Why Don’t We Rely On One’s Testimony?

In the course of this paper, I will try to approach the epistemic standing of testimonial knowledge by respectively presenting the opinions of Laurence BonJour and Jennifer Lackey as grounds in order to state my own opinions throughout the paper. At the core of the paper, I will focus the position of testimony in the case of miracles and interrogate the so-called reasons why we don’t rely on one’s testimony. If I will be reasonable enough, I aim to apply same arguments to other cases which are more casual. In order to support my argument on behalf of testimony, Thomas Reid’s views will be quite helpful and also challenging for Hume’s position. Considering the case of miracles, I will give place for Hume’s opinions and through the end of the paper I hope to suggest a naive breath of fresh air for the epistemic aspect of the miracles.

In his article, Laurence BonJour reasons about the reliability of testimony which is conveyed by others and he questions the situations which we have no direct relation to justify them. One of the most well known examples is about a place or an artificial manmade objects like  popular artworks, sculptures,etc. There are various things I have never seen and places I have never been, but it is possible for me to reach the knowledge of them via other sources existing independently from me. If I put the problem of other minds aside, either the agreements of other people on the same knowledge or communicational tools which I can access the information has to be enough for me to rely the truthness of the knowledge about this object or place. In other words, it is an inference to the best explanation, because there are so many widespread sources about these things. We are justified by previous testimonies which are reliable and checked many times by others. For the justification of these testimonies by others, even if Bonjour seems having an inclination to give more credit the truthness of beliefs, through the end of the part he says that:

“ Through there is obviously room for much more discussion, the indicated conclusion is that there is no way to construct a strong inductive argument for the conclusion that beliefs resulting from testimony are likely to be true on the basis of the cases where the reliability of such beliefs can be determined firsthand.”

Jennifer Lackey starts with emphasizing the generative aspect of testimony and the content which is the crucial point to argue on the favor of the testimony. But, If testimony is nothing rather than a transmission, and transmission of testimony entails a memory which preserves knowledge, then can we talk about a generation of a new knowledge from that transmission? Lackey claims that rather than a mere transmission of what one knows or believes, statements of people can generate knowledge if these statements meet some conditions, namely: statement’s reliability, person’s belief based on content of testimony, and no undefeated defeater found by person who is given the testimony. With these conditions Lackey saved the generative feature of the testimony on the basis of its content, but still she has to go for the justification of testimonial knowledge. She argues that belief we gain from testimony should be grounded in order to be qualified as a knowledge. But one can argue against this by saying that this ground is nothing more than other fundamental abilities of us. Here she mentions the reductionism and non-reductionism which are traditionally argue for the basic authority gives the justification for testimony. Even if the reductionists claim for the sake of other capacities of people and non-reductionists give priority for one’s testimony, it is not easy to put Lackey’s position in neither of them.

Considering these views, it is obvious that people can strongly argue for opposite views about testimony and our epistemic standing about relying on it or not. I would want to go further out of my curiosity and start with examining one of the extreme cases of testimony which is about miracles. Why don’t we rely on one’s testimony in the case of miracles? There are several reasons differing from case to case, but it would be better if I start with interrogating the most usual ones.

First and the most well known explanation coming from the encounterers of miracles, since miracle and its report are rare event in humans’ daily life, is that miracle is a violation of laws of nature, so it is not true that there are miracles. This explanation is open to debate, because it starts with defining miracles as violations of laws of nature which are identified by their regularity and permanence. Since in the case of nature there is no explanation coming from science or common sense for what is the reason for that law, then their regularity does not explain what makes them laws of nature, it just shows a strong property of these laws. Thus, there cannot be any sufficient argument coming from impossibility of miracles by defining them as violation of unbreakable laws of nature.

Second objection can be the lack of evidences in the case of miracles and this is a controversial one, because adequacy of evidences can change from case to case or person to person. Let me continue with an example of mine. There is a girl travelling a lot with her parents, once the family was in a cafe in Moscow, while she was looking throughout the window she saw a little horse with a horn on its head. It was a beautiful animal and she called it as “hornse”. After few years they went to another country and they were in a forest, she was looking around and she saw the “hornse” again. she told her parents and they said “ Yes my dear, but it is known as rhino.” Until the day she was taught that rhino is not the same what she saw and seeing a “hornse” is called as miracle, she has seen it for two more times. And when she has learned that seeing a real “hornse” is called as miracle because there is no such thing, she said that “I have already known that seeing a ‘hornse’ is less probable than not seeing it, but why don’t you believe that I saw couple of them? I believed in you when you told me there is such a thing as rhino, even though what I saw was a hornse”. In her case, when parents and girl assume that they both think the same animal, parents did not want evidence for her testimony, because they already have the knowledge of rhino but they do not have any “evidence” for hornse. The situation of parents is an understandable one, but if we argue about evidence for something it is obviously more difficult trying to show an evidence for a thing considered as non exist (hornse for parents) than for a thing which was experienced (hornse for girl).

Also, one can argue by pointing that it is more probable to see a rhino rather than a hornse, but she has already said that seeing it is less probable than not seeing it. Thus from this argumentation we cannot infer that she did not see it. Here we have to give place for Hume’s opinions, since he is an empiricist and also a naturalist he has strong views about miracles and he finds miracles as events which their probability to be true is less than the probability of one’s testimony being false. Thus according to him, there is no reason to believe in miracles. However, as I have tried to mention above, reasons why we don’t rely on one’s testimony are not sufficient in the case of miracles because probability objection takes laws of nature as granted like they are the primary and ultimate causes of things which occur in the world. Thus, it is begging the question in a sense when we conclude about miracles as being unlikely by starting from the violation of laws of nature as being unlikely.

We can think of the cases such as when people see a spaceship. It is not against the laws of nature, there is no evidence against their being both from science and commonsense, it is less probable to see it than not to see it. Still these cannot show the sufficient reason why we do not rely on one’s testimony about seeing an spaceship. Then my position in this kind of argumentation seems something like that: “I have to trust every testimony even if there is a little chance for it to happen, or few evidence on the behalf of it”. But, this is a very hard position to defend and from our experiences we know that this is not the case all the time. Then, when don’t we rely on one’s testimony?

Let’s think a simple example. I am at home in a hot summer day, my home mate comes from outside and says that it is snowing outside. There is small probability to be snow outside and I have said that small probability does not mean that it is impossible for something to happen. There is also my friend’s testimony and we have a kind of trustworthy friendship. So, do I have to rely on her testimony just because of these reasons? Probably not, because in this kind of a case I usually say that “No way, are you kidding me?!” which implies that I do not believe what you have said and I think it is a joke. This means I think what she has said is an unreliable testimony. So is it that easy not to believe one’s saying? If it is so, then how can I argue for the reliability of one’s testimony on miracles, or other less probable events? Here I have an important reason to reject her testimony, because the priority of my personal experience over her testimony makes me more than legitimate to trust my own experience, so I can say that I don’t believe in you (because it is extremely hot to snow outside).

Also something humorous appears here; jokes can be thought as testimonies we rely on falsely. When someone makes a joke he knows that his testimony is a reliable one for me and it must be like that otherwise there would be no fun, so the crucial element of jokes is its foundation of my false belief about what he testifies.

If I get back my point in order to draw an accurate picture of my claim, I have to interrogate one more situation when there is a testimony of someone and if there is no way to give priority to our own experience to think whether this testimony is an unreliable one or not. Let’s imagine, I am at the library and my best trustworthy friend comes with a rush and says that “When I was outside, there was a strange guy and he asked my biggest wish, I said it would be great if I fly for once. Then he made it real!” Now, what are the reasons for me not to rely on her testimony? To be coherent in my argumentation, I have to say that there is no reason not to rely on her testimony for me in that very specific case. However, here one can easily say that if you trust your friend’s testimony, then a stranger should trust; a stranger should not, so you should not trust your friend. I think there is something wrong with this claim because when I say I have no reasons not to trust my friend’s testimony, this does not mean that everybody is in the same conditions with me. A person can be with my friend while she is experiencing this miracle and this person might have reasons not to trust my friend, then I cannot say that I trust my friend’s testimony, so you should trust. Because this person can claim that he has reasons not to trust. Or I can tell this miracle to another person and when I say “I believe what she has said and she is so reliable, so you should believe”, here this person still can think what my friend has experienced is insane, because she has more things to interrogate such as my position testifying one’s testimony about a miracle.

Hume, on the other hand, clearly states that you should not believe people if they are not likely to be true. Since he is an empiricist he always portions one’s belief/testimony to the evidence in order to trust, if he does not have enough evidence to believe, he does not rely on one’s testimony. According to Hume, miracle is the violation of laws of nature and this means that there is a regularity in the nature and if there is a miracle, it means that this is very exceptional to be. When it is testified, Hume compares the probability of being an exception in the nature and probability of this person’s being false, and from other knowledge and evidences we have, he concludes that it is more probable for this man to be false rather than a violation in the laws of nature. In his argument, there is nothing wrong with claiming the regularity of laws of nature and the chance of a person to be false, however the other side of the coin is also reasonable, if you are not stuck with laws of nature and empiricism as only reference points. Thus, I try to claim on the behalf of testimony when there is no sufficient reason to reject it.

Until now, it seems that my position is a kind of “belief is default” position and in his article Thomas Reid has a different approach towards the very same position. He states that there is this principle of credulity in constitution of human beings, he also supports his argument by giving examples from children, which is used for our disposition to rely on what we have been said so. He argues that this principle is embedded in our nature and than it is not wrong to say that we are in a position where the belief is the default. In order to support my argumentation these words of Reid will be very helpful: “It is evident that, in the matter of testimony, the balance of human judgement is by nature inclined to the side of belief; and turns to that side of itself, when there is nothing put into the opposite scale.” Thus with the light of this decent explanation, I continue to claim that relying on one’s testimony is our very natural position when there is no reason to believe the other way around.

As being close to conclude my paper, I would like to go back the case of miracles and state my view about an aspect of the epistemic standing of miracles. Either it is our experience or someone else’s testimony, if I think that I can rely on what I have experienced or what I was told, then I would want to claim that miracle is knowledge generative. In order to support this, I prefer to use the word “event” as interchangeably with the word miracle rather than an impossible or less probable thing to happen, because these words build their ground in a more Humean way. The idea of miracles as knowledge generative comes from that “When an unusual, unexpected, rare and different event happens, it transforms your point of view”. Your point of view changes because what you have known about that thing does not include the information of this new event. If you would have had the knowledge of a miracle, it would not be the miracle for you. If tomorrow there will be no sunrise, then this will definitely generate a new knowledge about the laws of nature we know right now. Since what you have already known changes or renews, its generative power cannot be independent from your past knowledge about this thing. Hence, the power of generation here I try to emphasize is not coming from its effects projected towards the future, on the contrary its power comes from its effects on the past.

REFERENCES

BonJour, Laurence. “Some Further Epistemological Issues: Other Minds, Testimony, and Memory.” Epistemology: Classic Problems and Contemporary Responses, 149-71. Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2010.

Lackey, Jennifer. “Testimonial Knowledge and Transmission.” The Philosophical Quarterly, 471-90. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1999.

Hume, David. “Of Miracles.” An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, 221-33. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1902.

Reid, Thomas. “Inquiry into the Human Mind.” Inquiry and Essays, ed. R.E. Beanblossom and K. Lehrer, 234-38. Indianapolis, Ind: Hackett, 1983.

Zizek, Slavoj. “Events and Encounters Explain Our Fear of Falling in Love.” Big Think, November, 2014. http://bigthink.com/videos/slavoj-zizek-on-falling-in-love.