EPISTEMOLOGY OF TESTIMONY

Introduction

What is it important to know about the testimony? The exact definition of the testimony has discussed below. And there are four terms of questioning. And the evidence of how human do the reasoning for their problems. It also has several parts to be explained.

Testimony

The term testimony in modern analytic philosophy is used as label for the spoken or written word, once this purports to expire the speaker's or writer's knowledge, conveying factual information or other truth. Testifying, or giving testimony, could be a linguistic action, and testimony is its result, an audible speech act of telling or a lot of extended discourse (perhaps recorded), or a legible written text.

Our central issue about testimony can be divided into two main terms as “descriptive” and “normative”. So there are four distinct questions to investigate. They are as follows.

• Descriptive local question: How just human trust their informant unthinkingly, blindly; or do they somehow evaluate the informant for trustworthiness, and believe what they are told only if the evaluation is positive?
• Descriptive global question: In what conditions, and with what controls, should a mature adult hearer believe what he/she is told, on some particular occasion?
• Normative local question: What is the extent of dependence on testimony for grounding (epistemic dependence) of our beliefs? And what is the relation between testimony and our other sources of empirical belief.
• Normative global question: How, if ever, can a system of beliefs with un-eliminated epistemic dependence on testimony be justified?

Optimistic Epistemology of Testimony

The central case of testimony happens once one person tells one thing to another, thereby expressing her information, and therefore the other understands and believes her, taking her word for it. Once all goes as it should, knowledge is thereby shared, and by recursion of this mechanism it may be diffused through a community of speakers of a shared language.

Evidence about how human do the reasoning

The literature on these errors and biases has fully grown to epic proportions over the last few decades and that we will not decide to provide a comprehensive review. Instead, we concentrate on what we predict are some of the most intriguing and disturbing studies.

• Selection task: One of the foremost famous tasks within the study of deductive reasoning. The test is of special interest because people have a tough time solving it in most scenarios however can typically solve it properly in certain contexts.
• Base rate neglect: An example of the base rate fallacy is that the false positive paradox. This contradiction describes situations wherever there are more false positive test results than true positives. The probability of a positive test result is determined not only by the accuracy of the test but also by the characteristics of the sampled population.
• Conjunction fallacy: The conjunction fallacy (also called the Linda problem) is a formal fallacy that happens when it's assumed that specific conditions are more probable than a single general one.
• Overconfidence: The overconfidence impact could be a well-established bias during which a human subjective confidence in his or her judgments is dependably bigger than the target accuracy of those judgments, particularly once confidence is comparatively high.
• Anchoring: The anchoring impact may be a psychological feature bias whereby somebody's selections are influenced by a selected indicator or 'anchor'.

THANK YOU!!

Written by: Himauv Atthanayake