Testimony
The term testimony in contemporary analytic philosophy is used as label for the spoken or written word, when this purports to pass on the speaker's or writer's knowledge, conveying factual information or other truth. Testifying, or giving testimony, is a linguistic action, and testimony is its result, an audible speech act of telling or more extended discourse (perhaps recorded), or a legible written text. Interest in the topic has grown rapidly since the publication of C. A. J. Coady's Testimony: A Philosophical Study (1992). Testimony in this broad sense includes the central case of one person telling something to another in face-to-face communication, as well as a range of other cases, from public lectures, television and radio broadcasts, and newspapers to personal letters and e-mails, all kinds of purportedly factual books and other publications, and the information recorded in train timetables, birth registers, and official records of many kinds.
Philosophical Issues About Testimony
The key interest of testimony is as a source for individual human knowledge, alongside perception, memory, inference, and intuition. Thus attaining a correct account of its epistemology is the core organizing issue for explanatory philosophical theorizing about testimony. This interlocks with several other issues.
First, there is no believing what one is told, without first understanding it—grasping both content and force of the speech act.
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