Monday, January 3, 2011

The Epistemology of Testimony

A couple of months ago, I wrote a draft of a post about some recent books on the epistemology of testimony. Now that in my two previous posts I referred to the epistemology of trust, I think it's time to mention those books.

The past few years have witnessed a remarkable development in the study of the epistemological problems of testimony, a topic that should be of interest to those seriously working on epistemological skepticism. The best recent books of which I'm aware are the following:

- Sandy Goldberg, Relying on Others. Oxford University Press, 2010.

- Jennifer Lackey, Learning from Words: Testimony as a Source of Knowledge. Oxford University Press, 2008.

- Sandy Goldberg, Anti-Individualism: Mind and Language, Knowledge and Justification. Cambridge University Press, 2007.

- Jennifer Lackey & Ernest Sosa (eds.), The Epistemology of Testimony. Oxford University Press, 2006.
 
There is a clear and useful discussion of testimony, by Jonathan Adler, in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Click here.
 
Finally, the epistemology of testimony forms part of so-called "social epistemology", even though those working on testimony do not usually use this phrase to describe what they do. In this respect, there's a very recent collective volume on the topic:
 
- Adrian Haddock, Allan Millar, and Duncan Pritchard (eds.), Social Epistemology. Oxford University Press, 2010.

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