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Philosophical Studies (2005) 126:163190 Springer 2005
DOI 10.1007/s11098-004-7798-xJENNIFER LACKEYTESTIMONY AND THE INFANT/CHILD
OBJECTIONABSTRACT. One of the central problems aicting reductionism in the
epistemology of testimony is the apparent fact that infants and small children
are not cognitively capable of having the inductively based positive reasons
required by this view. Since non-reductionism does not impose a requirement
of this sort, it is thought to avoid this problem and is therefore taken to have
a signicant advantage over reductionism. In this paper, however, I argue
that if this objection undermines reductionism, then a variant of it similarly
undermines non-reductionism. Thus, considerations about the cognitive
capacities of infants and small children do not eectively discriminate
between these two competing theories of testimonial justication.If I am approached by a passerby on the street and am told that
there was a car accident a few blocks away, what entitles me to
believe what this person tells me? Otherwise put, what, from an
epistemic point of view, justies me in accepting the testimony
of this speaker?1There are two main responses to this question in the epistemology of testimony. On the one hand, non-reductionists
maintain that testimony is just as basic a source of justication
(knowledge, warrant, entitlement, etc.) as sense-perception,
memory, inference, and the like and, accordingly, that hearers
may be justied in accepting the reliable reports of speakers,
albeit defeasibly, merely on the basis of a speakers testimony.2
More precisely, non-reductionists put forth the following view
of testimonial justication:TJ-NR: For every speaker A and hearer B, B is justied in believing that p
on the basis of As testimony that p if and only if: (1) B believes that p on the
basis of the content of As testimony that p,3 (2) As testimony that p is
reliable,4 and (3) B has no undefeated defeaters for As testimony that p.164So, according to non-reductionism, it is epistemically appropriate for hearers to accept the testimony of speakers about
whom they know nothing at all. Given the reliability of the
speaker, the only epistemic obstacle to doing so is the presence
of an undefeated defeater.There are two dierent kinds of defeaters that are standardly
taken to be incompatible with testimonial justication. First,
there are what we might call doxastic defeaters. A doxastic
...