Abstract: It’s recently been argued that the epistemic role of testimony exceeds the exchange of propositional knowledge (Hazlett 2025; Hills 2020; Fraser 2021; Sliwa Forthcoming; Malfatti 2024). Speakers, it’s claimed, can change not onlywhat but how we think about some topic: what we attend to and take as significant, the associations we make, our inquiries and how we conduct them, and so on.
In these discussions, it’s assumed that such cases are distinct from those in which speakers merely cause some epistemically significant effect in hearers – like when I tell you about my day and you independently connect it to some interaction you had, perhaps coming to know or understand something about it. Rather, they involve a genuine epistemic relationship between speaker and hearer, one that involves a kind of dependence (Ibid).
What’s unclear, however, is how to make sense of this: what is the nature of the dependence at play? More specifically, what precisely does the hearer depend on the speaker for? In what sense, if any, is the hearer taking the speaker’s word for something? What must the relationship be between the speaker’s utterance and the hearer’s epistemic states or conduct for this to count as epistemic dependence? This talk has two aims: 1) to elucidate the problem and lay out some desiderata for an adequate answer. 2) to offer a tentative solution: roughly, that we can account for the dependence in terms of speaker responsibility. This is because, at least in some cases, speakers issue indirect directives – to compare two things, explore the implications of applying a certain concept to a situation – and recommend following these as epistemically fruitful. This, in turn, is what hearers take up on the testimony’s basis.
See the DPhil Seminar website for details.
DPhil Seminar Convenor: Asia Sakchatchawan and Dan Gallagher
