coady doesn't care enough about the importance of discriminating reliable from unreliable testimony. Shapin doesn't put sufficient emphasis on the testifier's competence; Coady doesn't worry enough about the testifier's honesty. Coady's epistemology would make us too gullible; Shapin's too selective. Moreover, although neither author rules out a `cognitive' or inferential account of the epistemology of testimony, both occlude such an account, Coady by emphasising simple acceptance of what we are told, Shapin by the reduction of epistemology to ethics. I try to defend some of these claims in what follows, beginning with some critical remarks about Shapin's book, then about Coady's, and ending with some reasons why we might want a cognitive solution to the problem of deciding whom to believe and a suggestion about where we might look for one.
II. Truth and Method
To give striking support to an approach or a theory, in any area of inquiry, take a phenomenon that the approach seems especially ill-suited to handle and show how the phenomenon can be reconfigured so as to provide a successful application of that approach. For example, altruistic behaviour is on its face a phenomenon that evolutionary biology is particularly ill-suited to explain, and this is one reason for the fascination with sociobiological accounts, which attempt to show that various sorts of altruism are precisely what an evolutionary mechanism should be expected to produce. What is attempted in cases like this is the conversion of an apparent counterexample into confirmatory evidence.
Shapin's project can be seen as a kind of counterexample conversion. However plausible a social constructivist story of the negotiations that lead to the acceptance of this or that bit of high theory, the constructivist approach seems ill-suited to account for the role of relatively mundane observation. The example of the Royal Society, with its emphasis on individualist empiricism, might be thought a particularly awkward case for the claimed ubiquity of testimony. Their motto, after all, was Nullius in verba (On no man's word). One of Shapin's central aims is to show that the dependence on testimony was ubiquitous in this case, as in all others, that it hence required extensive management, and that the social constructivist approach is well-suited to illuminate how this management was achieved. The extent to which Shapin succeeds in this is impressive. One reason it is so successful is that Shapin is especially good at balancing the particular against the universal, at revealing the particular and contingent ways that one scientific community handles the universal problem of the management of testimony.
For all my admiration for the historical achievements of social constructivists, however, I disdain their relativism, and I will begin my highly selective critique of A Social History of Truth with that topic. Shapin presents his book from the point of view of what he calls a `liberal' notion of truth, a notion that equates truth and consensual belief. He calls the notion `liberal' because it allows that what is true will vary between times and between communities, since consensual belief so varies. He contrasts this relativism with what he call the `restrictive' notion of truth, which distinguishes between truth and belief, and maintains that what is true does not vary over time or space. The restrictive notion is naturally associated with correspondence theories of truth, which makes what is true depend on the state of a mind-independent reality, but it would also cover some other standard philosophical accounts, including various Kantian, redundancy, and pragmatic theories. There are also members of the philosophical menagerie that are neither `liberal' nor `restrictive', such as some coherence, instrumental, and again some pragmatic theories. There is logical space for these theories of truth that are neither liberal nor restrictive because one can deny the equation between truth and consensual belief without maintaining that the truth is the same for all communities.
The frisson that the title `A Social History of Truth' is intended to provoke depends upon the contrast between the `liberal' perspective Shapin adopts and the `restrictive' perspective that he takes it many of his readers will have (though committed social constructivists will presumably take the title to suggest a truism). Partly for this reason, and partly because I am into epistemic bondage, I want to make some comment here on this very large topic. Because Shapin's taxonomy is not exhaustive, and because I find his terminology uncongenially loaded, from here on the `liberal' view will be referred to as `relativism', and any of the other views as `realism'.
The first question to ask is whether Shapin's relativism matters to his project. Shapin's own answer is no and yes. He claims that nothing in his book provides an argument against realism (4), and I agree. Realists will need to translate the title as A Social History of Belief, which will eliminate the frisson, but will not I think alter the substantive message. Similar translations will be necessary from time to time in the body of the book, but they strike me as equally innocuous and only very seldom required. Certainly a realist may read the book with great profit and may even accept almost all of its claims without metaphysical qualm. This is just what one would expect: the relativist and the realist both deploy the notion of belief, only the realist entertains a distinct notion of truth that the relativist rejects. So if the relativist tells a story about the dynamics of belief, there need be nothing in the story that the realist must reject.
Nevertheless, Shapin also maintains that his relativism matters methodologically, even if it makes little substantive difference to his argument (4-5). He claims it matters because realism creates a bias in favour of our own stock of knowledge, blocking curiosity about cultural variation. Relativism, by contrast, disposes us towards a charitable reading of alien belief and encourages us to leave aside what we believe the world to be like when trying to understand what historical actors thought. It also, according to Shapin, encourages the historian to adopt a salutary historicism, which interprets historical actors in their own terms (xvi). Shapin seems to acknowledge that, as ordinary actors, we are all realists, but he advocates relativism as an important resource for the special project of interpreting cultural variation. His willingness to tolerate both relativist and realist notions is I think also meant to be the consistent application of his relativism one level up.
Shapin's case for relativism in this book is very briefly made, but as given I find the arguments unpersuasive and the position unattractive, though I too will only offer a brief case. Since the notion of belief is common property between realists and relativists, realists are perfectly free to investigate the history of belief and its variation. Nor is it at all clear why a belief that there is only one truth should make one less interested in the question of why different people have believed different things. Moreover, insofar as a relativist can explain the development of past belief without appealing to what she knows but her subjects did not, so can the realist.
To this last claim the relativist may respond that, even if this feat of epistemic self-control were possible in principle, the realist would not in practice manage to avoid any appeal in his historical explanations to how he, deep in his heart, knows the world to be. Perhaps this would be difficult, but I do not see why it should be any more difficult than the feat that the relativist needs to perform, of suspending her own realism as an ordinary actor when she turns her hand to history. (Maybe both are impossible.) Indeed it is not even clear that the two feats are distinct.
Nor would it help the relativist if she could establish or persuade herself that relativism just is the true account of truth. Paradox aside, this will not serve the purpose, because epistemic relativism does not entail epistemic tolerance, any more than moral relativism entails moral tolerance. I may accept that what you believe to be morally right is indeed right for you even if it differs from what I take to be right, yet decide that one of the things that is right for me is ruthlessly to oppress you. I may decide that what your community believes is indeed true for you, even though it contradicts what I believe, yet decide to explain your beliefs in my terms and by appeal to how I take the world to be. The case for historicism must be made apart from the case for relativism, and if it can be so made then it can be accepted by the realist.
This suggests why I hold that the realist is in no worse shape than the relativist, when it comes to historical methodology. But there are also special liabilities the relativist faces. At first glance, a relativist view of truth seems strikingly inappropriate to Shapin's particular project, which is to explain how a particular community managed the problem of determining which testimony to accept and which to reject, because that choice presupposes a distinction between what is believed (or at least asserted) and what is the case. This point is related to one of Plato's central objections to relativism in the Theaetetus, his argument from judgements about the future (171d-172c, 177c-179b). Even if relativism were acceptable for judgements about current appearances, so for them what seems true is the same as what is true, it would not be acceptable for judgements about the future, even judgements about future experience. For in this case, the judger cannot contain the criterion of truth within herself: she must admit the possibility of a mismatch between what she believes she will experience and the experience when it comes. Similarly, when we evaluate testimony, we must acknowledge the possibility of justified false belief: the possibility of the gap between what a correct application of our epistemic standards might lead us to accept and what we might later discover. Thus those who rely on testimony but are not completely gullible must make the realist's distinction between belief and truth. So it may seem that one cannot make sense of the selective use of testimony from a relativist's point of view. But this is too quick. As we have seen, Shapin is careful to distinguish between the attitude of the actor and the special-purpose attitude of the analyst. What I have just said shows that the choosy consumers of testimony must be realists, but this does not immediately preclude selective relativism for historical purposes.
That special-purpose relativism is nevertheless problematic. First of all, it seems to violate the principle of historicism, since it deploys a relativist's notion of truth that is alien to the historical actors. The problem is not just that those actors did not in fact deploy this notion: no actors can consistently think relativistically about their own ordinary judgements and discriminations. Secondly, relativism generates an inconsistency that Shapin's `special-purpose' locution elides. As an historian who relies hand-over-fist on testimony but is at least as choosy as most, Shapin must be a realist about his own claims, making a sharp distinction between what members of his community may generally hold and what is really the case about past actors. At the same time, his methodology instructs him to deny the distinction. The only way I can see to avoid the inconsistency is to maintain the distinction between truth and belief, while attempting a principled refusal to explain the behaviour of past actors in terms they did not deploy. And that is simply the realist-historicist's approach to the problem.
Continued...
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Professor Peter Lipton is head of the Department of the History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge.
Published 2001.06.12
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