|
Email
|
If you enjoy this article, consider making an online donation to support the Global Spiral.
|
| The Epistemology of Testimony - Part 2/4
III. The Morality of Epistemology
We turn from the true to the good. Shapin encourages us to see the epistemology of testimony as a problem in applied ethics. He argues for this at two levels, the global and the local. The global arguments are that testimony is by its nature a moral issue, since accepting testimony is a matter of trust, since the social order depends upon it and since giving testimony is tantamount to making a promise that one's word can be relied upon. Testimony inherits the rich ethical content of placing trust, maintaining the social order and keeping promises. The local arguments concern the criteria of credibility that the 17th century gentlemen deployed. These criteria were moral, based as they were on the concepts of free action, honor, virtue, and civil conversation.
Shapin is very successful at eliciting moral aspects of testimony, and this is from my point of view a particularly important achievement, since the connection between epistemology and ethics is almost entirely ignored by the standard epistemological literature. Shapin's discussion and references also suggest that Coady would have found the philosophical literature on testimony somewhat less sparse had he investigated sources in ethics and political theory. At the same time, while Shapin places the existence of a substantial moral component in the epistemology of testimony beyond doubt, his discussion also suggests the radical programme of reducing the epistemology of testimony reduces to ethics. I want briefly to consider this reductive idea.
A claim that the epistemology of testimony reduces to ethics can mean various things. One is that all the criteria for the credibility of testimony are overtly criteria of moral assessment. Shapin's specific arguments concerning 17th century gentlemen's criteria of credibility and the moral elements they involve would not support this sort of general reductive claim, since only some of the criteria in play were overtly moral. To determine whether to accept a piece of testimony, the actors Shapin discusses, like the rest of us, take many factors into account. For example, we all makes use of the factors mentioned in Locke's famous list ((1700) IV.XVI.4), a list that includes the integrity of the informant, a moral question, but also the number and skill of the witnesses, the `design' of the author, the consistency of the different parts of the testimony and the existence of contrary testimonies. These, unlike honor and virtue, are not overtly moral criteria.
A second version of the reductive claim is that, while the specific criteria of credibility may be more or less overtly moral, the institution of testimony is by its nature a moral institution. This is the sort of reductive claim that Shapin's global arguments seem aimed to establish. The first universal argument is the argument from trust. The institution of testimony is by its nature moral, according to this argument, because the decision whether to accept someone's testimony is always a question of whether to trust the informant, and judgements of trustworthiness are always moral judgements. On its own, this argument is unpersuasive. We may grant that the decision whether to accept someone's testimony can always be glossed as the decision whether to trust that person, but we do not yet have a reason to suppose that trust in this sense is always a moral issue. It seems rather to be a sense that includes scientists' decisions whether to trust their theories, instrumentation and data.
The second global argument is that the institution of testimony is by its nature moral, because it is a prerequisite for the existence of any social order. The premise seems clearly correct: given our ubiquitous dependence on the word of others, no society could exist without testimonial practices. But, one might say, nor could a society exist in the absence of sense perception or reasoning, yet this is hardly sufficient to show that the epistemology of perception or reasoning reduces to ethics: not every prerequisite for a moral practice or concept is itself moral. If this objection to Shapin's argument is unconvincing, perhaps it is in part because the point is not just that testimony is a prerequisite for social order, but that it partially constitutes that order. Testimony is itself a social activity in a way that perception and reasoning are not. (Or so it seems. Given Coady's case for the influence of testimony on all other forms of belief acquisition, however, one might in the end want to say to say that all of these are to some extent social.) Nevertheless, even being partially constitutive of a social practice does not entail a strong moral reduction. Language, or its use, is of course part of social practice, but it does not follow that the philosophy of language reduces to ethics.
The leaves us with the third and I think the best of Shapin's global arguments, the argument from promises. In outline, the argument is that promising is a moral institution, to give testimony is tantamount to promising that one's word can be relied upon, so testimony is a moral institution. This argument looks strong, because promises do have an essentially moral character, and testimony does seem to be as morally charged as promising. As it happens, Kant came very close to making Shapin's argument for him. Promising is one of the examples Kant uses to illustrate his first formulation of the Categorical Imperative, according to which we should only act on a maxim that we could will to be a universal law. The Categorical Imperative is supposed to exclude false promises, because the attempt to universalise a maxim that permitted them would destroy the institution of promising. Conveniently enough, Kant equates false promising with lying, so that his claim is effectively also that we shouldn't lie, since the attempt to universalise a maxim that permitted lies would eliminate the practice of testimony (Kant (1785) First Section). This certainly suggests that promising and giving testimony are both essentially moral, and for the same reason.
Nevertheless, there is a salient difference between testimony and promises. When I promise to meet you for lunch tomorrow, I vouch that I will be there, not just that I would like to be. Testimony is sometimes but not always like this. When an informant speaks, she is sometimes vouching for the truth of what she says, so that she may be held morally culpable if what she said turns out to be false, even if she believed what she said. In many other cases, however, all she is morally responsible for is her belief in what she says. Testimony may be false in two ways: though lying and through honest mistake. Lying is always a moral issue, but error is only a moral issue some of the time. If I tell you the ice is safe, I take responsibility for being right, not just for being honest, but this is only one type of case. I do not suppose that everyone with whom I disagree is for that reason morally deficient. If there is a temptation to think that one always takes moral responsibility for the truth of one's testimony, this may be due to the formal ring of the word; once reminded that here we are here construing `testimony' so broadly as to include virtually all assertion, the temptation should disappear. There thus appears to be an important disanalogy between promises and testimony: false promises are always raise a moral issue, whereas false assertions do not. The most one can say is that lying is always an option in the case of testimony, and someone who gives testimony does vouch for his honesty, so to this extent testimony is indeed a moral issue.
In Shapin's discussion, the contrast to true testimony is almost always a lie, rather than an error (cf. Feingold 1996, 138). Why is this? One possibility is that his relativist methodology makes it seem inappropriate to invoke the category of error. But it is also part of Shapin's methodology to abjure appeal to the actors' psychological states (xxiii), which might seem to exclude attributions of lying too, because of the mendacious intention that this requires. Indeed he tells us to construe his use of `belief' behaviouristically, as `acting as if one believed', which would seem to rule out in one go the attribution of both error and of mendacity. The solution to this puzzle is to insist on the distinction I mentioned earlier between actor and analyst. Shapin will not claim that his actors were either mistaken or dishonest, but he is free to attribute to his actors both sorts of claim.
There are more plausible explanations for the focus on lying. One is that it meshes with Shapin's detailed development of the nature of the gentleman. Freedom, virtue and honor are supposed to be proof against lying, but not against error. It is the case of lying rather than the case of error that suits the local argument for the moral status of gentlemen's testimony. Another explanation for Shapin's focus on the lie is that it is the universal possibility of mendacity rather than the universal possibility of error that supports the claim that the management of testimony always has a moral component. A final explanation for the focus on the lie, however, would be an attempt to support a reduction of epistemology to ethics in a stronger form than I have so far considered. This would be the claim not merely that the decision of what testimony to accept has a moral dimension, but that moral assessment exhausts the space. It would be the attempt to replace the cognitive by the moral; but none of Shapin's arguments supports such moral imperialism. The sensible reminder of the permanent possibility of mendacity needs to be distinguished from any suggestion that all the credibility factors that consumers of testimony use to distribute their trust are themselves morally loaded. We may be quite convinced that our informant is an honest chap, yet still wonder whether to believe what he says, and the considerations that govern our decision in such cases will be epistemic but not in any straightforward sense ethical. An epistemology of testimony should illuminate these cognitive considerations, and these considerations should not be occluded by the moral factors that accompany them.
IV. Gentlemen Prefer Gentlemen
Shapin's book offers a rich and detailed discussion of the nature and status of gentlemanly culture in 17th century Britain and of Robert Boyle's own position in that culture. I am not in a position properly to assess Shapin's claims here, but his discussion must be essential reading for anyone concerned with this aspect of cultural history. I will, however, venture a few criticisms of some of Shapin's claims about the role of gentlemanly culture in the epistemology of testimony.
Shapin presents the central features of gentlemanly culture, especially freedom of action and the codes of honor and virtue, as peculiarly effective resources for establishing relations of trust. Yet some of these features and their consequences might be liabilities rather than advantages. Two seem particularly problematic: the freedom of action that gentlemen enjoyed and the extraordinarily high cost that Shapin claims was associated with contradicting a gentleman's testimony.
Shapin argues that gentlemen's free status encouraged trust in their testimony, primarily because it made it possible for them to present themselves as disinterested informants self-constrained by the honor code. This is plausible, but freedom cuts both ways. It also presumably allowed and was seen to allow gentlemen to get away with false testimony in a way that the comparatively unfree could not. Who had more to lose from being judged an unreliable informant, the master or the servant? Shapin's discussion of the role that the recognition of free status played in distributions of trust seems one-sided. Similarly, the high, even mortal cost of denying a gentleman's testimony seems a mixed epistemic blessing. Shapin argues, again with plausibility and insight, that this arrangement supported a culture of civil conversation that had clear advantages for the management of testimony. But it also seems that it must have had clear disadvantages. No gentleman could in fact accept everything claimed by every other gentleman, on pain of pervasive contradiction so, if trust could not be publicly withheld, the denials must have moved underground. This would and presumably did create various difficulties for the management of testimony, alongside its civil advantages. Shapin does an excellent job of illustrating some of the ways gentlemen scientists managed to avoid public contradiction, but he does not in my view say enough about the inevitable contrast between public acquiescence and private dissent (Cf. Feingold 1996, 134).
To my claim that some of the features of gentlemanly status that Shapin takes to be central to gentlemen's testimonial practices would have provided liabilities as well as advantages for the management of testimony, Shapin ought I think to respond that this is so but constitutes no criticism. His point is that this was the way testimony was in fact managed by that particular group of actors, whether or not it was the easiest conceivable means of getting the job done. My objection so far would then just be the mild one that Shapin's presentation is skewed towards the advantages. But I want now also to question the claim that it was the peculiar features of gentlemanly culture that provides the primary explanation of gentlemen's distribution of trust in each other. My question is based on two very general observations, both of which Shapin seems to accept and which in any case are pretty much direct consequences of the ubiquitous reliance on testimony that applies to members of any community and which both Shapin's and Coady's books bring out so well.
Given the extent of any actor's dependence on the word of others, it seems clear that he must trust most of the testimony of members of his own community, given that these members will in almost every case provide the actor with his primary source of testimony. This trust is essential if the actor is to have a workable stock of beliefs at all and, as Shapin observes, it is encouraged by the repeated and `face-to-face' interaction that in-group testimony allows (414-416). Not only are we in general more inclined to trust testimony delivered to our faces, but repeated interaction with the same individuals often provides especially good opportunities to assess the reliability of informants and so particularly strong motives for informants to act reliably. Crudely put, we are especially inclined to trust people we know, because we sometimes have especially good reasons to trust them and because sometimes we have no choice.
Faced then with the question of why gentlemen trusted each other, the obvious answer is simply that they all belonged to the same club. We could say that they trusted each other because they were all gentlemen, but this answer is ambiguous between Shapin's explanation and the simpler one I have just offered. The difference comes out when we move from group to group. According to Shapin, his gentlemen scientists were often suspicious of the testimony of `vulgar divers', who made claims about the effect of diving on perceived pressure. Yet given the enormous need for testimony from those with whom one lives, the community of vulgar divers could not but largely trust each other, however suspicious they may have been of the testimony of gentlemen. The general explanation I have suggested does not appeal directly to freedom, honor, and virtue, which might differentiate the gentlemen from the divers. The explanation is just that gentlemen, like vulgar divers, trusted their own.
The relationship between Shapin's `honor explanation' and my `communal explanation' for the trust that gentlemen placed in each other is not straightforward. Logically, they do not exclude each other: they could both be true, and indeed Shapin seems to endorse something like the communal explanation at the end of his book, where he presses his universal claims about testimony and trust. But one might hold that the two explanations are nevertheless epistemic competitors. We know that the communal explanation applies to the community of gentlemen, because it applies to all communities and, insofar as we have this explanation, it undermines our reason for also endorsing the honor explanation. An analogy may clarify this point. If my computer will not turn on, I might consider two explanations, that its fuse is blown and that it isn't plugged in. Both these explanations could be true, but once I see that the plug is out I lose any evidence I might have had for the blown fuse. If we take this view of the relation between the honor and communal explanation, then we ought to conclude that Shapin has at least substantially overstated his case.
It is not, however, clear to me that we ought to take the relation between the explanations in this way. An alternative, and one that Shapin would I think favour, is that the two explanations are not even epistemic competitors. Instead, the honor explanation should be seen as the communal explanation applied to a particular case. If another crude analogy is wanted, the relationship between the communal and honor explanation is not like that between the plug and the fuse explanation, but perhaps like the relationship between a Darwinian natural selection explanation for the presence of a given trait and an explanation appealing to the mechanism of gene selection and reproduction. In this case, the second explanation provides the instantiation of the first, showing how natural selection `runs' here on earth. Similarly, the proposal in the case of our 17th century gentlemen is that while members of any group must trust each other, the actual mechanism by which gentlemen managed this task is provided by the details that Shapin's honor explanation provides.
I am on the whole sympathetic to this irenic solution to the problem of the relation between the two explanations, but there may still be some difficulty of epistemic competition. Purporting to explain the grounds of my love for another, I may cite her extraordinary attention to detail, her rigid moral standards, and the righteous indignation she feels at every slight, and then go on to say why these are such good traits. Knowing, however, that I am deeply narscisistic and that the traits I have cited are precisely those I share with my beloved, you may reasonably suspect that the real reason I love her is not that these traits are so desirable, but just that they are ones I share. Similarly, a sceptical reader of Shapin's descriptions of the epistemic values invested by gentlemen in other gentlemen's perceived freedom, virtue and honor may still leave with the impression that what is really managing the testimony in this case is simply the maxim, `trust your own kind'. Insofar as this is so, Shapin's honour explanation may be right about the importance of the gentlemanly qualities he cites yet mislocate their import and exaggerate their moral aspect, since those qualities would function more as does a certain sort of accent than as genuine moral justifications.
Another criticism of Shapin's particular explanation for gentlemanly trust moves in the opposite direction from my observations arising out of the communal explanation of trust. The ubiquity of testimony requires that we maintain especially strong trust relations within our own community, but it also requires that we trust outsiders. Shapin illustrates this in considerable detail, devoting a chapter to the trust that Boyle had to invest in the testimony of his technicians. Other ungentle folk upon whose testimony gentlemen depended, many also mentioned by Shapin, include women, servants, instrument-makers, apocatheries, printers, messengers, and on and on. But this obvious and pervasive dependence on outsiders' testimony seems strikingly at odds with the general message of the honor explanation: gentlemen only trust gentlemen. Shapin must be aware of this tension, but he says surprisingly little directly to reduce it. What he does emphasise is invisibility of trust in the ungentle, so that for example a technician's observation reported to a gentleman is treated as the gentleman's own observation. Shapin's discussion here is extensive and nuanced, but for present purposes the main point is the claim that ungentle testimony was only trusted when vouched for by a gentleman, in which case it was treated as in effect the testimony of the gentleman himself, and thus made trustworthy for other gentlemen (400-401). The role of vouching in the epistemology of testimony is an interesting issue, and receives in this book an interesting treatment, but it does not remove the tension I have flagged. For as Wittgenstein never said, all vouching comes to an end. Boyle could vouch for his servants' results, but he often had to accept them himself without any other gentleman's voucher, and of course all other scientists were in a parallel situation. Moreover, even the knowledge of who is a gentleman must have depended in part on ungentle testimony. So, however important the role of freedom, honor and gentlemanly virtue, these traits cannot fully explain how gentlemen managed their judgements of credibility.
I will end this section by flagging a different but fundamental limitation on the scope of the honour explanation, one which would apply with equal force to a communal explanation. These sorts of account make credibility remarkably independent of the content of the testimony. What counts is who says it, not what is said. In this sense, these accounts are undiscriminating: they do not discriminate among different assertions of the same actor. Yet of course all of us do make such discriminations. We trust a person on some matters but not on others, and on a particular matter will accept claims only within a certain range of plausibility. Shapin's lack of focus on this sort of discrimination may be related to his interest in honesty rather than competence. To some extent, judgements of honesty attach to the individual as a whole, though of course even here we think that someone is much more likely to lie on some topics than on others. Competence, however, is more obviously connected to the content of the assertion: a person is not judged competent in all matters, but only in this or that area. In any event, it is clear that the decision whether to believe someone depends not just on who they are but also on what they say and how what they say fits with what the audience already accepts. The central question about testimony is not just whom to trust, but what to believe.
Did you enjoy this article? ... Your donation is tax-deductible to the fullest extent of the law.
Excerpt from "The Epistemology of Testimony", Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science, 29:1 pp 1-31, 1998.
Published 2001.06.19
|
Printer-Friendly |
Email This Article
©1997-2008 Metanexus Institute
www.metanexus.net |
|
|