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December 06, 2006
Testimony
Sophie Fortin has been thinking about testimony recently, and she has me reading the introduction to Lackey and Sosa's Epistemology of Testimony
Schmitt...invokes what he calls the Trasindividual Thesis, which consists of the following two parts: first, H's belief that p is justified on the basis of testimony only if it is justified on the basis of S's good reason to believe that p, unless on the basis of a good reason to believe that p that H possesses herself, and second, H's belief that p can be justified on the basis of testimony even though it is not justified on the basis of a good reason that H possesses to believe that p.
By way of defending his thesis Schmitt's central strategy is to discuss what he calls the Transtemporal Thesis, a similar though far more intuitively plausible thesis regarding memorial justification, which consists of the following two parts: first, a subject, A's belief that p is justified on the basis of memory only if it is justified on the basis of A's original good reasons to believe that p and, second, A's belief that p can be justified on the basis of memory even though it is not justified on the basis of a current reason to believe that p that A possesses. Schmitt then argues that if the intuitively plausible Transtemporal Thesis is accepted, then an analogous case can be made showing that the Transindividal Thesis is nearly as strong. (Lackey, p. 12-13)
Posted by logican at December 6, 2006 12:02 AM
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