Testimony and Trustworthiness, Keith Lehrer
Lehrer, K. (2006),Testimony and Trustworthiness, in Jennifer Lackey & Ernest Sosa, ed.,’The Epistemology of Testimony’, Oxford University Press, , pp. 145-159.
p. 145 – Proposes that the judgement of trustworthiness is testimonially based but that it is not going to be viciously circular.
p. 146-7 – Arguing against prima facie claims.
p. 149 – ‘The testimony is itself a source of evidence when the informant is trustworthy in the testimony. The terstimony in itself does not constitute evidence otherwise. A person may have evidence, as in an example considered, that what the informant says is true which is based on knowledge about the etiology of the testimony when the informant is herself untrustworthy. That does not mean that the testimony in itself is a source of evidence. Knowledge of the etilogy reveals that what the informant says is true in spite of the fact that the informant is herself untrustworthy. She is not worthy of trust even thouh we have evidence that what she says is true.’
Uses an example of a good testifier lying to another because they know that the person they are testifying to is a chronic liar and will thus only transfer the knowledge accurately if lied to. Apart from the fact that much testimony is much more that ‘A is B’ (which you could turn into ‘Not-A is B’ but which could have been conveyed as ‘Not-C is B’ which won’t work in this kind of transmission) I wouldn’t even classify this as testimonial transmission because I, the person who hears the liar, would have to know that the first testifier told a lie, which I, without further evidence, can’t know (and it seems like a pretty far-fetched thing to say that whenever someone tells anything to a chronic liar that they too will lie). Indeed, in this instance the person making the claim isn’t testifying unless they plan for me to hear it via this intermediary liar. Certainly, telling the liar ‘Not-A is B’ doesn’t transfer to the liar any knowledge because they may well take it that they have just been told ‘Not-A is B’ is true (if they know the person has lied to them then surely they will convert the statement to its true meaning and then lie about that one…). This seems a silly point.
p. 150 – Trustworthiness is not connected to truth.
p. 151-2 – Testimonial loop; our trust is testimony based.
p. 154-6 – His argument for a non-foundationalist, non-reliablist model of our justification in holding to testimony seems to rest upon a notion of general capacities (‘my being trustworthy in what I accept’) that is fallible when applied to specific cases. This is not a deduction from a general rule to particular cases, apparently.
