Katie Lowe (UCL) - 2023-24 Students
Zctyklo@ucl.ac.uk

Evidential and Testimonial Reasons for Belief

A large proportion of our knowledge about the world comes from the testimony of other people. Our capacity to investigate things for ourselves is limited and so we depend heavily on the word of others. As such, we ought to know what justifies beliefs formed on this basis. What is it about this mechanism of forming beliefs that means we can trust its deliverances? This question is made more pressing by the fact that as a mechanism for forming beliefs, it is frequently unreliable. We know that people lie, mislead, and can be mistaken about what they’re talking about.

For Moran, we would go wrong to answer this question without attending to the nature of testimonial acts as speech acts. He argues that there are certain asymmetries between the way we acquire reasons to believe from the speech acts of other people and the traditional epistemological standpoint of the individual observer and interpreter of evidence. Due to these asymmetries, Moran argues that the kind of reason for belief offered by testimony cannot be assimilated to that provided by evidence, and the two are distinct. My thesis will be an examination of Moran’s arguments to this end.

Primary supervisor: José Zalabardo

Secondary supervisor: Rory Madden