WEEK 4 - Testimony

What does testimony appears to be like in Philosophy?

"It only takes one lie to taint your entire testimony"- Jim Rohn 

In General, testimony is a set of statements of a situation provided by person who had witnessed it in a formal manner. Think of a situation where you are considered as an eye witness for a car accident. You are a friend of the person who caused the accident. What if you decided to be biased and lie at the court? Will your testimony still be valid?  Instead your lie will lead to serious consequences. This is what is highlighted in the above quote. But in philosophy, testimony is kind of different. But it doesn't mean that lying wouldn't harm your testimony in a philosophical approach. In philosophy, testimony is the base for building knowledge by understanding the utterance of a witness independent of the situation. Epistemology of testimony explains how beliefs based of testimony are justified using various theories.

Consider a case when you are asked to submit an assignment. In case 1, You handed the assignment directly to your teacher. In case 2, you entrusted this task to a stranger. How assured you are in the second case? wouldn't you feel at ease if entrusted this task your best friend, so he would report that he can report back to you?  But still this situation is lacking evidence which will hinder from building a strong belief. This will lead to doubt and scepticism. But for another person, strength of testimonies for both the cases might appear to be equal. As I see,there is an increasing trend of believing in testimony by the modern society without having reasons to believe in the testimony. This has it's own advantages and disadvantages. If the facts given by the testimony is false, it may lead to disharmony and distrust. This can be non intentional or intentional. Think of a situation where a doctor does a diagnosis and provides results without evidence. The patient has a choice to believe or disbelieve the doctor. The doctor might be accurate and the patient chooses to believe  him without a reason. This is a positive situation.

In our daily we rely on testimony consciously or unconsciously, because a lot of what we know, even today were built by the knowledge gained by testimony. Sources of testimony include journals, news papers, books, and most recently social media which has a greater feasibility for access. Think of the earlier example of entrusting a stranger to hand over your assignment to your teacher. Since you don't have evidence to know if your task is been done, this will raise scepticism. So isn't it obvious that you look for evidence? This is done by checking facts. You can check your teacher's records. You can also check the background of the person, like if he's a student of your grade, his character. This process of checking facts is known as "reductionism". This highlights the fact that testimony highly depends on the speaker. 

Evidence for testimony plays a huge role in building knowledge or belief.  Ultimate goal of testimony is to preserve original beliefs and knowledge. How responsible are you when you provide testimonies from what you know? isn't the truth value of a given testimony is significant?