Abstract: It’s recently been claimed that our model of testimony is overly simple: we do a lot more of epistemic import with our words than just passing over propositional knowledge. For example, we propagate knowledge and understanding when we “direct and guide” a hearer’s thinking (Hills 2020), offer narratives that give rise to “perspectival dependence” (Fraser 2021), and induce understanding in hearers by transmitting or otherwise communicating new perspectives (Hazlett 2025) (El Shazly Forthcoming) (Sliwa 2025). The unifying thought here is that, in these cases, speakers influence not just what we believe, but how we think about some topic: how we respond to and organise information relating to it.
If these claims are right, then there are cases in which hearers depend on speakers for something more than just a belief or set of beliefs. The key concern of this talk is to make sense of this. That is, let’s say we agree that this is a phenomenon we should incorporate into our theorising about testimony. If we do, how can we explain the nature of this dependence, and what distinguishes these cases from those in which speakers merely cause some effect in hearers?
This talk has two aims: 1) to elucidate the problem and lay out some desiderata for an adequate answer, and 2) to offer a solution. Roughly, the idea is that we can explain these cases in terms of speaker responsibility. This is because speakers issue indirect directives – to compare two things, to explore the implications of applying a certain concept to a situation – and recommending following these as epistemically fruitful.
Metaphysics and Epistemology Group Convenors: Nick Jones, Bernhard Salow and Alex Kaiserman
