Why Must We Tell?
Each of us can benefit from observations and discoveries made by other people and we can share information to our mutual advantage.
From Knowledge, by Michael Welbourne:
If I am not mistaken, Hume, no less than Reid, thinks there is a natural way of responding to what is perceived as testimony. Hume thinks that experience conditions us to deliver this response, whereas Reid thinks this mode of behaviour is divinely implanted; but however it is to be explained, both think it is part of our human nature to behave in this way. The response in question is simply to accept the information contained in the testimonies to which we are exposed. It seems pretty clear that this is how it is with us in many situations: for example, when we read the price tags on goods in the shops, lists of ingredients on pharmaceuticals, signposts, and so on. This is the default response to testimony; we accept that P on being told that P simply in virtue of understanding that we are being told that P. Nevertheless, we are sometimes suspicious. We may want to draw the line at believing reports of miracles, just like that. Where each of us draws the line will be at least to some extent a function of our previous experience, although some of us may be temperamentally more inclined to be suspicious than others. . . .
A good place to begin is to ask what, at bottom testimony [telling] is for. My suggestion is this. Human beings, like other more or less intelligent locomotors, need true beliefs for the successful conduct of their lives. We need them, above all, in order to realize our desires and bring our projects to successful conclusions. All our actions have to be performed in the circumstances that we believe to obtain, and it matters that our beliefs be true, if the actions are to be successful. But human beings are exceptional: the variety of goals we can conceive for ourselves and our capacity for an indefinitely wide range of cooperative endeavours that require us to share information with other people are vastly greater than other creatures seem able to encompass. We have correspondingly greater informational needs. So it is no accident that we have evolved special means for satisfying those needs, that is, for getting the multitude of true beliefs necessary for our flourishing. In particular we have developed ways of exploiting the work of one another by means of linguistic communication, so that each of us can benefit from observations and discoveries made by other people and we can share information to our mutual advantage. This is the origin of testimony [telling]. To be sure, we are not the only creatures that communicate, but no others can match us in the range and detail of the information we are capable of conveying to one another and in the fine focus with which we can articulate our informational wants.
