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Erkenn (2011) 74:131135
DOI 10.1007/s10670-010-9253-z
BOOK REVIEW
Jennifer Lackey: Learning from Words. Testimony as a Source of Knowledge
Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2008, 295 pp, ISBN 978-0199219162, USD 70.00 (Hardback), ISBN 978-0199575619 (Paperback)
Nicola Mner
Received: 13 September 2010 / Accepted: 13 September 2010 / Published online: 2 October 2010 Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010
Jennifer Lackey presents a well elaborated study in the epistemology of testimony and of related problems. Whereas perception, memory, introspection, and reason are taken to be individual sources of knowledge, as they are, so to speak, onboard-sources of man, testimony is the only one dealing with the social aspects of gaining and justifying knowledge. A lot we know we owe to the successful use of this epistemic link. Every kind of reportboth in direct conversation and in indirect forms like the use of mass mediaclassically belongs to the realm of testimony in the epistemological sense.
In this context Lackey provides us with a lot of fresh ideas about a discussion that has (re-)started in the 1990s with C. A. J. Coadys book Testimony a Philosophical Study (Oxford 1992). Her new perspective on a variety of the epistemological problems is mainly based on her emphasizing the dual nature of testimony. This concerns both the concept and the epistemology of testimony.
Lackey starts her book with an analysis of the concept of testimony (Chap. 1). After that she tackles some problems pertaining to the question of the epistemic status of testimony. First of all, she rejects the model of knowledge transmission as an adequate description of our epistemic behaviour concerning testimony (Chap. 2). The main thesis of this account consists in the following statement: We cannot get knowledge by the words of a speaker who himself does not know what he is telling us (see e. g. Audi 2003, p. 138). Strictly speaking, then, we do not learn from anothers wordswe learn from anothers beliefs (pp. 37/38, her italics). In contrast to this, Lackey makes the proposal to take more seriously the communicative character of testimony by focusing on the speakers statements (Chap. 3). Statements are not, therefore, merely vehicles for expressing beliefs, but, rather, they are the central bearers of epistemic signicance themselves (p. 72). In order to complete her...