Epistemology

Epistemology is my area of specialisation, and within it the epistemology of testimony: how we come to know things because someone, or something, has told us.

The leading accounts of testimony disagree about a great deal. Burge grounds the hearer’s entitlement in the presumption of a rational source; Williamson ties assertion to a knowledge norm; Goldberg locates the relevant reliability partly in the speaker’s own production; Faulkner grounds warrant in assurance; Lackey shows that the speaker need not believe what she says. In “Assertion Without a Speaker” (forthcoming in Episteme) I argue that beneath these disagreements they share a minimal condition, the Tracking Minimum: a source transmits testimonial knowledge only if the truth of what it asserts, or the evidential support for it, figures in the explanation of its asserting it — and figures there through the source’s own production process rather than through a proxy on which that process depends.

That endogeneity requirement, not any modal profile, is what the accounts have in common. It is third-personal and testable by intervention, so it does not settle the machine case by stipulating that a source must have a mind. It also has a consequence that is easy to miss: a working barometer satisfies it. The line it draws is not between people and instruments but between sources whose outputs are connected to the truth of what they emit and sources whose outputs are not.