Description

There are at least four prima facie categories of evidence: observation, deductive inference, inductive inference, and testimony.1 The first three have had a great deal of attention paid to them in philosophy; the fourth, however, has been relatively neglected. Whatever the reason for this neglect, it cannot have arisen from the insignificance of the role played by testimony in the forming of beliefs in the community, as C.A.J. Coady observes in his 1973 article on "Testimony and Observation."2 Due to the failure of classical epistemology to give testimony its due, that epistemology has come under fire from a number of quarters within the last fifty years or so. Critics charge that traditional epistemological undertakings have been too individualistic, assuming that cognitive achievements belong to the individual believer alone, all the while ignoring the part that others play in the acquisition and transmission of knowledge.3 In response to these concerns about classical epistemology's overly narrowed focus on the individual, a branch of epistemology called social epistemology has sprung to the foreground.