Concept tag
#testimony
-
Barnes is right: being disabled is not in itself bad for you
I came to philosophy through effective altruism, where it's common to count disability as a reduction in wellbeing and to rank interventions accordingly. Elizabeth Barnes's The Minority Body changed my mind, and I want to defend her thesis. Thesis: disability is a…
Started by Ethan Mercer7 replies215 views -
Testimony is an independent source of knowledge, not reducible to perception or inference
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…
Started by Meera Kulkarni6 replies254 views -
What is hermeneutical injustice, and how is it different from simply not being believed?
I am a midwife at a district hospital. In my work I see women not being believed all the time. A mother says the pain is not normal, and she is told every mother says that. Later it turns out she was…
Started by Farhana Akter6 replies197 views -
Where a claim came from is often the best evidence you have about it
My PhD is on Yoruba epistemic vocabulary, especially the line between what you have seen for yourself and what you have only heard. My grandmother's first question on hearing any news was "who told you?", and then "who told them?" I used…
Started by Titilayo Adeyemi6 replies248 views -
Can students learn something from a teacher who doesn’t believe it herself?
A colleague at a teachers' workshop told me that testimony can only pass on knowledge the speaker already has. It is a tidy principle, and it is how most of us picture teaching: I know something, I tell my students, now they…
Started by Rowena Abellana6 replies223 views -
I have grown cocoa for thirty years and never seen chocolate made. How do I know that is where it goes?
I farm eleven acres of cocoa near Kumasi and sell through a cooperative. My son is at university and sends me articles from his course, and I send him back proverbs. Last week he sent one that said most of what any…
Started by Akosua Mensah5 replies207 views -
Reid said we are built to believe what we are told. Was he right, or was Hume?
I was a GP in Leith for thirty-four years. Patients told me things and I believed most of them; I told patients things and they believed most of those. It never occurred to me to ask what entitled either of us. Now…
Started by Alistair Gow5 replies245 views -
Sincere and mistaken: what the memory research means for how we listen to victims
I have spent eight years covering the peace process in Colombia, which has meant listening to hundreds of people describe the worst days of their lives. Something has troubled me for a long time, and I'd like to think it through with…
Started by Andrés Zuluaga5 replies137 views -
When someone says “that’s my truth”, what exactly are they claiming?
At our poetry workshop last week a young woman read a piece about her family, and when someone gently questioned one detail, she said, "That's my truth." The room went quiet. Nobody knew what to say next. I felt two things at…
Started by Kavya Menon5 replies168 views -
Epistemic injustice, nearly two decades on: what has the idea actually changed?
I'm finishing a PhD on Yoruba epistemic vocabulary in Ibadan, and one of the developments in philosophy since 1990 that matters most to my work is the turn to testimony and the social side of knowledge. Miranda Fricker's Epistemic Injustice (2007) named…
Started by Titilayo Adeyemi5 replies267 views -
If the comparison table had a Yoruba row: mọ̀, gbàgbọ́ and the gap between seeing and hearing
Comparative tables of how traditions answer "how do we know anything?" usually have rows for Greek, Indian, Buddhist, Chinese, Islamic, scholastic and modern European thought. My doctorate is on Yoruba epistemic vocabulary, so I want to sketch the row that is usually…
Started by Titilayo Adeyemi5 replies199 views -
Reading group: al-Bīrūnī’s India, the preface and the chapter on why understanding is hard
Around 1030 the scholar al-Bīrūnī completed a book usually known in English as India (or Alberuni's India). He had learned Sanskrit, read Indian works with pandits, and set out to describe Indian religion, philosophy and science as their adherents understood them. It…
Started by Layla Haddad5 replies189 views -
Reading group: The Muqaddimah, the introduction on historians’ errors
Before the Muqaddimah proper begins, Ibn Khaldun explains why historians get things wrong. His list includes partisanship for opinions and schools, overconfidence in one's sources, failure to understand what was intended, mistaken belief in the truth of reports, and, above all, ignorance…
Started by Youssef Benali4 replies158 views -
My new cooks believe everything I tell them about safe temperatures. Do they actually know it?
I run a kitchen in Dubai with twenty-two cooks from nine countries. Every few months a new commis arrives, often very young, and the first week is mostly me telling them things. Chicken has to reach a certain core temperature. Rice left…
Started by Joel D'Souza4 replies210 views -
Ibn Khaldun’s impossible-army test, applied to the stories that go viral
Every year I teach my lycée students the passage in the Muqaddimah where Ibn Khaldun complains about earlier chroniclers. They recorded enormous army numbers because a source had recorded them, without asking whether such an army could be fed, watered, marched and…
Started by Youssef Benali4 replies184 views -
Yorùbá separates what you have seen from what you were told. What does that do to testimony?
My doctoral work is on Yorùbá epistemic vocabulary, so let me offer something for comparison and see what others make of it. In a well-known study from the 1980s, the philosophers Barry Hallen and J. Olubi Sodipo worked with Yorùbá healers and…
Started by Titilayo Adeyemi4 replies120 views -
Testimony as an information channel: Nyāya’s śabda next to Dretske
I've been reading Dretske for a seminar alongside the Nyāya Sūtra, and I think they illuminate each other on testimony in a way neither does alone. Nyāya counts four means of knowing (pramāṇa): perception, inference, comparison, and śabda, word or testimony. The…
Started by Meera Kulkarni3 replies113 views -
Seen with one’s own eyes: what Yoruba usage teaches about knowing and believing
Yoruba speech draws the line between knowledge and belief somewhere English does not. That line is a serious contribution to the epistemology of testimony.
Started by Titilayo Adeyemi0 replies119 views -
Innocent until proven false: Kumārila on why a cognition needs no certificate
The Mīmāṃsā doctrine of intrinsic validity is usually filed under scripture. It is first of all a general theory of knowledge, and a strong one.
Started by Govinda Prasad Mishra0 replies45 views