STUDY OF TESTIMONY & REASON

In the study of philosophy, testimony is considered as the intentional transfer of a belief from one person to another. Generally, this transfer can be verbal, written, or signaled in some way. Testimony enables the transmission of current news, information (or misinformation), opinion and gossip throughout a community with a shared language. Also, it enables the conservation and passing on of our accumulated heritage of knowledge and belief. Issues concerning the epistemology of testimony have become increasingly discussed in contemporary philosophy, with the debate broadening out from epistemology to other fields such as philosophy of mind, action theory, and philosophy of language.

Philosophical Issues About Testimony

Along with vision, memory, inference, and intuition, testimony is of particular relevance as a source of individual human knowledge. As a result, the key organizational challenge for explanatory philosophical theorizing regarding testimony is obtaining an accurate explanation of its epistemology. This is linked to a number of other concerns. 

First, it is impossible to believe what someone says unless they first understand the content and intensity of the speaking act. And knowing what someone was told is inextricably linked to knowing who was told. As a result, a description of testimony must be accompanied with a description of linguistic understanding, both in terms of psychology and epistemology. In turn, understanding cannot be fully explained except as part of a larger attempt of explaining linguistic meaning, the importance of words, which is grasped when a speech act is understood. 

Second, the human social institution of language is made up of many different activities, and telling is just one of them. The nature of a linguistic act of telling determines why and how it is epistemically justified to trust its purport. The analysis of testimony must take into consideration the human interactions involved in linguistic interchange, particularly the commitments and norms involved in the making and reception of the speech act of assertion. Third, an account of what makes belief obtained from testimony become knowledge will be convincing only if it instances a convincing general conception of knowledge, also similarly for justified testimonial belief.

Reason and Rationality

In the philosophy, reason is often taken to refer to the active as opposed to the passive or receptive aspects of the mind. “Reason” in this sense is contrasted with perception, sensation, and emotion, which are thought of as forms of passivity, or at least as involving passivity. The contrast is not unproblematic, for it seems clear that the kind of receptivity or responsiveness involved in sensation, perception, and emotion, cannot be understood as wholly passive. The perceived world does not simply enter the mind, as through an open door. In sensing and responding to the world our minds interact with it, and the activity of our senses themselves makes a contribution to the character of the world as we perceive it. All of this is undoubtedly true of the minds of the other animals as well.

Reason operates on a fundamentally different level from rationality. While forms of rationality refer to objects, reason focuses on the forms of rationality. Nowadays, this requires reference to the highly differentiated, diverse and conflicting paradigms of rationality, because they are obviously equivalent to what was conventionally called understanding. They are restricted to their specific perspectives. Reason, on the other hand, reaches further. It refers to the host of different types of rationality, and evaluates their interrelationship. Structural considerations dictate that this responsibility cannot be fulfilled adequately by any of the rationalities, only by reason.

In the philosophy, testimony considers the nature of language and knowledge's confluence, which occurs when beliefs are transferred between speakers and hearers through testimony. Testimony constitutes words, gestures, or utterances that convey beliefs. We get a great number of our beliefs from what others tell us. The epistemology of testimony concerns how we should evaluate these beliefs.