The Epistemology of Testimony, David Cooper
Cooper, D. E. (1987), ‘The Epistemology of Testimony’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Soceity Supplementary Volume LXI, 57-106.
p. 86 – Argues that Fricker’s notion of comptence (in respect to Testimony) is eccentric in that we recognise that doctors, et al, can exercise great competence and still get things wrong yet Fricker’s notion (S is competent with respect to P at t=df· at t, S believes P→P) has it that false beliefs means incompetence.
p. 88 – Not everything someone asserts is something they believe (Swift’s ‘A Modest Proposal’) [this might, however, be case of mistaking some speech act for being an assertion when it is not...].
p. 91 – Distinguishes between ‘committed assertions’ (intended to convey truth) and ‘uncommitted assertions’ (not intended to convey truth) – ‘A Modest Proposal,’ then, is not intended to convey truth.
p. 92 – Fricker’s view is a perceptualist account of speech acts; we hear assertions as such rather than infer them to be such things.
p. 93-4 – ‘What divides the ‘perceptualist’ from the ‘inferentialist’, I suggest, may be the following: —For the former, it is only in ‘suspicious’ cases that it can be properly required of the hearer that he be able to justify, beyond saying ‘I heard him’, his reception of a speaker’s utterance as a committed assertion. In the ‘normal’ case, where there is no suspicion of irony, say, the hearer’s inability to produce such further justification does not count against his entitlement to that judgement. For the ‘inferentialist’, on the other hand, it is always in order to require that the hearer be able to furnish this further justification. In ‘normal’ as much as in ‘suspicious’ cases, the inability to furnish it, if challenged, means that the hearer is not fully entitled to his judgement.’
[Is it me, or does this sound as if the prima facie case, for Fricker, is moved into the first order (based upon her use of CSS) rather than to the second order, where she claims testimony occurs?]
p. 95 – ‘My main concern is simply to emphasize the gap that exists between recognizing that S has asserted P and recognizing that his assertion was committed. Insensitivity to this gap makes the ‘perceptualist’ claim sound more obvious than it is. Such insensitivity is, of course, encouraged by restricting ‘assertion’ to committed assertions, for the gap is then pasted over. What may be true of assertion in the familiar sense—that it is heard as such—is then illicitly transposed to assertion in the stipulated sense of committed assertion.’
p. 97 – One response to the above: We can claim that, prima facie, assertions are of the committed type.
p. 99 – Questions whether we can claim most assertions are of the committed type.
p. 100 – Runs a line about uncommitted assertions being parasitic upon committed assertions, to which he agrees, but also points out that such a view is asymmetric; there is reason to think that no natural language could evolve without there being some uncommitted assertions. As he says ‘…words must first be used to open a clearing before we can communicate information about what is in the clearing.’ [This is almost the reverse of the literalist claim in re Creationism.]
p. 102 – ‘…any standing assumption of committedness will be relative to conversational context, not something which is transcendent of context.’
p. 104-4 – Refers to the perceptualist phenomenology of assertion as grimly authoritarian; because everyone is committed in their assertions there is no notion of the expressive.
p. 105-5 – Nice summary of the article that I can’t be arsed typing out.
