| |
Difino
| • | In philosophy testimony refers to any words or utterances that are presented as evidence for the claims they express. This definition may be distinguished from the legal notion of testimony in that the speaker does not have to make a declaration of the truth of the facts (See Testimony). Testimonial evidence contrasts with the evidence of the senses and memory.
The role of testimony in acquiring belief and knowledge has been a relatively neglected philosophical issue. Coady1 believes that this is because traditional epistemology has had a distinctly individualist flavour.
However, it seems that many of the beliefs that we hold have been gained through accepting testimony. For example, one may only know that Kent is a county of England or that David Beckham earns $30 million per year because one has learned these things from other people. A more striking example is the belief about one's own birthdate. If you know your birthdate, the evidence for your belief was almost certainly received through testimony.
One of the problems with acquiring knowledge through testimony is that it does not seem to live up to the standards of knowledge (see knowledge in philosophy ). As Owens notes2, it does not seem to live up to the Enlightenment ideal of rationality captured in the motto of the Royal Society – ‘Nullius in verba (no man's word)’. Crudely put, the question is: 'How can testimony give us knowledge when we have no reasons of our own?'
Coady sugests that there are two approches to this problem:
·Reductivism, which seeks to ‘reduce’ or re-describe our behaviour such that it is not at odds with the traditional view of knowledge
Source: [wikipedia: testimony, philosophical problems of]
|
alebrije.info
:
alebrijes
:
sites
:
advertising
:
link to us
:
contact
|
|