Philosophy of Mind Seminar (Friday - Week 6, HT26)

Abstract: According to the song, it takes two to tango. According to so-called Assurance views of testimony, the same is true of telling. Proponents of this type of view argue that telling is a social or intersubjective act, the performance of which require both speaker and hearer to play an active part; this fact in turn categorically distinguishes testimony from other sources of knowledge.

In this paper, I offer a qualified vindication and development of the assurance theorist’s project. While proponents of the view have rightly emphasised the importance of the normative relation between interlocutors to the epistemic distinctiveness of testimony, they have both over- and under-estimated its social character and mislocated its impact on testimonial performance.

To identify and remedy these defects, I first propose a distinction between simple and complex testimony, arguing that the former has been misdescribed while the latter has been unjustly neglected as an area of inquiry. Drawing from work in empirical socio-pragmatics and conversation analysis, I then sketch an account of conversational partnership, which involves a more radical departure from epistemic orthodoxy, but better captures the truth in the notion that telling takes two.