APPRAISING THE EPISTEMIC STATUS OF TESTIMONIAL EVIDENCE AS A SOURCE OF KNOWLEDGE

Abstract

This paper appraises the epistemic status of evidence as a source of knowledge. The debate over the epistemic value of testimonies has raged on between two major contending notions. On the one hand is reductionism, which makes plausible demands on what counts as a testimonial justification, but leads directly to a form of scepticism about the epistemic status of our testimony. While on the other hand, is anti-reductionism, which avoids scepticism, but at the cost of allowing our claims to knowledge to be justified on the basis of testimony even in the absence of supporting evidences. This dilemma leaves us with a pressing need for some sort of midway reconciliatory account. In any case, we observed that the failure to clearly spell out grounds for determining the justificatory condition of testimony as a source of knowledge as seen in the debate between reductionism and anti-reductionism does not rule out the fact that a great deal of many claims to knowledge are founded on testimony. Therefore, in admitting the significance of testimony as one of the sources of human knowledge, we found that the epistemic status of testimonial evidence and its capability of yielding reliable knowledge are contextually contingent upon the dynamics and relation between the speaker and the listener. Consequently, we concluded that these factors determine the justificatory condition of the listener’s reliance on the testimony of the speaker. The authors adopted the textual analysis and expository methods of enquiry in this research.