Document Type
Thesis
Degree
Master of Arts
Major
Philosophy
Date of Defense
4-30-2020
Graduate Advisor
William Dunaway
Committee
Eric Wiland
Jon McGinnis
Abstract
A central question in the epistemology of testimony concerns whether a
speaker’s testimony should count as a reason for a hearer to believe the
content of the speaker’s assertion. Proponents of the interpersonal view of
testimony (IVTs) contend that it is the interpersonal relationship between
speaker and hearer that provides the hearer with a reason to believe what
the speaker says. In contrast, critics of IVTs argue that the interpersonal
relationship between speaker and hearer is epistemically superfluous. Call
this the superfluity objection to IVTs. In the following paper, I defend
an IVT against the superfluity objection. I argue that the speech act of
telling is both genuinely interpersonal and has epistemic import. As I
present it, telling is an intersubjective, hence interpersonal, speech act:
it constitutively requires more than one party for an act of telling to
occur. Drawing from Grice (1989), I argue that the features which make
telling constitutively intersubjective also contribute to making it genuinely
epistemic. As such, the telling view of testimony avoids the superfluity
objection, vindicating IVTs.
Recommended Citation
Filby, Sam, "Telling and Testimony" (2020). Theses. 421.
https://irl.umsl.edu/thesis/421