TESTIMONY

Some philosophers of knowledge believe that knowledge is definitely different from belief, so it may not be right to treat it as a kind of belief. Many philosophers nowadays appear to find it incredible that anyone should think knowledge is not some kind of (superior, privileged) belief; Contemporary epistemologists believe that their central task is to standardize the true of a belief. In contemporary epistemology, ‘testimony’ is used as an umbrella term to refer to all those instances where we form a belief, or acquire knowledge, on the basis of what others have told us. 

What is Testimony?

In the field of philosophy, testimony is defined as the intentional transfer of a belief from one person to another. The transfer can be verbal, written, or signaled in some way. The philosophy of testimony considers the nature of language and knowledge's confluence, which occurs when beliefs are transferred between speakers and hearers through testimony.

Testimony is an invaluable source of knowledge. This leads to the development of a theory that gives proper credence to testimony's epistemologically dual nature: both the speaker and the hearer must make a positive epistemic contribution to testimonial knowledge. According to Global Reductionism,  in order to be justified in accepting a speaker's testimony, we need to have positive reasons for believing that testimony is generally reliable.

What is Personal Testimony?

A personal testimony is simply the Good News presented in terms of your own experience. It is the experiential, practical, and lived side of the proclamation of the Gospel. An example of that is what a person says about a religious lesson he believes he learned from god.

Philosophical Issues Concerning Testimony

So much of what we know about the world comes from the testimony of others. But while testimony is clearly an indispensable source of knowledge, specifying exactly how it is that we are able to learn from a speaker’s say-so has proven to be a difficult task. According to "Testimony: Knowing through being told"(by Elizabetii Fricker), the primary concern of philosophy regarding testimony is epistemological: to explain the status as potentially justified and knowledgeable of beliefs dependent on testimony, Or if the upshot is skeptical, to show why such beliefs are not apt to be justified and knowledgeable. 

We can divide our central issue about testimony along two dimensions, yielding four distinct questions to investigate. 

Those are;

• Descriptive Local Question

• Normative Local Question

• Descriptive Global Question

• Normative Global Question

Descriptive Local Question

How do human hearers typically form belief in response to testimony? In particular, do they just trust their informant unthinkingly, blindly; or do they somehow (consciously, or sub-consciously) evaluate the informant for trustworthiness, and believe what they are told only if the evaluation is positive? (The process of testimony)

Normative Local Question

In what conditions, and with what controls, should a mature adult hearer believe what she is told, on some particular occasion? (Fresh instances of testimony, for an adult hearer.)

Descriptive Global Question

What is the actual place of testimony-beliefs overall, in a person's structure of empirical belief? What is the extent of dependence on testimony for grounding (epistemic dependence) of our beliefs? And what is the relation between testimony and our other sources of empirical belief: perception, memory, and deductive and inductive inference from empirical premises? 

Normative Global Question

How, if ever, can a system of beliefs with uneliminated epistemic dependence on testimony be justified?

Knowledge and Beliefs

Knowledge has been frequently described as "justified true belief", a belief held by an individual that is both true and for which they have some justification. Thus, for a belief to be knowledge, it must be the case that the belief is, in fact, true, and the believer must have justification for the belief. Knowledge, according to this traditional account, is justified true belief. And though philosophers still largely accept that justification is necessary for knowledge, it turns out to be difficult to explain precisely how justification contributes to knowing.

We assume that if we know something we also believe whatever it that we claim to know, so the domain of "knowledge" must be a subset of the class of "beliefs." But obviously not everything people believe to be true is in fact the case; there are false beliefs, and so if what we believe is in fact not the case, then clearly we do not know it, although we may falsely believe that we know it.

Knowledge of What One is Told

"Testimony: Knowing through being told" shows, In practice, in commonsense epistemology, we have concepts of a range of epistemic links: the various modes of perception, inference, memory and testimony; and we cite their operation to answer the question: "How do you know that?" By doing so, we provide, both for others and ourselves, an explanation of how we have come to know that thing, which one of the familiar types of epistemic access to that fact we have enjoyed. (- I saw it; I remember doing it; I worked it out; Someone told me.)

Let us turn to testimony armed with these general thoughts about knowledge. There is a prima facie rather attractive idea that in testimony knowledge just 'rubs off on one person from another. The conjecture is that it is a correct epistemic principle about testimony that:

• Pure Transmission principle (PTP): 

If A knows that P, and tells B that P, and B understands what she is told and thereby comes to believe it, then B knows that P. If the teller knows, and the hearer understands her, this is sufficient for the teller's knowledge to 'rub off' onto the hearer. 

• Reliable Transmission Principle (RTP): 

If A knows that P, and is generally disposed to be knowledgeable on that sort of topic, and A tells B that P, and B understands what she is told and thereby comes to believe it, then B knows that P. RTP is less implausible than PTP. 

CONCLUSION

Testimony is defined as the intentional transfer of a belief from one person to another. The transfer can be verbal, written, or signaled in some way. We can divide our central issue about testimony along two dimensions, yielding four distinct questions to investigate. Those are Descriptive Local Question, Normative Local Question, Descriptive Global Question, and Normative Global Question. Knowledge has been frequently described as "justified true belief", a belief held by an individual that is both true and for which they have some justification. Thus, for a belief to be knowledge, it must be the case that the belief is, in fact, true, and the believer must have justification for the belief.

REFERENCES: "Testimony: Knowing through being told" by Elizabetii Fricker, https://link.springer.com, Wikipedia