Testimonial Assurance and Epistemic Authority
Final Report Abstract
In the project's view, the verb ‘to testify’ has a narrow use in the context of expert testimony, since utterances in such contexts involve an act of assurance that differs significantly – in terms of the normative force with which a proposition p is expressed – from the illocutionary role of assertive speech acts. The project’s first aim was to show that this narrow use cannot be explained in terms of a special kind of truth-promoting authority with respect to the content of the speech act. Instead, the project distinguished between a truth-conducive and a closure-conducive function of testimonial speech acts and developed an “inquiry-based approach of assurance” (IAA for short). This approach comprised three steps: (i) the development of a general “inquiry framework” for the closure-conducive function of testimonial assurances, (ii) the elaboration of a “protective view of epistemic accountability” according to which assurances provide preemptive reasons that entitle the addressee of the speech act to stop his own inquiry, and (iii) the incorporation of an “interactional account of illocutionary practice”, according to which the speech act of assurance prefigures a fixed “leader-follower pattern” of interaction that coordinates the distribution of rights and duties in the process of epistemic division of labour, and which the speaker seeks to reproduce in the performance of her speech act. The project’s second aim was to use IAA to clarify the relationship between testimonial and disciplinary (domainspecific) epistemic authority (EA for short). The first part of the second project area focussed on the issue of the sincerity of expert testimony. In order to avoid certain undesirable outcomes of the current debate, the idea of an “inquiry-based account of selfless assurance” was developed. The second part was devoted to the study of non-ideal phenomena of expert testimony. In this context, the project examined the consequences for the knowledge transmission environment when the fundamental relationship between scientific expert groups and lay communities is damaged by non-ideal exogenous factors (such as cognitive distortions of testimonial interaction, polarising mistrust, group-functional arrogance, imitated or false EA). The project has shown that such damage can be mitigated if experts use their disciplinary EA in a protective way in the sense of the IAA. In this case, testimonial assurances provide an undistorted indicator of an “otherregarding” virtuous knowledge distributor that laypersons can trust even in an epistemic environment with non-aligned interests. Next, the project has analysed whether EAen are permitted to intervene paternalistically (i.e. for they epistemic well-being, but without consent) in the inquiry of other agents. Using IAA, an “other-regarding” virtue-based account was developed according to which paternalistic expert testimony is legitimate if the intervention is an instance of complex epistemic care to ensure that the target of the intervention regains her intellectual sovereignty, thereby preventing epistemic injustice with respect to the perspective of other participants in the inquiry. Finally, the project addressed the traditional preemptive account of disciplinary EAs. This approach can be criticized for failing to explain how expert testimony contributes to laypeople gaining epistemic understanding. As an alternative, a reflexive equilibrium model was proposed within the project-based 'inquiry framework', which accounts for the various non-ideal phenomena by modeling understanding as a process in which all elements of the cognitive network, including epistemic goals, tentative theories and testimonially acquired beliefs, are revisable.
Publications
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Einführung: Die Corona-Krise als Paradigma einer nicht-idealen Erkenntnis- und Wissenschaftstheorie?. Wissensproduktion und Wissenstransfer unter erschwerten Bedingungen, 13-28. Verlag Karl Alber.
Hauswald, Rico & Schmechtig, Pedro
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Epistemischer Dogmatismus und Arroganz – das Expert*innen-Laien-Verhältnis in nicht-idealer epistemischer Umgebung. Wissensproduktion und Wissenstransfer unter erschwerten Bedingungen, 245-282. Verlag Karl Alber.
Schmechtig, Pedro
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Wissensproduktion und Wissenstransfer unter erschwerten Bedingungen. Verlag Karl Alber.
Hauswald, Rico & Schmechtig, Pedro (Eds.)
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‘Epistemic Paternalism and Protective Authority in a Non-Ideal World’, In: Schmechtig, P., / Hauswald, R. (Eds.). ‘New Waves in the Philosophy of Epistemic Authority and Expert Testimony’, Special Issue of Social Epistemology (September 2024b), 1-17.
Schmechtig, P.
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‘New Waves in the Philosophy of Epistemic Authority and Expert Testimony’, Special Issue of Social Epistemology (September 2024a).
Schmechtig, P. & Hauswald, R. (Eds.)
