Abstract
This paper identifies two distinct dimensions of what might be called testimonial strength: first, in the case of testimony from more than one speaker, testimony can be said to be stronger to the extent that a greater proportion of the speakers give identical testimony; second, in both single-speaker and multi-speaker testimony, testimony can be said to the stronger to the extent that each speaker expresses greater conviction in the relevant proposition. These two notions of testimonial strength have received scant attention in the philosophical literature so far, presumably because it has been thought that whatever lessons we learn from thinking about testimony as a binary phenomenon will apply mutatis mutandis to varying strengths of testimony. This paper shows that this will not work for either of the two aforementioned dimensions of testimonial strength, roughly because less testimony can provide more justification in a way that can only be explained by appealing to the (non-binary) strength of the testimony itself. The paper also argues that this result undermines some influential versions of non-reductionism about testimonial justification.
| Original language | English |
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| Journal | Philosophy and Phenomenological Research |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 2023 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information: This paper was originally presented at the workshop at University College Dublin in March 2017. I am grateful to the audience at that workshop, especially Maria Baghramian (the organizer) and Elizabeth Fricker (the star attraction), for very insightful comments and criticisms. I am also grateful to my colleagues at the Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences for helpful feedback at a departmental research seminar. A special thanks to Elmar Unnsteinsson for feedback on an early draft and for countless helpful discussions about testimony over the years. Finally, I am grateful to several anonymous reviewers for comments and criticisms that have led to this paper being improved in many respects. Most of the work for this paper was done while I was a postdoctoral fellow in the project , funded by the Irish Research Council (REPRO/2015/89). On Testimony When Experts Disagree Publisher Copyright: © 2022 The Authors. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of Philosophy and Phenonmenological Research Inc.Other keywords
- agreement
- confidence
- justification
- non-reductionism
- testimony