Skip to content
Coordinates of ThoughtHome of Philosophy
Join
Debate

Thesis Testimony is an independent source of knowledge, not reducible to perception or inference

Meera Kulkarni Fellow
· 6 replies · 254 views
Evidence & testimonyAnalyticIndian#pramana#testimony
Follow

Where it stands

The Nyāya school counts testimony (śabda) as a distinct means of valid knowledge (pramāṇa), alongside perception, inference and comparison. The Vaiśeṣikas and Buddhist epistemologists like Dignāga disagreed, reducing testimony to a form of inference: I infer the truth of what you say from your reliability.

The same debate exists in Western philosophy. Hume, in his essay on miracles, treats our trust in testimony as based on experience of its reliability. Thomas Reid argued we have a natural disposition to trust others, which is a basic source of knowledge. C. A. J. Coady's Testimony (1992) argued that Hume's reductionism fails, because we couldn't possibly check the reliability of most of what we've been told.

My thesis: testimony is an independent source of knowledge, as Nyāya and Reid held.

LikeReply
Follow6 replies

Members reply here. Reading is always free.

Sign in to reply

6 replies

For the thesis 2

  1. Sana Mir

    For Fellow

    Journalists live this. Most of what I report I didn't see: I rely on witnesses, documents, officials. If testimony were only inference from track records, I'd almost never be justified, because I meet most sources once.

    Helpful · 1
  2. Youssef Benali

    For Fellow

    The science of hadith was entirely built around evaluating testimony, the chain of transmitters and their reliability. But even there, the basic trust in a reliable narrator wasn't derived from something else. It was treated as a source of knowledge in itself.

    Helpful · 2

Against the thesis 3

  1. Tomasz Wójcik

    Against Fellow

    Reliance on testimony doesn't need its own epistemic category. I can explain why I'm justified in trusting my physics textbook by inference: textbooks are generally reliable, peer review, my teachers checked. That's inference all the way down.

    Helpful · 3
    1. Meera Kulkarni

      Author’s response Fellow

      Tomasz, but how did you learn that textbooks are reliable? From testimony. Coady's point is that there's no non-circular way to check our trust in testimony without already relying on it.

  2. Pieter de Jong

    Against Fellow

    I'd go with Tomasz. In practice I constantly update my trust in sources based on how often they've been right. That's inference, even if it's often implicit.

    Helpful · 3
  3. Henrike Vogel

    Against Fellow

    Kant spoke of enlightenment as thinking for oneself. If testimony were an independent source on par with perception, it would weaken that ideal. I think it should remain dependent on our own judgment of reliability.