To Be Believed as a Person
Beyond its epistemic function of making knowledge available to the recipient, testimony is intimately tied to human sociality.
Again from A Critical Introduction to Testimony. Lots of boldfaced emphasis from me on this section:
Russell’s question—'Why accept testimony at all?'—has a simple, if somewhat flippant, answer: because we cannot not rely on the testimony of others. Our dependence on others for knowledge is so pervasive that, if we are to lead rich epistemic lives, we cannot do without testimony as a source of knowledge . . . We would stand to lose much more than just knowledge, if we were forced to give up on the exchange of testimony. Beyond its epistemic function of making knowledge available to the recipient, testimony is intimately tied to human sociality . . .
There are at least two aspects to this. First, much of the communication we engage in with others does not primarily aim at imparting knowledge—even if overtly informative speech acts are typically governed by norms of truthfulness, sincerity and accuracy—but instead seeks to strengthen social ties . . . The wish to be believed as a person—as opposed to being relied upon, in purely instrumental fashion, as a mere source of information—has deep roots in our psychology as social beings. As Stanley Cavell puts it: 'I do not always feel that speaking to someone is making myself handy for them, or always done because something handier is lacking'. The fact that the speaker is personally invested in her testimony is also recognized by the recipient, which is why 'if I accept what you say, on the basis of your saying it, [. . .] I respond by saying "I believe you", not "I believe what you say"'.
Second, we often participate in testimonial exchanges in order to put our own judgements to the test—if not explicitly, then at least in indirect ways . . . Thus, Sydney Shoemaker writes:
"Unless I were willing in some circumstances to accept the utterances of other people as memory claims, and as evidence concerning what has happened in the past (among other things, what has happened to me in the past), and were willing to do this without first having conducted an empirical investigation to determine whether I am entitled to do it, I would in effect be admitting no distinction between the way things are and the way they seem to me to be" . . .It is part of the philosophical conundrum of testimonial dependence that, by the time we are in a position to ask epistemological questions, we have already been thoroughly infused with the knowledge, beliefs and information gained from the testimony of others . . . When we call into question specific beliefs—or belief-forming practices—we always do so against the backdrop of an already established 'world-picture':
"But I did not get my picture of the world by satisfying myself of its correctness; nor do I have it because I am satisfied of its correctness. No: it is the inherited background against which I distinguish between true and false" . . .Even those who, as mature reasoners, tend towards caution in their testimonial dealings with others, may find, upon reflection, that they are epistemically indebted to others in more ways than they might have suspected at first.
