Answer these questions for week 2 and week 3 articles.

1. What is one of the author’s main ideas? Tell me something interesting about this idea. 

2. What is one of the author’s key reasons behind this main idea? Explain that briefly to me. 

3. If the author is right, what are some major implications for your life or way of thinking? 

4. Is the author making a mistake in their reasoning? Are they ignoring something relevant?

Answer Question below for week 4 article

First, read the article assigned for week 4.Listen to the lecture, Third, post an original comment addressing something in either the reading or the lecture (or both).

Philosophical Issues, 23, Epistemic Agency, 2013

INTELLECTUAL AUTONOMY

Linda Zagzebski
University of Oklahoma

1. Introduction

According to a standard interpretation of philosophical history, Im-
manuel Kant revolutionized ethics by making the ultimate moral authority
one’s own rational will. I take that to be the heart of the idea of autonomy.
In this essay I will describe a view of the self according to which autonomy
properly applies in the intellectual domain on the same grounds as it applies
in the practical domain. I will explain why I believe that the power of reflec-
tive self-consciousness is more basic than any epistemic reasons—anything
that indicates to a reasonable person that some proposition is true. The ar-
gument is epistemological, not moral. The conclusion is that what we mean
by reason in its theoretical sense derives from reflective self-consciousness.
The authority of the self over the self is the natural right of the self to reflect,
which is to say, the natural right of the self to be a self. The authority of
reason over a person’s belief-forming activities, like the authority of reason
over a person’s practical action, is derivative from the natural authority of
the self.

2. Autonomy

2.1. A very short history of autonomy

In contemporary discourse, autonomy can mean a number of different
things, but I assume that the dominant idea is that of rational self-governance.
Autonomy has sometimes been identified with the different notion of inde-
pendence, especially in political discussions, and that is one of the reasons
for the vilification of autonomy by those opposed to the individualism of our

Intellectual Autonomy 245

times. When autonomy is applied to the epistemic domain, it has sometimes
been equated with epistemic self-reliance, the analogue of political indepen-
dence. For instance, Elizabeth Fricker describes intellectual autonomy as
follows: “This ideal type relies on no one else for any of her knowledge.
Thus she takes no one else’s word for anything, but accepts only what she
has found out for herself, relying only on her own cognitive faculties and
investigative and inferential powers (2006: 225).”1 This ideal raises a num-
ber of issues, but I find it particularly interesting that intellectual autonomy
should be identified with epistemic self-reliance when it is far from obvious
that autonomy and self-reliance are identified in the practical domain. My
purpose in this essay is to present a view of intellectual autonomy as a form
of autonomy, not simply self-reliance by another name.

In my opinion, autonomy is most interesting if it is a value that is
pre-moral. What I mean is that the idea of autonomy does not rest upon
any moral value, and it might be strong enough to be a constraint on our
understanding of what morality is. If I am right about that, that would
explain why the idea of autonomy can support the modern shift from viewing
morality as obedience to law to understanding morality as self-governance.
Self-governance was arguably an important value since the ancient Greeks,
so that is not what was new in the modern era.2 What Kant gave us was
the idea that morality is self-governance, the rules by which a rational being
governs itself. The additional premise is that morality comes in the form of
a command; it is the product of a will. So if morality comes in the form
of a command, and a person should not submit to any will but her own,
it follows that morality is a command I give myself. It gets its authority
from myself. The Kantian position on the nature of morality, then, follows
from the nature of autonomy as self-governance combined with the view that
morality comes in the form of a command.

Why would modern philosophers think, either on moral or pre-moral
grounds, that I should not submit to anything but my own rational will? In
the ancient and medieval periods, philosophers recognized two grounds for
authority—one Greek, one Judeo-Christian, both of which were modified
or even rejected in the modern West. The first way to ground authority was
in God, who created and governs the universe. The second way to ground
authority was in reason. For the Greeks, reason is intrinsically authoritative;
the authority of reason is self-evident. A person is self-governing in so far as
she has a share in the force of reason that governs the universe. But since an
individual person’s reason is limited, her authority to govern herself is also
limited.

In the last several centuries before Kant, I see two shifts in the way
philosophers thought of the ground of authority. The first shift was from
reason to the will. In the later Middle Ages there was a dispute between
those who accepted the ancient view that the source of authority is in the
divine reason, and those who claimed that the source of authority is in

246 Linda Zagzebski

the divine will rather than the divine reason. Duns Scotus was one of the
earliest proponents of the latter view.3 The shift from reason to will as the
ground of authority had significant consequences since the relation between
the divine and human wills is quite different from the relation between the
divine and human reason. Our reason is arguably a share in the divine reason,
which is why a measure of self-governance for the ancients and medievals is
compatible with being governed by God. In contrast, our wills obviously do
not share in the divine will. A will by its nature is individual. The focus on
will cannot help but be a focus on the individual.

In the century leading up to Kant, there was a second shift—from the
idea of the natural authority of reason to the idea of the natural authority
of the self. Kant brilliantly combined (a) the modern idea of the authority
of the self, (b) the ancient idea of the authority of reason, and (c) the later
medieval view that authority resides in a will. He argued that to be governed
by oneself and to be governed by reason are the same thing because the true
self is one’s own rational will.

But that does not yet tell us which is more basic. Is the point of the
Kantian view of autonomy that I should not submit to anything but my
rational will, or is it that I should not submit to anything but my rational
will? If it is the former, reason is still the primary authority, and there is no
explanation for why it should be my will that governs me rather than any
other rational will. If instead, autonomy means that I should not submit
to anything but my own rational will, my rationality is not sufficient to
explain why other wills do not have authority equal to or greater than mine.
Many modern philosophers will say that I do not need a justification for the
authority of my own will, but since philosophers before the modern period
did not see it that way, we need a defense for the shift from the idea that the
authority that needs no justification is reason to the idea that the authority
that needs no justification is the authority of the self over itself.

Christine Korsgaard offers such a defense. She argues that Kant’s answer
to our question is that the self’s authority over itself does not derive from
the authority of a rational will; rather, reason is authoritative because it is
the rules that the self must set to govern itself (Korsgaard 2009: xi). The
self just is a being with an executive function. It must take control of itself
because of the operation of self-consciousness. The rules of reason are the
rules of a self-conscious being. Korsgaard interprets the authority of reason
as derivative from the authority of the self-conscious self, the reverse of the
traditional view.

As I interpret the historical development of the idea of autonomy, then,
there was a progression from the ancient idea that authority over me resides
in reason, to the idea that authority resides in the rational will, to the idea
that authority resides in my rational will. The first two were rooted outside
the individual person, generally in the divine reason or will, with human
authority based on the human being’s submission to or imitation of the

Intellectual Autonomy 247

divine ground of authority. The third constituted a radical shift, although
Kant did not give up the idea that authority is grounded in universal reason.
What was radical was the idea that universal reason is attached to my own
will. I surmise that it was that feature that permitted later degeneration into
the view that my will, unconstrained by anything, including reason, is the
only authority over me.4

2.2. Intellectual autonomy and heteronomy

Let us now begin to look at what all this has to do with autonomy in
the intellectual domain. First, I think it is fair to say that even if the ulti-
mate bearer of practical or moral authority is someone’s will, nobody but
Hobbes would say that the ultimate bearer of intellectual authority is a will.5

Nevertheless, we would expect there to be a close connection between intel-
lectual autonomy and autonomy of the will, and a corresponding connection
between intellectual authority and practical authority.

Notice first that autonomy of the will presupposes autonomy of the
intellect. It is unlikely that we can autonomously make a choice unless the
beliefs upon which the choice is based are autonomous. This point does not
depend upon any particular view of autonomy, but only on the assumption
that choices depend upon beliefs. If it is good that acts are autonomous, at
least some of our beliefs ought to be formed autonomously. The conditions
of the mind upon which choice depends must be autonomous.

Notice also that the ways in which a will can be heteronomous according
to Kant have a parallel in the formation of beliefs. A will is heteronomous
in one way when it is controlled by a will outside of it. Similarly, an intellect
can be too greatly influenced or even controlled by someone else’s will. It
is plausible to say such an intellect is heteronomous. Intellectual coercion
is generally thought to be impossible, as Locke observed (see note 5), but
commercial and political advertising are common ways of pressuring people
to form particular beliefs even though the beliefs are not literally coerced.
It is understandable that people sometimes complain that their autonomy is
violated, at least to some degree, by the use of such methods of influencing
belief. An amusing and more extreme view on coercion over belief is Robert
Nozick’s claim that rational persuasion is coercive, and philosophers are
guilty of coercing people’s minds. Nozick says:

The terminology of philosophical art is coercive: arguments are powerful and
best when they are knockdown, arguments force you to a conclusion, if you
believe the premises you have to or must believe the conclusion, some arguments
do not carry much punch, and so forth. A philosophical argument is an attempt
to get someone to believe something, whether he wants to or not . . . Why are
philosophers intent on forcing others to believe things? Is that a nice way to
behave toward someone? (Nozick 1981: 4–5)

248 Linda Zagzebski

We may not all agree on whether anyone is entitled to influence the beliefs
of others by rational argument or any other method, but fortunately, we do
not have to settle that issue because the first kind of intellectual heteronomy
is relevant either way. Surely another person can unduly influence my beliefs,
and that can happen even when the other person is not claiming authority,
is not attempting to coerce my belief or to persuade me, and may even be
unaware of my existence. Of course, we will want to know what undue influ-
ence is, but it is plausible that it exists and that it is problematic for roughly
the same reason Kant gives for thinking that the first kind of heteronomy of
the will is problematic. If we are not fully rational when our wills are pushed
around, then we are not fully rational when our intellects are pushed around,
whatever “pushed around” amounts to. At least, there is a prima facie case
for the equivalence.

A will is heteronomous in the second way, according to Kant, when it
is determined by forces within the self other than reason—by inclination
or fancy. An intellect also can be determined by inclination or fancy, or
something other than reason, and there is a prima facie case for calling such
an intellect heteronomous. The value of intellectual autonomy that contrasts
with a heteronomous intellect in this sense is not very controversial. Nobody
denies that reason is good for the intellect, and that forming beliefs by
inclination or fancy is a bad idea. I think that we can expect, then, that
if autonomy is valuable, intellectual autonomy is also. Both of the ways in
which a will can be heteronomous according to Kant probably apply to the
intellect, and both ways are disvaluable.

So far we have nothing more than a couple of hints about the nature
of intellectual autonomy. In the next two sections I will return to the view
adopted from Korsgaard that reason derives from self-consciousness. Rather
than to give a Kantian argument for that position, I will give an epistemologi-
cal argument that epistemic reasons derive from the powers of a self-reflective
being. This will lead to a view of intellectual autonomy that connects it with
autonomy in the practical domain.

3. The primacy of conscientious self-reflection

3.1. The exercise of self-reflection

What I mean by a self is the inner world of a person. When a self is
conscious, it is aware of the distinction between the subject and object of
consciousness, and in self-consciousness the subject is able to direct con-
sciousness to itself. To be conscious of oneself includes consciousness of a
variety of mental states, including beliefs, desires, emotions, sensations, atti-
tudes, judgments, and decisions, as well as imaginary versions of each. Some
of these states occur naturally. For instance, I think there is a natural desire

Intellectual Autonomy 249

for truth and a natural belief that the natural desire for truth can be satisfied,
so basic epistemic self-trust is natural. I think it is natural to have many other
beliefs, such as the belief that there are other persons with conscious states
similar to mine. Many emotions are no doubt natural as well. But most of
our particular beliefs, desires, and emotions are acquired.

Our mental states can sometimes conflict with one another. We experi-
ence conflict between our mental states as dissonance. It seems to me that
the experience of dissonance is basic. It cannot be explained or analysed in
terms of some other experience. I do not mean that conflict is defined by the
experience of dissonance since there can be conflict that is unconscious, but
we detect conflict through the experience of dissonance.

Many times when there is dissonance, the self automatically adjusts by
giving up one of the states that conflict. This often happens when there is
conflict between a belief and a perception. I believe that I turned off the
watering system, but then hear the sprinklers go on. I give up my belief
without any attention to the conflict. The conflict is short-lived and psychic
harmony is restored effortlessly and without conscious attention. I think that
the awareness of dissonance resolved without effort gives us our initial model
of what rationality is. I say that because I think that rationality is a property
we have when we do what we do naturally, only we do a better job of it. To
be rational is to do a better job of what we do anyway—what our faculties
do naturally.

Sometimes there is conflict that is not automatically resolved. If we are
aware of dissonance, we typically feel a need to resolve it by giving up one of
the components of the self that creates the dissonance, and we may not want
to do so. Some forms of dissonance do not need to be resolved; we can get
along well enough with the dissonance. This often happens with conflicting
desires, or with a desire that conflicts with a belief. I believe that I will go
on a trip tomorrow, but I do not want to go. I am aware of the dissonance
between the belief and the desire, but I do not feel an urgency to give up
either the belief or the desire the way I do when I am aware of conflicting
beliefs. Nonetheless, it is better if dissonance is resolved. Conflict between
desires or between a belief and a desire can also be resolved unconsciously,
and the experience of the resulting harmony gives us a model of a kind of
rationality that is desirable for the same reason we desire harmony in our
beliefs: We naturally desire and attempt to achieve a harmonious self.

When we are aware of a conflict within the self, we might find it hard to
give up either side to the conflict, but may make the judgment that a certain
one ought to be given up. This situation often occurs when a decision conflicts
with a set of beliefs. We may judge that we ought to change the decision, but
find it difficult. Perhaps we are able to do so after a struggle; we call that
continence. Perhaps we are not able to do so and we call that incontinence
or akrasia. Akrasia is often called moral weakness, but the weakness need
not have anything to do with morality. Indeed, one can be akratic when what

250 Linda Zagzebski

one judges one ought to do is opposed to morality (Davidson 1970). A mild
form of akrasia exists as long as the conflict exists and we are aware of the
dissonance but do not resolve it. A stronger form of akrasia occurs when we
resolve the conflict in favor of the wrong side to the conflict—what we judge
we ought not to do.

I have proposed that we begin reflection with a model of what we ought
to do to resolve conflict, which is, very roughly, what we would do if we were
doing it automatically and without effort. What we do reflectively builds
upon a base in what we do pre-reflectively. Of course, part of the point
of reflection is to change some of what we do pre-reflectively, but reflec-
tion operates on processes that already exist in our pre-reflective state. We
judge ourselves reflectively with the pre-reflective experience of successful
resolutions of conflict.

My position, then, is that there is a connection between rationality and
our reflective judgment of what produces harmony in the self. I have added
the idea that there is a connection between rationality and what people do
automatically. I think we would have a lot of trouble distinguishing rational
from irrational behavior were it not for the experience of making an auto-
matic adjustment when there is dissonance in the states of the self. Of course,
I am not suggesting that rationality should be defined by such behavior. But
what we do automatically gives us our initial standard of rationality, a stan-
dard for what it is to make the adjustment in the self correctly. The criterion
works only if there is a close connection between the way the self naturally
operates and what the self ought to do. That means that there is a connection
between the natural and the normative, in particular, a connection between
the self as it naturally operates and the way it should operate.

When parts of the self adjust automatically, no executive is needed. The
self exercises its executive function when we have to make up our mind.
Choice in action involves an executive function, but other changes in the
self do also. Sometimes resolution of dissonance within the self requires the
exercise of the executive function of the self. It does so when the resolution
of dissonance does not occur automatically. The executive self can also be
called an agent. The self is an agent in its role of taking charge of itself,
correcting itself, and thereby becoming a more harmonious self, and hence,
in some deeper way, more of a self. A self-conscious being has an executive
function in virtue of being a self. This is the sense in which the self has
natural authority over itself.

I have no objections to someone who says that the reflective ability
of the self to monitor and change in the way I have described shows the
centrality of the will in our psychology, but I find it misleading to use the
term “will” for the executive function I have described. I do not maintain
that the self-reflective regulation of the self involves changing states of the
self “at will,” and I think that our power to act is not a good model of the
reflective powers of the self, which are broader and generally weaker than

Intellectual Autonomy 251

the power to perform basic acts. My preference, then, is not to say that the
ultimate authority over a self is the will. Rather, the natural authority of
the self over the self is the power of the executive function of self-reflective
consciousness.

3.2. Beliefs and the reflective self

Let us look now at a deep kind of dissonance produced by reflection
upon our beliefs as a whole. Many philosophers who have rigorously reflected
upon their beliefs notice the phenomenon of epistemic circularity, or what
Keith Lehrer (1997) has called “the loop of reason.” The problem is that
there is no non-circular way to determine that the natural desire for truth is
satisfiable, or to put the claim in the preferred idiom, there is no non-circular
way to tell that our belief-forming faculties are reliable as a whole.

Richard Foley (2001) links the phenomenon of epistemic circularity with
the lack of answers to the radical skeptic and the failure of the project
of strong foundationalism. We can do everything epistemically that we are
supposed to do, including following the evidence scrupulously, but we have
no assurances that the results will give us the truth or even make it more
probable that we will get the truth. Foley concludes that we need self-trust
in our epistemic faculties taken as a whole, together with our pre-reflective
opinions. Self-trust is necessary, and further, he argues that it is rational in
that it is a state to which we are led by the process of rational self-criticism.
One is rationally entitled to self-trust, and therefore one is rationally entitled
to the degree of confidence one has in one’s opinions and faculties when
one has trust in the self since it is critical reflection that leads to self-trust.
(25, 47). Foley’s model is one in which it is rational to do what self-reflective
beings do. That seems to me to be right.

William Alston offers a more detailed argument for a related conclusion
about circularity in his final book, Beyond Justification (2005), which modi-
fies an argument in Alston (1986). Alston argues that we cannot justify any
belief arising from a basic practice of belief-formation (perception, memory,
introspection, rational intuition, induction, and others) without justifying the
well-groundedness of the practice, but we cannot do that without using that
same practice. For instance, I cannot justify my belief that a dive-bombing
hawk just swooped by my window without a justification of the reliability of
my perceptual faculties, but I cannot justify my belief in the reliability of my
perceptual faculties without using perception. This is a stronger claim than
the one made by Foley. Alston argues that circularity arises in the attempt
to establish the reliability of individual basic sources of belief such as per-
ception, memory, and deductive reasoning, whereas Foley claims only that
circularity arises in the attempt to establish the reliability of our epistemic
faculties and beliefs taken as a whole.6

252 Linda Zagzebski

It does not matter for my argument whether Alston’s stronger view on
the extent of circularity is correct. Either way, circularity is a problem that
reflective beings notice. But there is an interesting difference between Alston
and Foley that I think is important. Alston does not think that the problem
of epistemic circularity is necessarily tied to the threat of skepticism. He says
that the spectre of skepticism is a dramatic way to put the issue, “but it is
not necessary for a calm, fully mature consideration of the problem” (2005:
216).7 The problem as Alston sees it is that the fact that the justification
of our beliefs is ultimately circular prevents us from being “fully reflectively
justified” in our beliefs. We need not be especially worried about evil geniuses
and brains in vats to notice circularity, and we need not think that the
alternative to full reflective justification is skepticism.

I think Alston is right about that. A problem arises as soon as a person
reflects upon her desire for truth and carries reflection upon that desire
as far as she can. She is doing what every self-reflective being does, only
more thoroughly and scrupulously. She feels dissonance when she lacks full
reflective justification for her beliefs, and that is a problem even if she does
not fear skepticism or even pays any attention to skepticism.

Alston and Foley think of self-trust as the rational outcome of a so-
phisticated line of argument. It is an end state, not the state from which we
start. I differ from them on this point since I have suggested that there is
pre-reflective self-trust. Before we reflect upon the justification of our beliefs
or the reliability of our faculties, we already trust ourselves and our environ-
ment, including other people. The difference is that awareness of epistemic
circularity forces us to confront the pre-reflective trust we have in ourselves
at the reflective level.

Is it rational to have self-trust after reflection? That depends upon
whether reflection creates dissonance between our natural pre-reflective trust,
and beliefs that result from reflection on our total set of beliefs, including
the belief that full reflective justification is impossible. Foley and Alston say
that self-trust is the rational result of reflection upon beliefs. But even if
someone is not convinced by their arguments, surely the rational result of
self-reflection is not to give up pre-reflective trust. There is no dissonance
between self-trust and our total set of beliefs, including the belief that full
reflective justification is impossible. On the contrary, there is less dissonance
between self-trust and our total set of beliefs than there is between the belief
that full reflective justification is impossible and the rest of our beliefs.

But there is another way to resolve the latter dissonance: one could
become a skeptic. One could give up both natural self-trust and one’s previous
beliefs, but not give up the belief that full reflective justification is impossible.
To prevent dissonance with the natural desire for truth, the skeptic would
have to give that up also, if possible, or else live with permanent dissonance. I
have my doubts that there are such persons, but if such a radical skeptic exists,
she does not have the irrationality of dissonance, but she attains harmony

Intellectual Autonomy 253

by foregoing much of what we do naturally. I have suggested that rationality
is, roughly, doing a better job of what we naturally do. The skeptic I have
described is not going a better job of what we do naturally because she is not
doing what we do naturally. However, I am not going to critique skepticism.
My conclusion in this section is that when a person carries self-reflection as
far as she can, and does it honestly and rigorously, she will do the best job of
maintaining harmony in the self—one of the principal goals of the executive
self, by maintaining a great many of her pre-reflective beliefs, and bringing
her trust in herself to reflective consciousness. That is, the result of rigorous
self-reflection is to become consciously aware of her natural self-trust and
accepting of it.

3.3. The conscientious believer and the nature of reasons

The function of self-trust in our epistemic lives leads to a way of thinking
about reasons for belief that makes them derivative from what we do when we
bring our desire for the truth to reflective consciousness. When we want our
questions answered, what we typically do is to look for what we call reasons.
Something is a reason because, upon reflection, it can be put together with
other reasons in such a way that they seem to support a given conclusion, a
conclusion that we then take to be true. What we call justification (in one of
its senses) is the state we are in when we succeed in finding reasons of that
kind. The desire for truth in a self-reflective person leads to the search for
reasons in this way, and the arguments for epistemic circularity by Foley and
Alston make this assumption. We trust that there is a connection between
the possession of reasons for belief and getting the truth.

A self-reflective person who desires truth may not search for reasons for
every belief. The issue of whether there are beliefs that a self-reflective person
accepts without reasons is an important one, and I am not assuming that
there are no such beliefs. What is not disputable is that a self-reflective person
looks for reasons for many of her beliefs, and she considers it a good thing
to have reasons for any of her beliefs. I do not think there is any explanation
for why she does that or what would justify her in doing so except that
that is what self-reflective persons who desire truth do. To have reasons for
her beliefs produces psychic harmony, and to fail to have reasons produces
psychic dissonance.

This leads to the question whether we have reasons to think that our
reasons for belief lead to the truth. The same question can be posed in terms
of the related notion of evidence.8 Do we have evidence that evidence leads to
truth? In any sense of evidence that would eliminate the need for trust in the
relation between evidence and truth, the answer is no. For one thing, we do
not have evidence that evidence leads to truth. What we have is evidence that
evidence for p leads to more evidence for p, enough that at some point we

254 Linda Zagzebski

declare p true. But in any case, why should we pay attention to the evidence
that evidence leads to truth unless we trust the connection between evidence
and truth? No matter how much evidence we have, its connection to truth
will always be something that cannot be established without circularity.

The answer to the question of why it is rational to trust evidence is the
same as the answer to the question of why it is rational to trust reasons.
Trusting the connection between evidence and truth is something rational
people who desire the truth do. Even the skeptic trusts this connection. In
fact, it is because the skeptic trusts this connection that the skeptic becomes
a skeptic. It is the failure to complete the search for evidence that leads her
to skepticism.

Circularity is relevant to the desire for truth because we make certain
assumptions about the nature of mind and the universe. We want truth—our
questions answered correctly, and we notice that the process of attempting
to answer those questions can never be completed. But this is a problem
because we assume (a) there is a connection between successfully getting the
truth and what we do when we attempt to answer our questions (what we
call finding reasons or evidence), and (b) what we attempt to do can never
be completed. The discovery of epistemic circularity discussed by Alston and
Foley is the discovery of (b), but what about (a)? We do not discover (a); we
trust it. The need for trust in (a) is independent of (b), and we can see that by
looking at what our situation would be like if, per impossibile, we were able
to complete the search for reasons in a non-circular way. We would still need
trust that there is any connection between reasons and truth. Whether or not
we have the reasons we seek, we need to trust that reasons are the sorts of
things that give us the answers to our questions, that connect us to truth.
So even if strong foundationalism had succeeded, we would need trust that
we identified the foundation correctly and that the foundationalist structure
reliably gives us truth. This is no less the case if the foundation is certain. We
would still need trust in the connection between the state of certainty and
truth.

We get the same conclusion no matter what notion of evidence or reasons
we use. Evidence can be understood as something internal to the mind—
generally, a phenomenal experience or a belief. In contrast, evidence is some-
times understood as public property, the sort of thing to which scientists or
lawyers can point in the common project of attempting to answer questions.
If reasons are public, they can be either objects, such as fingerprints, or facts
(true propositions).9 Alternatively, reasons could be some combination of
the public and private, such as facts known by the subject. There are many
variations, but in every case, trust is needed. If a reason for belief is inter-
nal to the mind, the need for trust in the connection between a reason and
something external to the mind is clear. If instead a reason is defined from
an external perspective, what in fact indicates truth, that means that what we
do when we are attempting to get truth may not be having a reason in the

Intellectual Autonomy 255

sense defined. That does not remove the need for trust, it just backs it up a
step to trust in the link between what we do when we are trying to get truth
and having a reason from an external perspective. The same point applies to
evidence. Whether or not we define evidence in a way that builds a reliable
connection to the truth into the concept, we need to trust the connection
between (a) what we do when we make a fully conscious effort to use our
faculties the best way we can to get truth and (b) success in reaching truth.
Using an externalist notion of reasons or evidence therefore does not remove
the need for trust in the connection between our faculties and getting the
truth.

The fundamental reason we trust evidence or reasons is that looking for
evidence is what we do when we are self-reflective, and we trust that. I call
the quality of using our faculties to the best of our ability in order to get the
truth epistemic conscientiousness. I think of this quality as the self-reflective
version of the natural desire for truth. It is a natural desire brought to self-
reflective consciousness and accompanied by the attempt to satisfy it with all
of one’s powers. I have argued that we need trust that there is a connection
between the natural desire for truth and the satisfaction of that desire using
the faculties that any person has, reflective or pre-reflective, but once a
person becomes reflective, she thinks that her trustworthiness is greater if
she summons her powers in a fully conscious and careful way, and exercises
them to the best of her ability. What I am calling conscientiousness is the
state or disposition to do that.10 Conscientiousness is important because we
do not think that we are equally trustworthy at all times. We trust that there is
a connection between trying and succeeding, and the reflective person thinks
that there is a closer connection between trying with the full reflective use
of her powers, and succeeding. Conscientiousness comes in degrees. There
is a probably a degree of conscientiousness operating most of the time since
we have some awareness of ourselves and the exercise of our powers most
of the time. But higher degrees of conscientiousness require considerable
self-awareness and self-monitoring.

A conscientious person has evidence that she is more likely to get the
truth when she is conscientious, but she trusts evidence in virtue of her trust in
herself when she is conscientious, not conversely. Her trust in herself is more
basic than her trust in evidence, and that includes evidence of reliability. The
identification of evidence, the identification of the way to handle and evaluate
evidence, and the resolution of conflicting evidence all depend upon the more
basic property of epistemic conscientiousness. I think, then, that evidence is
what we take to be indicative of truth when we are conscientious, and we trust
that that is identical with what is indicative of truth. Norms of reasoning
such as the rules of probability are tools for helping us figure out what is
most conscientious to believe.11 Likewise, I think that intellectual virtues
are qualities that arise out of epistemic conscientiousness. These qualities
are those that epistemically conscientious persons endorse and attempt to

256 Linda Zagzebski

acquire. But we would not treat them as virtues unless we thought that
our cognitive and sensory faculties are generally trustworthy because these
qualities are useless in a being whose faculties are not naturally conducive to
reaching their end.12

It follows from what I have argued that there are two levels of self-
trust, both of which are more basic than any reasons or evidence we can
identify. First, there is the general trust in our faculties that I argued is the
most rational response to epistemic circularity. Second, there is the particu-
lar trust we have in our faculties when we are conscientious—exercising our
truth-seeking faculties in the best way we can. Our identification of reasons
for belief, norms of reasoning, and the qualities we think are intellectually
virtuous are all derivative from what we do when we are epistemically consci-
entious. My judgment that the evidence supports some proposition p is not
trustworthy without trust in my faculties, in particular, the conscientious use
of my faculties. That means that trust in my faculties is always more basic
than any judgment about the evidence and what it supports. Trust in myself
is more basic than trust in my judgment of the reliability of myself or anyone
else.

This line of reasoning has the consequence that ultimately our only
test that a belief is true is that it survives conscientious reflection. That
includes reflection on future experiences, and future judgments about the
past and present. At any one time, of course, we cannot know what our
future experiences will be. Norms of reasoning are the norms that have been
adopted by the conscientious judgment that following them makes it likely
that beliefs will survive without dissonance into the future—that they will
survive with changes in experience and changes in other beliefs.

In section 3.1, I proposed that the experience of dissonance uncon-
sciously resolved gives us our first model of what rationality is. Given what
I have argued in sections 3.2 and 3.3, the experience of the conscientious
self resolving dissonance gives us our second model of what rationality is.
It is rational to trust when it is needed to resolve dissonance, and epis-
temic self-trust is rational in this sense. The foundation of rationality is the
conscientious self reflecting upon itself in order to resolve dissonance.

4. Intellectual autonomy

In section 2, I suggested that the rise of the idea of autonomy can be
understood in terms of a double shift in the answer to the question, “What
has ultimate authority over me?” Before the modern era there were two
answers to that question that were not perceived as conflicting, and for the
most part, were blended into one answer. The ultimate authority is God,
and the ultimate authority is reason, but reason is the divine in the human.
I proposed that the two-part shift in the answer to the question, “What has

Intellectual Autonomy 257

ultimate authority over me?” included a shift from the (divine) reason to the
(divine) will, and a second shift from reason to the self. Kant did not reject
the authority of reason, but he accepted both the shifts from reason to will
and from reason to the self, yielding the view that the ultimate authority over
me is my own rational will. The defense of this view, according to Korsgaard,
is that the norms of reason are the rules of self-governance. It is important
that the rules of self-governance are not the rules that they are because they
are the norms of reason. Rather, the norms of reason are what they are
because they are the rules of self-governance. The self governs itself because
of the self-reflective structure of the self. The self is more basic than reason,
and the will directs the self. What makes the will crucial for Kant is that the
norms of morality come in the form of commands.

In my view of autonomy, there are some features of this picture that
need to be clarified, and possibly modified. First, the ability of the self to
command itself is just a special case of the more general capacity of a self to
reflect upon itself and to make adjustments, some of which are unconscious,
some of which are conscious but effortless, some of which require effort, and
some of which are intended, but the self is powerless to make the change. I
see all of these processes as occurring because of the natural desire of a self
to be harmonious in its states—to resolve dissonance, and to adjust in a way
that is intended to survive future self-reflection without dissonance. It is not
obvious that it is the will that performs all these functions. Rather, the self
performs these functions upon itself. What gives the self authority to do so
is just that that is the nature of the self. It cannot do otherwise than to be a
self.

I think that also means that the term “self-governance” is misleading
since that term can be interpreted as suggesting that there is an issue that
can be answered in more than one way: Does the self govern itself or is
it governed by something outside the self? In the sense in which I think
the self is self-governing, there is no alternative, so the question of who
governs the self does not arise. In the sense in which I have argued that
the self is self-governing, governance by anything other than the self is an
impossibility.

We can now see how the problem of epistemic circularity reveals the
relationship between the authority of reason over our beliefs and the au-
thority of the self to direct itself. As I argued in section 3, trust in ourselves
when we are conscientiously directing the self is more basic than anything we
call evidence or reasons to believe some proposition. From my first person
perspective, I will always need to trust the connection between (a) what I
do when I make a fully conscious effort to use my faculties the best way we
can to get truth, and (b) success in reaching truth. I am rationally forced
to accept that trust in my powers is prior to trust in reasons. That does not
mean that I am more authoritative than reason. It just means that my ability
to use reason is always derivative from the self-directing function of my self.

258 Linda Zagzebski

The authority of the self also does not mean that I could decide otherwise
than to adopt the norms of theoretical and practical reason. The norms of
reason are the norms I must use in order to reflectively adjust the self. It is
not an accident that the rules I must use in self-direction are the same as the
ones every other self must use. Reason is the set of rules of any self-reflective
being.

Finally, the sense in which the self has authority over itself is compatible
with governance by God or by another external authority for the same reason
it is compatible with being governed by reason. The self is a constantly
changing entity that develops under its own direction, but there is nothing in
that function that rules out accepting beliefs or directives from authority. In
fact, I have argued elsewhere (Zagzebski 2012) that the acceptance of both
epistemic and practical authority is a rational requirement of a consistently
self-directing self.

The modern shift from the authority of reason to the authority of the
self therefore does not diminish the authority of reason, but it does show
us that the effective use of reason by one self can differ from its use by
another self because of differences in the states of the selves upon which
the norms of reason are applied. I think also that the argument of section
3 shows us the fundamental significance of the self’s management of itself,
even in the intellectual domain. I think that autonomy is this capacity for
self-management and its exercise.

Autonomy is sometimes described as a right that can be violated, and
sometimes as an ideal to which we should aspire. Both ways of speaking
of autonomy make sense on the picture I have described. I have proposed
that the basic norm of self-direction is conscientious self-reflection. Consci-
entiousness comes in degrees, and I suggested that it takes a high degree of
self-reflection to use our faculties to the fullest extent of our powers in our
attempt to reach the ends of those powers. Self-direction is also a right that
a self has in being a self, and there are ways that that right can be violated,
either from the inside or from the outside. As I mentioned in section 2.2,
Kant argued that a will is heteronomous in one way when it is controlled
by a will outside of it. In my picture, a self is heteronomous in this way
when there is outside interference in the capacity or exercise of self-direction.
Someone is intellectually heteronomous in this way when there is outside
interference in the self’s direction of its pursuit of truth or other intellectual
goods. According to Kant, a will is heteronomous in another way when it
is unduly influenced by inclination, or what he called “empirical” causes.
In my picture, a self is heteronomous in this way when it is not properly
self-reflective, thereby permitting states of the self to change or continue
without conscientious self-reflection. The self is intellectually heteronomous
in this way when it permits states of belief to change or continue without
conscientious self-reflection. Conscientious self-reflection can be hampered
by both internal and external influences.

Intellectual Autonomy 259

In my view, autonomy is the right or ideal of managing all parts of
the self, not just decisions to act, in order to achieve a harmonious self.
Intellectual autonomy is the right or ideal of self-direction in the acquisition
and maintenance of beliefs. The basic ends of acts and beliefs are given by
natural desires. I have mentioned the natural desire for truth in particular,
but I do not wish to deny that there are other intellectual goods, such as
knowledge and understanding. Desire for these goods is probably acquired
by the experience of self-reflection.

The foundation of rationality is the conscientious self attempting to
resolve dissonance and produce harmony in the self. I argued in section 3
that the self cannot resolve the dissonance that results from conscientious
reflection on one’s total set of beliefs without epistemic self-trust. Since
intellectual autonomy is the exercise of self-management in one’s beliefs,
then epistemic self-trust is a necessary condition for intellectual autonomy.
I think that this point can be generalized. Autonomy requires trust in the
connection between the conscientious use of all of one’s powers—perceptual,
epistemic, affective, conative—and success in reaching the basic ends of those
powers. Self-trust is a necessary and critical condition for autonomy, and
for the same reason it is a necessary and critical condition for being a
self.13

Notes

1. The identification of intellectual autonomy and epistemic self-reliance has also
been made by some who are opposed to epistemic self-reliance. For instance,
Benjamim McMyler (2011, ch. 1) says he is opposed to intellectual autonomy,
but he makes it clear that that is because he equates it with epistemic self-reliance.

2. Anthony Flood (2003) argues that there are numerous ancient sources of the
idea of self-governance stretching back to Socrates, and that Aquinas had a
robust notion of self-governance in his moral philosophy.

3. See Schneewind (1998 ch. 2, sec. iii) for an historical overview of voluntarism,or
the view that moral authority is grounded in a will. For a history of Divine
Command theory, see Idziak (1980).

4. For an interesting discussion of the culmination of the idea of authority in the
individual will, see Taylor (1976: 288–94).

5. In Behemoth, Dialogue 1, Hobbes argues that the Sovereign is the intellectual
authority in the State, holding authority over the Church in its teachings. He
argues that the universities need to be disciplined so that they teach what the
sovereign wants since the universities are the core of rebellion, as happened in
the English civil war. This part of Behemoth includes a long diatribe against
the Catholic Church and the Presbyterian Church for their “pretensions” to
authority. In contrast to Hobbes, Locke denies that authority over religious belief
is possible. He says: “ . . . the care of souls cannot belong to the civil magistrate,
because his power consists only in outward force: but true and saving religion
consists in the inward persuasion of the mind, without which nothing can be

260 Linda Zagzebski

acceptable to God. And such is the nature of the understanding, that it cannot
be compelled to the belief of any thing by outward force. Confiscation of estate,
imprisonment, torments, nothing of that nature can have any such efficacy as
to make men change the inward judgment that they have framed of things.”
(Locke 2009: para 16). Rousseau (1968) seems to have an intermediate position.
He agrees with Hobbes that the sovereign should fix the articles of faith, but he
says it cannot compel a citizen to believe them, although it can banish whoever
does not believe them as an anti-social being. (The Social Contract Book IV,
chap 8). I thank Zev Trachtenberg for conversation on these passages.

6. Alston’s position on the circularity of justifying basic sources of belief has an
interesting twist. He argues that circularity does not prevent us from using an
inductive argument to establish the conclusion that a doxastic practice such as
sense perception is adequately grounded (1986: 202–3). An inductive argument
of this sort is not logically circular, given that the conclusion does not appear
in the premises, but it is epistemically circular in that one’s confidence in each
premise depends in practice upon the assumption of the reliability of sense
perception (SR). Nonetheless, epistemic circularity does not prevent us from
being justified in believing each of the premises in the argument, nor does it
prevent us from being justified in believing that SR follows from the premises.
And so epistemic circularity does not prevent us from being justified in believing
the conclusion, SR.

7. He says, however, that he will pursue the discussion in the following pages in
terms of the “more dramatically attractive” skeptical challenge. His response
to epistemic circularity two pages later is therefore framed as a reply to the
Pyrrhonian skeptic.

8. The notions of reasons and evidence are closely connected, but there are some
differences. One difference is that we usually speak of reasons for a given belief,
whereas evidence can be gathered when any belief for which it is evidence is
not yet in play. So we would not normally speak of having reasons without
indicating what the reasons support, whereas we might say we have evidence
when we have no idea what the evidence indicates. Some philosophers make
evidence a narrower category than reasons, limiting evidence to reasons of a
certain kind—e.g., propositional beliefs. For instance, Plantinga (1983) does this
in his well-known attack on evidentialism. In this terminology, an experience can
give a person a reason to believe a proposition, but it is not evidence. Another
difference is that evidence is sometimes thought to be objects that point to truth,
such as fingerprints. A fingerprint could be evidence, but it is not a reason. I
mention evidence in this sense below.

9. See Kelly (2006) for an excellent summary of the various senses in which people
speak of evidence.

10. Note that as I define conscientiousness, it does not have any relation to duty.
11. For this reason, trusting my faculties as a whole cannot mean trusting that,

taken as a whole, using my faculties makes it more probable than not that I
get the truth. That would make it too easy to convince myself that most of my
beliefs are true. Believing a faculty is trustworthy does not include making a
judgment of probability. My position is that judgments of probability depend
upon a prior belief in the trustworthiness of my faculties.

Intellectual Autonomy 261

12. In Zagzebski (2012: 82) I argue that qualities like intellectual attentiveness,
carefulness, thoroughness and openness to new evidence are forms of epistemic
conscientiousness. But it does not do us any good to be careful, thorough, etc.
unless our faculties put us generally on the right track. So we assume the general
trustworthiness of our faculties when we treat these qualities as virtues.

13. Parts of this paper are taken from Zagzebski (2012, chapters 1, 2, and 11).

Bibliography

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47, pp. 1–30.

Alston, William P. 2005. Beyond Justification: Dimensions of Epistemic Evaluation. Ithaca, N.Y.:
Cornell University Press.

Davidson, Donald. 1970. “How is Weakness of the Will Possible?” in Moral Concepts, edited
by Joel Feinberg. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Flood, Anthony. 2003. “Self-Governance in Aquinas and Pre-Modern Moral Philosophy.”
Dissertation in Philosophy, University of Oklahoma.

Foley, Richard. 2001. Intellectual Trust in Oneself and Others. N.Y.: Cambridge Universitiy
Press.

Fricker, Eizabeth. 2006. “Testimony and Epistemic Authority.” in The Epistemology of Testi-
mony. Edited by Jennifer Lackey and Ernest Sosa. N.Y.: Oxford University Press.

Hobbes, Thomas. 2010. Behemoth, or the Long Parliament. Edited by P. Seaward. N.Y.: Oxford
University Press.

Idziak, Janine. 1980. Divine Command Morality: Historical and Contemporary Readings. N.Y.:
Edwin Mellen Press.

Kant, Immanuel. 1997. Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. Translated and edited by M.
Gregor. N.Y.: Cambridge University Press.

Kelly, Thomas. 2006. “Evidence.” in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Edited by E.N.
Zalta. http://plato.stanford.edu/arhives/fall2008/entries/evidence/.

Korsgaard, Christine. 2009. Self-Constitution: Agency, Identity, and Integrity. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.

Lehrer, Keith. 1997. Self-Trust: A Study of Reason, Knowledge, and Autonomy. Oxford: Claren-
don Press.

Locke, John. 2009. A Letter Concerning Toleration: Humbly Submitted. N.Y.: Classic Book
America.

McMyler, Benjamin. 2011. Testimony, Trust, and Authority. N.Y.: Oxford University Press.
Nozick, Robert. 1981. Philosophical Explanations. Cambridge, M.A.: Belknap Press of Harvard

University Press.
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Wolterstorff and A. Plantinga. Notre Dame, I.N.: University of Notre Dame Press,
pp.16–93.

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Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Taylor, Charles. 1976. “Responsibility for Self.” in Identifies of Persons. Edited by Amelie Rorty.
Berkeley, C.A.: University of California Press.

Zagzebski, Linda. 2012. On Epistemology. Belmont, C.A.: Wadsworth/Broadview Press.
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not capable of generating enough energy to lead to its own revitalization.
What is needed is a kind of shock therapy with stimulation supplied by
other, living sources. And this is what we try to do. For us, McLuhan’s
Understanding Media, Wiener’s The Human Use of Human Beings, Roger’s
On Becoming a Person, Korzybski’s Science and Sanity, even Richards’s
Practical Criticism (to name a few) are such sources. In other words they are
‘education’ books, and, in our opinion, the best kind. We mean by this that
these books not only present ideas that are relevant to current reality but that
the ideas suggest an entirely different and more relevant conception of
education than our schools have so far managed to reflect. This is an
education that develops in youth a competence in applying the best available
strategies for survival in a world filled with unprecedented troubles
uncertainties and opportunities. Our task, then, is to make these strategies for
survival visible and explicit in the hope that someone somewhere will act on
them.

Crap Detecting

‘In 1492, Columbus discovered America….’ Starting from this disputed
fact, each one of us will describe the history of this country in a somewhat
different way. Nonetheless, it is reasonable to assume that most of us would
include something about what is called the ‘democratic process’, and how
Americans have valued it, or at least have said they valued it. Therein lies a
problem: one of the tenets of a democratic society is that men be allowed to
think and express themselves freely on any subject, even to the point of
speaking out against the idea of a democratic society. To the extent that our
schools are instruments of such a society, they must develop in the young
not only an awareness of this freedom but a will to exercise it, and the
intellectual power and perspective to do so effectively. This is necessary so
that the society may continue to change and modify itself to meet unforeseen
threats, problems and opportunities. Thus, we can achieve what John
Gardner calls an, ‘ever-renewing society’.

So goes the theory.

In practice, we mostly get a different story. In our society as in others, we
find that there are influential men at the head of important institutions who
cannot afford to be found wrong, who find change inconvenient, perhaps
intolerable, and who have financial or political interests they must conserve

Luis Oliveira

at any cost. Such men are, therefore, threatened in many respects by the
theory of the democratic process and the concept of an ever-renewing
society. Moreover, we find that them are obscure men who do not head
important institutions who are similarly threatened because they have
identified themselves with certain ideas and institutions which they wish to
keep free from either criticism or change.

Such men as these would much prefer that the schools do little or nothing
to encourage youth to question, doubt, or challenge any part of the society in
which they live, especially those parts which are most vulnerable. ‘After all,’
say the practical men, ‘they are our schools, and they ought to promote our
interests, and that is part of the democratic process, too. True enough; and
then we have a serious point of conflict. Whose schools are they, anyway,
and whose interests should they be designed to serve? We realize that these
are questions about which any self-respecting professor of education could
write several books each one beginning with a reminder that the problem is
not black or white, either/or, yes or no. But if you have read our
introduction, you will not expect us to be either professorial or prudent. We
are, after all, trying to suggest strategies for survival as they may be
developed in our schools, and the situation requires emphatic responses. We
believe that the schools must serve as the principal medium for developing
in youth the attitudes and skills of social, political and cultural criticism. No.
That is not emphatic enough. Try this: in the early 1960’s, an interviewer
was trying to get Ernest Hemingway to identify the characteristics required
for a person to be a ‘great writer’. As the interviewer offered a list of various
possibilities, Hemmingway disparaged each in sequence. Finally, frustrated,
the interviewer asked, ‘Isn’t then any one essential ingredient that you can
identify?’ Hemingway replied, ‘Yes, there is. In order to be a great writer a
person must have a built-in, shockproof crap detector.’

It seems to us that, in his response, Hemingway identified an essential
survival strategy and the essential function of the schools in today’s world.
One way of looking at the history of the human group is that it has been a
continuing struggle against the veneration of ‘crap’. Our intellectual history
is a chronicle of the anguish and suffering of men who tried to help their
contemporaries see that some part of their fondest beliefs were
misconceptions, faulty assumptions, superstitions and even outright lies. The
mileposts along the road of our intellectual development signal those points
at which some person developed a new perspective, a new meaning, or a

new metaphor. We have in mind a new education that would set out to
cultivate just such people – experts at ‘crap detecting’.

There are many ways of describing this function of the schools, and many
men who have. David Riesman, for example, calls this the ‘counter-cyclical’
approach to education, meaning that schools should stress values that are not
stressed by other major institutions in the culture. Norbert Wiener insisted
that the schools now must function as ‘anti-entropic feedback systems’,
‘entropy’ being the word used to denote a general and unmistakable tendency
of all systems – natural and man-made – in the universe to ‘run down’, to
reduce to chaos and uselessness. This is a process that cannot be reversed
but that can be slowed down and partly controlled. One way to control it is
through ‘maintenance’. This is Eric Hoffer’s dream, and he believes that the
quality of maintenance is one of the best indices of the quality of life in a
culture. But Wiener uses a different metaphor to get at the same idea. He
says that in order for them to be an anti-entropic force, we must have
adequate feedback. In other words, we must have instruments to tell us when
we are running down, when maintenance is required. For Wiener, such
instruments would be people who have been educated to recognize change,
to be sensitive to problems caused by change, and who have the motivation
and courage to sound alarms when entropy accelerates to a dangerous
degree. This is what we mean by ‘crap detecting’. It is also what John
Gardner means by the ‘ever-renewing society’, and what Kenneth Boulding
means by ‘social self-consciousness’. We are talking about the schools
cultivating in the young that most ‘subversive’ intellectual instrument – the
anthropological perspective. This perspective allows one to be part of his
own culture and, at the same time, to be out of it. One views the activities of
his own group as would an anthropologist, observing its tribal rivals its
fears, its conceits, its ethnocentrism. In this way, one is able to recognize
when reality begins to drift too far away from the grasp of the tribe.

We need hardly say that achieving such a perspective is extremely
difficult, requiring, among other things, considerable courage. We are, after
all, talking about achieving a high degree of freedom from the intellectual
and social constraints of one’s tribe. For example, it is generally assumed
that people of other tribes have been victimized by indoctrination from
which our tribe has remained free. Our own outlook seems ‘natural’ to us,
and we wonder that other men can perversely persist in believing nonsense.
Yet, it is undoubtedly true that, for most people, the acceptance of a
particular doctrine is largely attributable to the accident of birth. They might

be said to be ‘ideologically inter-changeable’, which means that they would
have accepted any set of doctrines that happened to be valued by the tribe to
which they were born. Each of us whether from the American tribe, Russian
tribe, or Hopi tribe, is born into a symbolic environment as well as a
physical one. We become accustomed very early to a ‘natural’ way of
talking, and being talked to, about ‘truth’. Quite arbitrarily, one’s perception
of what is ‘true’ or real is shaped by the symbols and symbol-manipulating
institutions of his tribe. Most men, in time, learn to respond with favor and
obedience to a set of verbal abstractions which they feel provides them with
an ideological identity. One word for this, of course, is ‘prejudice’. None of
us is free of it, but it is the sign of a competent ‘crap detector’ that he is not
completely captivated by the arbitrary abstractions of the community in
which he happened to grow up.

In our own society, if one grows up in a language environment which
includes and approve such a concept as ‘white supremacy’, one can quite
‘morally’ engage in the process of murdering civil- rights workers. Similarly,
if one is living in a language environment where the term ‘black power’
crystallizes an ideological identity, one can engage, again quite ‘morally’, in
acts of violence against any non-black persons or their property. An
insensitivity to the unconscious effects of our ‘natural’ metaphors condemns
us to highly constricted perceptions of how things are and, therefore, to
highly limited alternative modes of behavior.

Those who are sensitive to the verbally built-in biases of their ‘natural’
environment seem ‘subversive’ to those who are not. There is probably
nothing more dangerous to the prejudices of the latter than a man in the
process of discovering that the language of his group is limited, misleading,
or one-sided. Such a man is dangerous because he is not easily enlisted on
the side of one ideology or another, because he sees beyond the words to the
processes which give an ideology its reality. In his May Man Prevail? Erich
Fromm gives us an example of a man (himself) in the process of doing just
that:

The Russians believe that they represent socialism because they talk in
terms of Marxist ideology, and they do not recognize how similar their
system is to the most developed form of capitalism. We in the West believe
that we represent the system of individualism, private initiative, and
humanistic ethics, because we hold on to our ideology, and we do not see

that our institutions have, in fact, in many ways become more and more
similar to the hated system of communism.

Religious indoctrination is still another example of this point. As Alan
Watts has noted: ‘irrevocable commitment to any religion is not only
intellectual suicide; it is positive unfaith because it closes the mind to any
new vision of the world. Faith is, above all, openness – an act of trust in the
unknown’ And so ‘crap detecting’ require a perspective on what Watts calls
‘the standard-brand religions’. That perspective can also be applied to
knowledge. If you substitute the phrase ‘set of facts’ for the word ‘religion’ in
the quotation above, the statement is equally important and accurate.

The need for this kind of perspective has always been urgent but never so
urgent as now. We will not take you again through that painful catalogue of
twentieth-century problems we cited in our introduction There are, however,
three particular problems which force us to conclude that the schools must
consciously remake themselves into training centers for ‘subversion’. In one
sense, they are all one problem but for purposes of focus may be
distinguished from each other.

The first goes under the name of the ‘communications revolution’ or media
change. As Father John Culkin of Fordham University likes to say, a lot of
things have happened in this century and most of them plug into walls. To
get some perspective on the electronic plug, imagine that your home and all
the other homes and buildings in your neighborhood have been cordoned
off, and from than will be removed all the electric and electronic inventions
that have appeared in the last fifty years. The media will be subtracted in
reverse order with the most recent going first. The first thing to leave your
house, then, is the television set – and everybody will stand there as if they
are attending the funeral of a friend, wondering, ‘What are we going to do
tonight?’ After rearranging the furniture so that it is no longer aimed at a
blank space in the room, you suggest going to the movie. But there won’t be
any. Nor will there be LP records, tapes, radio, telephone, or telegraph. If
you are thinking that the absence of the media would only affect your
entertainment and information, remember that, at some point, your electric
lights would be removed, and your refrigerator, and your heating system,
and your air conditioner. In short, you would have to be a totally different
person from what you are in order to survive for more than a day. The
chances are slim that you could modify yourself and your patterns of living
and believing fast enough to save yourself. As you were expiring, you would

at least know something about how it was before the electric plug. Or
perhaps you wouldn’t. In any case, if you had energy and interest enough to
hear him, any good ecologist could inform you of the logic of your problem:
a change in an environment is rarely only additive or linear. You seldom, if
ever, have an old environment plus a new element, such as a printing press
or an electric plug. What you have is a totally new environment requiring a
whole new repertoire of survival strategies. In no case is this more certain
than when the new elements are technological. Then, in no case will the new
environment be more radically different from the old than in political and
social forms of life. When you plug something into a wall, someone is
getting plugged into you. Which means you need new patterns of defense,
perception, understanding, evaluation. You need a new kind of education.

It was George Counts who observed that technology repealed the Bill of
Rights. In the eighteenth century, a pamphlet could influence an entire
nation. Today all the ideas of the Noam Chomskys, Paul Goodmans, Edger
Friedenbergs, I. F. Stones and even the William Buckleys, cannot command
as much attention as a thirty-minute broadcast by Walter Cronkite. Unless,
of course, one of them were given a prime-time network program, in which
case he would most likely come out mote like Walter Cronkite than himself.
Even Marshall McLuhan, who is leading the field in understanding media, is
having his ideas transformed and truncated by the forms of the media to fit
present media functions. (One requirement, for example, is that an idea or a
men must be ‘sensational’ in order to get a hearing; thus, Mcluhan comes out
not as a scholar studying media but as the ‘apostle of the electronic age’.)

We trust it is clear that we are not making the typical, whimpering
academic attack on the media. We are not ‘against’ the media. Any more,
incidentally, than McLuhan is ‘for’ the media. You cannot reverse
technological change. Things that plug in are here to stay. But you on study
media, with a view towards discovering what they are doing to you. As
McLuhan has said, there is no inevitability so long a there is a willingness to
contemplate what is happening.

Very few of us have contemplated more rigorously what is happening
through media change than Jacques Ellul who has sounded some chilling
alarms. Without mass media, Ellul insists, there can be no effective
propaganda With them, there is almost nothing but. ‘Only through
concentration of a large number of media in a few hands can one attain a
true orchestration, a continuity, and an application of scientific methods of

influencing individuals.’ That such concentration is occurring daily, Ellul
says, is an established fact, and its results may well be an almost total
homogenization of thought among those the media reach. We cannot afford
to ignore Norbert Wiener’s observation of a paradox that results from our
increasing technological capability in electronic communication: as the
number of messages increases, the amount of information carried decreases.
We have more media to communicate fewer significant ideas.

Still another way of saying this is that, while there has been a tremendous
increase in media there has been, at the same time, a decrease in available
and viable ‘democratic’ channels of communication because the mass media
are entirely one-way communication. For example, as a means of affecting
public policy, the town meeting is dead. Significant community action
(without violence) is increasingly rare. A small printing press in one’s home
as an instrument of social change, is absurd. Traditional forms of dissent and
protest san impractical, e.g. letters to the editor, street corner speeches, etc.
No one can reach many people unless he has access to the mass media. As
this is written, for example, there is no operational two-way communication
possible with respect to United States policies and procedures in Vietnam.
The communication is virtually all one way: from the top down, via the mass
media, especially TV. The pressure on everyone is to subscribe without
question to policies formulated in the Pentagon. The President appears on
TV and clearly makes the point that anyone who does not accept ‘our policy’
can be viewed only as lending aid and comfort to the enemy. The position
has been elaborately developed in all media that ‘peaceniks’ are failing in the
obligation to ‘support our boys overseas’. The effect of this process on all of
us is to leave no alternative but to accept policy, act on orders from above,
end implement the policy without question or dialogue This is what Edger
Friedenberg calls ‘creeping Eichmannism’, a sort of spiritless, mechanical,
abstract functioning which does not allow much room for individual thought
and action.

As Paul Goodman has pointed out, there are many forms of censorship,
and one of them is to deny access to ‘loudspeakers’ to those with dissident
ideas, or even any ideas. This is easy to do (and not necessarily
conspiratorial) when the loudspeakers are owned and operated by mammoth
corporations with enormous instruments in their proprietorship. What we get
is an entirely new politics, including the possibility that a major requirement
for the holding of political office be prior success as a show- business
personality. Goodman writes in Like a Conquered Province:

The traditional American sentiment is that a decent society cannot be built
by dominant official policy anyway, but only by grassroots resistance,
community cooperation, individual enterprise, and citizenly vigilance to
protect liberty…. The question is whether or not our beautiful libertarian,
pluralist, and populist experiment is viable in modern conditions. If it’s not, I
don’t know any other acceptable politics, and I am a man without a country.

Is it possible that there are millions becoming men without a country? Men
who are increasingly removed from the sources of power? Men who have
fewer and fewer ideas available to them, and fewer and fewer ways of
expressing themselves meaningfully and effectively? Might the frustration
thus engendered be one of the causes of the increasing use of violence as a
form of statement?

We come then to a second problem which makes necessary a ‘subversive’
role for the schools. This one may appropriately be called the ‘change
revolution’. In order to illustrate what this means, we will use the media
again and the metaphor of a clock face. Imagine a clock face with sixty
minutes on it. Let the clock stand for the time men have had access to
writing systems. Our clock would thus represent something like three
thousand years, and each minute on our clock fifty years. On this scale, there
were no significant media changes until about nine minutes ago. At that
time, the printing press came into use in Western culture. About three
minutes ago, the telegraph, photograph, and locomotive arrived. Two
minutes ago: the telephone, rotary press, motion pictures, automobile,
aeroplane and radio. One minute ago, the talking picture. Television has
appeared in the last ten seconds, the computer in the last five, and
communications satellites in the last second. The laser beam – perhaps the
most potent medium of communication of all – appeared only a fraction of a
second ago.

It would be possible to place almost any as of life on our clock face and
get roughly the same measurements. For example, in medicine, you would
have almost no significant changes until about one minute ago. In fact, until
one minute ago, as Jerome Frank has said, almost the whole history of
medicine is the history of the placebo effect. About a minute ago, antibiotics
arrived. About ten seconds ago, open-heart surgery. In fact, within the past
ten seconds there probably have been more changes in medicine than is
represented by all the rest of the time on our clock. This is what some people

call the knowledge explosion. It is happening in every field of knowledge
susceptible to scientific inquiry.

The standard reply to any comment about change (for example, from many
educators) is that change isn’t new and that it is easy to exaggerate its
meaning. To such replies, Norbert Wiener had a useful answer: the
difference between a fatal and a therapeutic dose of strychnine is ‘only a
matter of degree’. In other words, change isn’t new; what is new is the degree
of change. As our clock-face metaphor was intended to suggest, about three
minutes ago there developed a qualitative difference in the character of
change. Change changed.

This is really quite a new problem. For example, up until the last
generation it was possible to be born, grow up, and spend a life in the United
States without moving more than fifty miles from home, without ever
confronting serious questions about one’s basic values, beliefs and patterns
of behavior. Indeed without ever confronting serious challenges to anything
one knew Stability and consequent predictability –within ‘natural cycles’ –
was the characteristic mode. But now, in lust the last minute we’ve reached
the stage where change occurs so rapidly that each of us in the course of our
lives has continuously to work out a se of values, beliefs, and patterns of
behaviors that are viable, a seem viable, to each of us personally. And just
when we have identified a workable system, it turns out to be irrelevant
because so much has changed while we were doing it.

Of course, this frustrating state of affairs applies to our education as well.
If you me over twenty-five years of age, the mathematics you were taught in
school is ‘old’; the grammar you were taught is obsolete and in disrepute; the
biology, completely out of date, and the history, open to serious question.
The best that can be said of you, assuming that you remember most of what
you were told and read, is that you are a walking encyclopedia of outdated
information. As Alfred North Whitehead pointed out in The Adventure of
Ideas:

Our sociological theories, our political philosophy, our practical maxims
of business, our political economy, and our doctrine of education are derived
from an unbroken tradition of great thinkers and of practical examples from
the age of Plato …to the end of the last century. The whole of this tradition is
warped by the vicious assumption that each generation will substantially live
amid the conditions governing the lives of its fathers and will transmit those

conditions to mould with equal force the lives of its children. We are living
in the first period of human history for which this assumption is false.

All of which brings us to the third problem: the ‘burgeoning bureaucracy’.
We are brought there because bureaucracies, in spite of their seeming
indispensability, are by their nature highly resistant to change. The motto of
most bureaucracies is, ‘Carry on, regardless’. There is an essential
mindlessness about them which causes them, in most circumstances, to
accelerate entropy rather than to impede it. Bureaucracies rarely ask
themselves Why?, but only How? John Gardner, who as President of the
Carnegie Corporation and Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare has
learned about bureaucracies at first hand, has explained them very well:

To accomplish renewal, we need to understand what prevents it. When we
talk about revitalizing a society, we tend to put exclusive emphasis on
finding new ideas. But there is usually no shortage of new ideas; the
problem is to get a hearing for them. And that means breaking through the
crusty rigidity and stubborn complacency of the status quo. The aging
society develops elaborate defenses against new ideas -‘mind-forged
manacles’, in William Blake’s vivid phrase…. As a society becomes more
concerned with precedent and custom, it comes to care more about how
things are done and less about whether they are done. The man who wins
acclaim is not the one who ‘gets things done’ but the one who has an
ingrained knowledge of the rules and accepted practices. Whether he
accomplishes anything is less important than whether he conducts himself in
an ‘appropriate’ manner.

The body of custom, convention and ‘reputable’ standards exercises such
an oppressive effect on creative minds that new developments in a held often
originate outside the area of respectable practice. In other words,
bureaucracies are the repositories of conventional assumptions and standard
practices – two of the greatest accelerators of entropy.

We could put before you a volume of other quotations – from Machiavelli
to Paul Goodman – describing how bureaucratic structures retard the
development and application of new survival strategies. But in doing so, we
would risk creating the impression that we stand with Goodman in yearning
for some anarchistic Utopia in which the Army, the Police, General Motors,
the US Office of Education, the Post Office, etc. do not exist. We are not
‘against’ bureaucracies, any more than we are “for’ them. They are like

electric plugs. They will probably not go away, but they do need to be
controlled if the prerogatives of a democratic society are to remain visible
and usable. This is why we ask that the schools be ‘subversive’, that they
serve as a kind of anti-bureaucracy bureaucracy, providing the young with a
‘What is it good for?’ perspective on its own society. Certainly, it is
unrealistic to expect those who control the media to perform that function.
Nor the generals and the politicians. Nor is it reasonable to expect the
‘intellectuals’ to do it, for they do not have access to the majority of youth.
But schoolteachers do, and so the primary responsibility rests with them.

The trouble is that most teachers have the idea that they are in some other
sort of business. Some believe, for example, that they are in the ‘information
dissemination’ business This was a reasonable business up to about a minute
or two ego on our clock. (But then, so was the horseshoe business and the
candle-snuffer business.) The signs that their business is failing are
abundant, but they keep at it all the more diligently. Santayana told us that a
fanatic is someone who redoubles his efforts when be has forgotten his aim.
In this case, even if the aim has not been forgotten, it is simply irrelevant.
But the effort has been redoubled anyway.

There are some teachers who think they are in the ‘transmission of our
cultural heritage’ business, which is not an unreasonable business if you are
concerned with the whole clock and not just its first fifty-seven minutes. The
trouble is that most teachers find the lest three minute too distressing to deal
with, which is exactly why they are in the wrong business Their students
find the last three minutes distressing – and confusing – too, especially the
last thirty seconds, and they need help. While they have to live with TV,
film, the LP record, communication satellites and the laser beam, their
teachers are still talking as if the only medium on the scene is Gutenberg’s
printing press. While they have to understand psychology and psychedelics,
anthropology and anthropomorphism, birth control and biochemistry, their
teachers are teaching ‘subjects’ that mostly don’t exist any more. While they
need to find new role for themselves as social, political, and religious
organisms, their teachers (as Edger Friedenberg has documented so
painfully) are acting almost entirely as shills for corporate interests, shaping
them up to be functionaries in one bureaucracy or another.

Unless our schools can switch to the right business, their clientele will
either go elsewhere (as many are doing) or go into a severe case of ‘future
shock’, to use a relatively new phrase. Future shock occurs when you are

confronted by the fact that the world you were educated to believe in doesn’t
exist. Your images of reality are apparitions that disappear on contact. There
are several ways of responding to such a condition, one of which is to
withdraw and allow oneself to be overcome by a sense of impotence. More
commonly, one continues to act as if his apparitions were substantial,
relentlessly pursuing a course of action that he knows will fail him. You may
have noticed that there are scores of political, social and religious leaders
who are clearly suffering from advanced cases of future shock. They repeat
over and over again the words that are supposed to represent the world about
them But nothing seems to work out. And then they repeat the words again
and again. Alfred Korzybski used a somewhat different metaphor to describe
what we have been calling ‘future shock’. He likened one’s language to a
map. The map is intended to describe the territory that we call ‘reality’, i.e.
the world outside of our skins. When there is a close correspondence
between map and territory, there tends to be a high degree of effective
functioning, especially when it relates to survival. When then is little
correspondence between map and territory, then is a strong tendency for
entropy to make substantial gains. In this context, the terrifying question
‘What did you learn in school today?’ assumes immense importance for all of
us. We just may not survive another generation of inadvertent entropy
helpers.

What is the necessary business of the schools? To create eager consumers?
To transmit the dead ideas, values, metaphors, and information of three
minutes ago? To create smoothly functioning bureaucrats? These aims are
truly subversive since the undermine our chances of surviving as a viable,
democratic society. And they do their work in the name of convention and
standard practice. We would like to see the schools go into the anti-entropy
business. Now, that is subversive, too. But the purpose is to subvert attitude,
beliefs and assumptions that foster chaos and uselessness.

2. The Medium is the Message, Of Course

One of the most dangerous men around at the moment – dangerous because
he sums to be subverting traditional assumptions – is Marshall McLuhan.
Nonetheless, as of this writing he is capturing the attention of intellectuals
and the press as few educationalists have ever done. One of the reasons is
the seeming uniqueness of his remarks. Another is the unconventional
manner in which he conducts his reflections. And a third is that he is not

Luis Oliveira

10
Testimony and Epistemic Autonomy

Elizabeth Fricker

1 . D I V I S I O N O F E P I S T E M I C L A B O U R V E R S U S T H E
I D E A L O F I N D I V I D U A L E P I S T E M I C A U TO N O M Y

A reference point in philosophical investigation of knowledge from testimony
is the ideal of the ‘autonomous knower’. This ideal type relies on no one else
for any of her knowledge. Thus she takes no one else’s word for anything,
but accepts only what she has found out for herself, relying only on her own
cognitive faculties and investigative and inferential powers. Descartes explicitly
espoused this ideal, and method, in his Meditations (Descartes 1641). Locke
equally rejected ‘other men’s opinions floating in one’s brain’ as not constituting
knowledge (Locke 1690). The wholly autonomous knower will not accept any
proposition, unless she herself possesses the evidence establishing it. Thus she
will not accept anything on the basis of another’s word for it, even when she has
evidence of their trustworthiness on the topic in question.

Such extreme purism restricts how much one can come to know very severely.
We humans are essentially social creatures, and it is not clear that we do or
could possess any knowledge at all which is not in some way, perhaps obliquely,
dependent on testimony. How exactly does the system of empirical belief —
hopefully knowledge — of each of us depend on others’ testimony? There is cer-
tainly massive causal reliance on testimony in the process by which each of us
develops into a language-user and thinker, ‘grows into possession of a world’.!
The initial stages of language acquisition by a child inevitably occur through a

Earlier versions of this paper were given at a workshop on ‘Testimony, Trust and Action’
in King’s College Cambridge in September 2003, at a conference on ‘Moral Testimony’ in the
Philosophy Department at Birmingham University in March 2004, and at a conference at the
Inter-University Centre in Dbrovnik, Croatia, in May 2005. I received very useful comments from
audiences at these events, in light of which I corrected various errors. I am also very grateful to both
John Hawthorne and Stephen Schiffer for valuable comments and discussion on an earlier draft.
The research for this paper was done between January and June 2002, during a period of leave
funded by my employers, Magdalen College and Oxford University, and by a Fellowship from the
Mind Association. My thanks for their support.

226 Testimony and Epistemic Autonomy

process of simple trust” in its teachers — parents and other carers. In this cog-
nitive developmental process learning meanings is not separable from coming to
grasp and accept our shared basic world picture, the common-sense theory which
structures and frames our empirical thought. There is, for instance, no distinction
to be drawn between learning the meanings of ‘chair’, and ‘horse’, and ‘jump’,
and ‘cook’, and learning about chairs, and horses, and jumping, and cooking.#

The fact that each of us is causally reliant on others’ testimony in the historical
process by which she acquires her system of concepts and beliefs does not entail
that, once adult, each of us remains epistemically dependent on testimony for
her empirical knowledge. Perhaps each of us can afterwards push away the ladder
of trust in others, up which she has climbed into possession of a world. Beliefs
which were first acquired through a process involving simple trust in testimony,
and were initially epistemically based on testimony (as we may say once core
normative epistemic concepts become applicable to the developing child, viz.
when she becomes a thinker capable of epistemic self-criticism), may later acquire
an alternative basis. It may be that beliefs from the epistemic source of percep-
tion, linked by memory and extended by inference, can take over, together with
support from inference to the best explanation and broader coherence. Suppose
one could, once epistemically matured, thus push away the ladder of testimony,
retaining only the portion of one’s beliefs which remain epistemically supported
without reliance on it. In maintaining the ideal, one would then be restricted to
what one learns from one’s own senses and preserves in memory, plus whatever
one can get to by use of one’s own inferential powers from that base — with a ban
on even reasoned, empirically backed trust in the word of others!

There is reason to doubt that one can in that way eliminate all epistemic
dependence on testimony in one’s mature system of empirical belief, even if pre-
pared drastically to prune it. For one to do so, her original epistemic dependence
on testimony would have, everywhere, to be replaced by adequate support from
other epistemic sources, or the belief in question dropped. Now of course it often
happens in particular cases that one first learns of something through another’s
testimony, and then is later able to confirm it for oneself through perception,
perhaps combined with memory and inference. My daughter tells me her new
teacher wears glasses; later I see the teacher for myself. The weather forecaster on
Tuesday predicts that it will rain on Wednesday; Wednesday proves wet. Facts
about a foreign country known to one at first only through travel literature and
friends’ reports are confirmed by perception, when one travels there oneself. In
these and countless similar cases one later gets first-hand perceptual evidence of
what one first believed on testimony. In such cases contrary perceptual evidence
would decisively falsify the testimony.

There are other ways, less direct but no less powerful, in which alternative
grounds for belief can grow strong enough to take over the support of a
belief originally acquired from and based on testimony. Inference to the best
explanation and explanatory coherence more broadly can take over the support

Elizabeth Fricker 227

of many beliefs originally based solely on others’ testimony. It is plausible, for
instance, that one’s implicit beliefs about what the words of one’s language mean
no longer rest on the past trusted testimony through which they were learned.
One’s linguistic interactions with others would not run as smoothly as they do, if
one’s first teachers had deceived one! (See Adler 1994; Lyons 1997.)

Nonetheless the role of past trusted testimony in the system of empirical belief
of each of us is fundamental, because it has shaped the conceptual frame with-
in which current individual perceptions are made — how the sensory given is
conceptualized to yield perceptual experience and belief.$ Thus, in our three
examples above, while it is true that subsequent contrary perception would refute
the earlier testimony, these perceptions are themselves subtly dependent on a
framework of concepts shaped in part by earlier trust in testimony. I see the
teacher’s reading glasses, but that she is my daughter’s teacher I know only
through a set of background beliefs in which testimony is inextricably involved.
When it rains on Wednesday I see and hear the rain; but my knowledge that it
is Wednesday is testimony-infected, and that very concept and its application is
one constituted by human consensus involving testimony. Similarly, when I vis-
it Australia for the first time, in one way I gain personal confirmation of what I
had previously known of only through testimony; but my knowledge that I am
in Australia at all depends on testimony in multifarious and hard to pin down
ways: initially I knew where my flight landed only through trusting the testimony
of travel agent and airline personnel, and though the evidence of roadsigns and
so forth may take over, these are all put there by human agency, and constitute
a kind of testimony. Moreover, the controlling idea in terms of which I con-
ceptualize and slot in all my own personal experiences — of the spherical planet
earth with its land masses and seas, its countries, nations, and other geopolitical
institutions, its history and prehistory — was acquired from testimony.

This brief sketch has shown how the epistemic dependence on testimony in the
beliefs of each of us socially embedded twenty-first-century individuals is subtle
and widespread, if not all-pervading. A more sustained enquiry is needed to see
whether it could in principle be eliminated by such an individual while leaving
her any beliefs at all. Worse yet for the would-be epistemic autonome: it may
not be sharply determinable at all, whether and when freedom from oblique epi-
stemic dependence on testimony is achieved, since isolating the contribution of
testimony from that of other sources of support, in a system of belief with rich
explanatory coherence, is not a clear-cut matter. It is at any rate certain that, in
order to live up to the ideal of individual epistemic autonomy, a very great deal
of what is believed by a normal member of a modern society, with its exten-
ded division of epistemic labour, would have to be bracketed, given up — most
of geography, history, the natural and social sciences including medicine, and
so forth.

Giving all that up is no more a serious practical possibility than living out the
life of a more thoroughgoing sceptic — one who doubts even the evidence of the

228 Testimony and Epistemic Autonomy

senses as indicators of a perceptible external world. Who would really give up the
fruits of the sciences including all technology, medicine, dentistry, foreign travel,
as well as historical understanding and knowledge — and so on? The epistemic-
ally autonomous individual could not trust an electrician to wire her (self-built!)
house for her, since she would not accept his testimony about what he was going
to do, and that it would work safely; nor her doctor to prescribe medicines; nor
would she try ski-ing because her friends (she could not have many!) told her it
was fun.

We have found that testimony, for each of us in our modern social and epi-
stemic predicament in which division of epistemic labour along with other sorts
is the rule, is an essential source of empirical grounding for her beliefs about the
world she finds herself in, and her own place in it. This system of empirically
based belief is richly coherent, including its ability to explain its own sources.

Notice that the trust in testimony of which I am stressing the ubiquity need
not however be given uncritically, without empirical grounds. I have argued else-
where that a mature recipient of testimony need and should not trust another’s
word without adequate empirically based warrant to do so. We have seen that it
is impractical to live up to the supposed ideal of individual epistemic autonomy.
One cannot live in a modern scientifically and technologically sophisticated soci-
ety, nor have any social life at all, without trusting others in almost one’s every
action. But this is not to say that one’s trust in the vast heritage of knowledge and
know-how built up from others’ investigations, expertise, and experience must
be blind — uncritical and undiscriminating. Good empirical grounds for taking a
fresh instance of testimony to be sincere and reliable — or for being distrustful of
it — are often to be had; and inference to the best explanation and rich coherence
within one’s accumulated system of belief can support, ex post, one’s reliance on
some earlier pieces of testimony, while equally discrediting others. (I here barely
touch on issues which need much fuller discussion. See Adler 1994; Coady 1992;
Fricker 1994, 2002, 2005.)

Still, one who trusts testimony discriminatingly, only when she has an
adequate empirical basis to do so, and whose past trust is now vindicated through
support from explanatory coherence, is yet dependent on testimony in her beliefs,
and actions based on them. If I take others’ word for things, I extend my
knowledge far beyond the range I could achieve on my own, but by this very fact
I am not epistemically autonomous. I believe many things for which I personally
do not possess the evidence, and my believing is premised on the supposition that
some other person or set of persons jointly has, or had, access to that evidence,
and evaluated it correctly. (These points are expanded in Section 4, below.)

We have seen that even if one could, by a heroic effort of epistemic recon-
struction, push the ladder of past trusted testimony away, the project of attaining
and maintaining the ideal of complete individual epistemic autonomy is not
an attractive or feasible one — one would forgo too much! Is there reason to
regret this? In this paper I shall respond to this question by addressing a closely

Elizabeth Fricker 229

related one: In what way exactly is one’s epistemic self-governance necessarily
compromised, by one’s practically inevitable dependence on others’ testimony?
Putting the question the other way about: In what way, and to what extent, can
one maintain one’s epistemic self-governance despite one’s inevitable reliance on
others’ testimony, and the technological fruits of others’ knowledge and expert-
ise, in almost every area of one’s life?% I will first prepare the ground to address
this question by considering another: In what circumstances, and on what topics,
may one properly accept and learn from another’s testimony? In developing an
answer to this question we will find material relevant to answering our first one.

2 . T H E C I RC U M S TA N C E S A N D TO P I C S O F P RO P E R
A C C E P TA N C E O F T E S T I M O N Y

In what circumstances and on what topics may one person with epistemic pro-
priety accept the testimony of another and by so doing learn, acquire know-
ledge, from her? Conversely: What are the circumstances in which, and topics
on which, one person may tell something to an audience, thereby expressing her
knowledge, and reasonably intend and expect to be believed, trusted — to have
her word on the matter accepted? These are distinct questions, but the mutuality
of the illocutionary act of telling means that their answers will coincide, where the
expectation of being trusted is well founded.&

2.i A Precondition for Testimonial Spreading of Knowledge
As a preliminary I note a precondition for testimony to be given and received at
all. For an act of telling to succeed there must be mutual understanding. A mes-
sage must be got across and accepted. So there must be a proposition which the
teller intends by her action to present as true, and this must be identical with the
one grasped by her audience as so presented, and accepted by her.’ This does not,
in itself, entail a shared language. Nor does it entail that, when a shared language
is employed, the message conveyed is what the speech act literally means — a pro-
position which the sentence used is conventionally apt to convey, and is plausibly
interpreted as specifying on that occasion.( But communication of a message is
most commonly effected by use of sentences of a shared language in accord-
ance with the constraints of their literal meaning, to make explicit assertions.
The occasions on which other media are feasible vehicles are relatively few and
far between. This being so, the spreading of knowledge by means of testimony,
or something like it, is possible to any significant extent only when there is a
shared language, and mutual understanding of speech acts between speaker and
audience.

Our common-sense view — which I shall not question here — is that we do
indeed share a language, including its semantics, with our co-speakers to an extent
sufficient for mutual understanding and successful communication. But one can

230 Testimony and Epistemic Autonomy

learn from another’s testimony only when one does not already know what she
tells one. Hence, if difference of opinion regarding the truth value of some sen-
tence S entailed difference of meaning attached to S, there would be no learning
from others regarding the proposition expressed by S.) This observation is, I
think, enough to discredit extreme ‘holistic’ theories about the fixation of mean-
ing (already implausible). But there are certain areas of discourse where disagree-
ment might be thought to undermine the supposition that meaning is shared. If
this suspicion were confirmed, then learning from testimony in the strict sense
(as opposed to changing one’s language to conform more with others) would be
shown to be impossible in these areas.

Difference of opinion due to ignorance, where one party simply lacks firm
belief either way on the topic, is unproblematic. Equally, disagreement in the
strong sense of conflict of opinion is unproblematic, when its origin is traceable
to different access to evidence. (In such a case pooling of evidence will produce
convergence of opinions.) It is when disagreement in judgement persists despite
similar access to evidence that, in certain areas, the supposition of shared mean-
ing may be threatened. If there are certain subject matters where disagreement of
judgement in response to the same evidence entails difference of meaning, then
there can be no learning from testimony in the strong sense of deferring to others’
judgement, letting it override one’s own, on those topics.

It is a point familiar from a certain style of philosophical account of how
meanings and beliefs are simultaneously attributed to someone, that a tentat-
ive interpretation of an utterance which yields a difference of opinion between
interpretee and interpreter not explained by differential access to evidence, is
thereby thrown into doubt. Other aspects of the total interpretation being equal,
it is more ‘charitable’ hence a priori better warranted, to interpret the other as
meaning something else (see Davidson 1984). But other aspects may well not be
equal, and so the defeat of the assumption of shared meaning is generally not
instantaneous. We all have had futile arguments — ‘‘It’s green’’; ‘‘No it’s not, it’s
yellow’’ — where the suspicion lurks that there is not really a substantial matter at
issue, rather than a non-concordance of linguistic usage at its vague edges, com-
pounded perhaps by a pig-headed refusal of the out-of-line debater to adjust her
usage. Equally we all have had arguments where it seems certain that there is a
substantial, not merely a semantic matter at stake — ‘‘It’s unfair that you let Juli-
an go in the front of the car, but you never let me’’, although progress towards
agreement may seem no less hard to achieve.

Colour concepts, and other simple perceptually applied concepts; plus moral
and also aesthetic concepts, are ones where sorting out substantive from merely
linguistic disagreement on particular occasions is difficult; no less difficult than
giving an account of how the precise content of those concepts is fixed. In these
and some other cases, there really may be no way to distinguish between defer-
ring to others’ judgement about the application of an already shared concept, and
adjusting one’s concept. (We remarked earlier that, in one’s initial acquisition of

Elizabeth Fricker 231

one’s language, there is no sharp line between acquiring new information, beliefs,
about things one already has a concept of; and acquiring those concepts.)

These considerations will be relevant in a full investigation of the possibilit-
ies for learning from testimony about these topics. It will be important to bear
them in mind, when considering to what extent one can defer to others’ judge-
ment on moral and aesthetic matters. There may prove to be limitations on this
grounded in considerations about meaning, for aesthetic judgement in particular,
I suspect.!* Having noted this, I will not explore it more fully here.

2.ii A Principle Concerning Deferential Acceptance
With these points about the need for shared meaning made, we can proceed with
the main positive idea. We can formulate a general principle:

Testimony Deferential Acceptance Principle (TDAP 1): For one
properly to accept that P on the basis of trust in another’s testimony that
P — her word that P!! — requires that she be epistemically well enough
placed with respect to P so that were she to have, or make a judgement
to form a conscious belief regarding whether P, her belief would almost
certainly be knowledge;!” and that she be better epistemically placed with
respect to P than oneself; and that one recognize these things to be so.

TDAP1 specifies a condition necessary for epistemically proper trusting
acceptance of another’s testimony on some topic. It is not sufficient, because
while the hearer’s cognizance of the testifier’s strong epistemic position vis-à-
vis the topic makes it rational for her, other things being equal, confidently to
expect the testifier’s judgement about the matter in question to be correct — to
deem her competent about the matter in question — TDAP1 does not speak
to the question of the testifier’s sincerity. As I have argued elsewhere, the
overall trustworthiness of a speaker’s testimony breaks down into these two quite
separate components. In this investigation I concentrate on the circumstances in
which deferential acceptance of another’s judgement, as expressed in her sincere
testimony, is epistemically proper. Thus, having noted the need for adequate
warrant to believe the speaker sincere, I put further consideration of sincerity
aside, assuming in what follows that insincerity is not an issue in whether to trust
the other’s testimony.!#

The matter of sincerity is one reason why TDAP1 specifies only a necessary,
not a sufficient condition, for epistemically proper deference to another’s
testimony. The only other reason I can think of why other things would
not be equal, regarding the hearer’s expectation of correctness of the testifier’s
expressed judgement, is if she were also aware of significant contrary testimony.
Contrary testimony will be epistemically significant if it either comes from
another equally well-qualified expert; or, in some cases, if it is from many
mutually independent sources, albeit not especially expert ones.!$ A more refined

232 Testimony and Epistemic Autonomy

condition incorporating these two factors, which is normatively both necessary
and sufficient for deferential acceptance is:

TDAP 2: One properly accepts that P on the basis of trust in another’s
testimony that P — her word that P — just if she speaks sincerely, and she is
epistemically well enough placed with respect to P so that were she to have,
or make a judgement to form, a conscious belief regarding whether P, her
belief would almost certainly be knowledge; and she is better epistemically
placed with respect to P than oneself; and one recognizes all these things to
be so; and one is not aware of significant contrary testimony regarding P.

TDAP 2 specifies when it is proper to accept another’s testimony that P out-
right. There will also be situations where neither party is in a position to make a
knowledgeable judgement as to whether P, but one is better epistemically placed
than the other. In these cases it will be epistemically rational for the worse-placed
person to defer to the other’s opinion, while falling short of taking her utterance
as an expression of knowledge; hence forming only a tentative belief regarding
P. This is required when, for instance, an informed decision about how to act
is urgently needed. There may be some topics for which this situation is the
rule — that is, where knowledge as opposed to more or less well-grounded spec-
ulation is very hard to come by.!% It remains true that one should not accept
outright another’s testimony that P, unless one reasonably believes her to be so
placed as to (almost certainly) form knowledgeable belief regarding P. Hence
TDAP2 is the correct general principle governing the outright acceptance of
another’s testimony.

An explanatory comment is needed on the role of the complementary ‘intern-
al’ and ‘external’ components of epistemic propriety in TDAP1 and 2. I have
formulated TDAP1 and 2 incorporating both internal and external components,
because I am concerned to describe what happens when things go right, and thus
how knowledge is spread by means of testimony. Externally, things are going
right when the testifier speaks from her expertise-generated knowledge, and is
sincere. But epistemic rationality has a key internal component: it is not rational
to accept unquestioningly the testimony of an expert who, so far as one knows,
is no such thing. And, though not all-in epistemically proper, it is subjectively
rational and epistemically blame-free to accept another’s testimony, when one
falsely but justifiedly believes her to be an expert about the topic, being deceived
about this through no fault of one’s own. I am against purely exernalist accounts
of when acceptance of testimony is epistemically proper. These fail to incorporate
the requirement that the subject maintain epistemic responsibility for her own
beliefs. In Section 3 I spell out the implications, and means of satisfying, this
requirement.!&

We may distinguish between a weak and a strong form of deference to anoth-
er’s testimony:

Elizabeth Fricker 233

Weak Deferential Acceptance occurs when I form belief that P on the basis
of trust in another’s testimony that P, when I myself have no firm pre-
existing belief regarding P; nor would I form any firm belief regarding P,
were I to consider the question whether P using only my current epistemic
resources, apart from the current testimony to P.
Strong Deferential Acceptance occurs when I let another’s trusted testimony
regarding P override my own previous firm belief, or disposition to form a
firm belief, regarding P.

The distinction between strong and weak deferential acceptance may or may
not turn out to be important. First off, it seems that there could be subject
matters where strong deferential acceptance is never epistemically appropriate,
although weak deference can be. This fact may illuminate the nature of that sub-
ject matter.

Whether for weak or strong deferential acceptance, it seems that TDAP2 is the
correct normative principle: her sincerity not being in question, and my being
aware of no significant contrary testimony, it is epistemically proper that I defer
to another’s testimony in forming belief regarding P, or in overriding my own
previous belief regarding P, just if I recognize that she is better epistemically
placed than I am to determine whether P; and it is epistemically proper that I
accept her testimony outright just if I recognize this, and also that she is so placed
as to form (almost certainly) knowledgeable belief regarding P. We may intro-
duce a thin and inclusive sense of ‘expert’ capturing this core normative necessary
condition for deferential acceptance expressed in TDAP1 (which is also norm-
atively sufficient, apart from the matters of sincerity and absence of significant
contrary testimony):

S is an expert about P relative to H at t just if at t, S is epistemically well
enough placed with respect to P so that were she to have, or make a judge-
ment to form a conscious belief regarding whether P, her belief would
almost certainly be knowledge; and she is better epistemically placed than
H to determine whether P.

2.iii Bases of Expertise
We can now explore the different possible bases of such relative epistemic expert-
ness of S over H regarding some collection of propositions P comprising a subject
matter W. In so doing we will be developing a description of the various cir-
cumstances in which it is epistemically proper, when she knows them to obtain,
for one person deferentially to accept another’s testimony regarding some sub-
ject matter. The idea of someone’s being epistemically ‘well placed’ regarding P is
used so far in a broad catch-all sense. We will now see how a variety of specific cir-
cumstances may contribute to this. One is literally the spatio-temporal location
of the person; another is particular skills and perceptual and cognitive equipment
she possesses.

234 Testimony and Epistemic Autonomy

There are various kinds of situation in which it is obvious and unproblematic
that S will at that time be epistemically expert relative to H regarding some sub-
ject matter W.

Case One: W is an observable event or state of affairs, and S is or was at the
time of its occurrence so positioned as to be able to observe it, whereas H
was not.

Suppose, for instance, that Natalie went to the RadioHead concert in South
Park, while I did not. Then — assuming she has normal observational and
memory capacities — she knows quite a bit of what happened during it, and I
can learn from her telling me about it. Without access to some such eyewitness
account (written or spoken), I cannot know very much about what happened.
Of course Natalie is not my only possible informant. And there may be a limited
amount I can infer from other sources of evidence — walking there the next day
I observe huge numbers of empty drinks cans scattered around, and see the stage
being dismantled. But I cannot learn any detail except from testimony; and only
hers is conveniently available.!’

Natalie is an expert on what happened at the concert, relative to me.
Hence — if she is truthful — I can learn from her. But her expert status on the
topic relative to me is highly accidental. It is based in a mere happenstance
about our locations on one particular day, not on any more stable and intrinsic
epistemic talent, skill, or base of knowledge that she possesses whereas I lack.
Had I possessed a ticket and gone to the concert, while Natalie stayed at home,
I would instead have been the expert vis-à-vis her. Such merely accidental and
extrinsic expert status is often brief and transient. Emily is momentarily an expert
relative to me about what is in the fridge; but only until I take a look for myself.

Case Two: Superior perceptual skill of S over H.

Now suppose Natalie and I are both at the concert, and are trying to make out
what is happening on the stage from some distance. I am shortsighted, whereas
Natalie has excellent distance vision. She reports ‘the supporting band is coming
on’ and I accept her report, not being able to see anything specific for myself. Or I
may think I can see something different, but I allow my visually based judgement
to be overruled by hers, in the knowledge that she has better distance vision than
me.!( This case is more interesting. Natalie is an expert relative to me about what
is happening in the distance not because of an accidental difference in our loca-
tions, but due to a superior epistemic skill she has relative to me, which is (in a
relaxed sense) intrinsic, and fairly stable. She is not just accidentally better placed,
that is spatio-temporally located, than me, regarding the topic; she is better epi-
stemically equipped than me to make judgements of a certain kind — namely,
judgements about events occurring in the visual perceptual distance. Let us say
that she is not only currently an expert relative to me about the happenings on the
stage, in the thin sense defined above; but that this is due to an epistemic expertise

Elizabeth Fricker 235

she possesses relative to me, regarding a range of matters-in-circumstances. Spe-
cifically:

S has an expertise relative to H on some subject matter W at a time t just if
S has a superior ability at t to determine the truth of propositions in W
which is based in superior perceptual and/or cognitive skills and know-
ledge, and is hence (in a relaxed sense) intrinsic, or has a crucial intrinsic
component.

Exercise of an expertise will almost certainly require that the environment be
normal in various respects — as with perceptual skills — and so is intrinsic only in
a sense which is relaxed, though surely intuitive. Exercise of specialized cognitive
skills may require access to equipment, even laboratories; but has a crucial intrins-
ic component. An expertise is, in this lenient sense, a superior epistemic power
possessed by a person due to her specific differentiating characteristics, such as
superior perceptual skills, or specialized field of training and knowledge. Her
expertises are relatively stable properties of a person, since they are not owed to
mere accidents of spatio-temporal location, but are more deep-seated properties
of that person; some owed to genetic endowment, but many acquired through
special training or education.!)

S’s possessing a superior perceptual ability to H is one kind of expertise which
S may have relative to H. This may be due to native differences in perceptual
equipment, as with acute versus poor distance vision. But differential percep-
tual ability may also be due to training and background knowledge. An expert
at cricket can see and describe what is taking place during the game — ‘‘It was
a fast ball that moved in from outside the off stump, and the batsman caught
an edge on it, and was caught behind by the wicket-keeper’’ — when a novice
will have discerned almost nothing specific at all. The same goes for aural per-
ceptual abilities, for instance to discern and describe the harmonic progressions
in a complex piece of music; or to catch and understand the words of speech
in a particular language. Because background knowledge and skills inform and
shape perception in this way, there is no sharp distinction between perceptu-
al versus knowledge-based expertise. Many bases of expertise involve both in
inextricable combination. The complex perceptual-cum-knowledge-based skill
provides a superior ability to determine the truth of a range of propositions in
certain circumstances. Other bases of expertise are more heavily grounded in spe-
cialized knowledge and training, with a lesser role for associated perceptual skills.
This includes scientific knowledge and skills in experimental procedures and the
evaluation of data; and technological knowledge and know-how, such as that of
the garage mechanic, builder, or computer technician. Most purely cognitive is
superior ability at reasoning in a particular abstract domain such as mathematics.

When another has expertise relative to me in a certain, perhaps esoteric, field
of knowledge, it is clear that I can and should — assuming I trust in her sincer-
ity — defer to her in forming beliefs about the domain in question. Where the

236 Testimony and Epistemic Autonomy

field is sufficiently advanced and complex, I may not even be able to evaluate the
arguments, nor the significance of the evidence, myself; and I may lack the nat-
ive talents to acquire the skills to do so, even if I had both time and inclination
(see Hardwig 1991). We will draw out the significance of these facts in the next
section.

We can make some observations about the relations between weak and strong
deference, and expertise. Deference to another is appropriate (assuming that she
has, like me, a normal endowment of perceptual and cognitive skills) when she
but not I has had access to the relevant evidence — for instance, when she but
not I has had opportunity to exercise normal perceptual judgemental abilities,
as in Case One. Since I have no basis for firm belief in such cases, this will be
weak deference. I learn from the other about something of which I would oth-
erwise be ignorant. Her report informs me, rather than overriding my own prior
firm belief. Thus we can conclude that: Weak deference is often appropriate,
even when the other has no superior expertise to me regarding the topic, she is
merely contingently more expert than me, at this moment.

In contrast, when I and the other both have access to relevant evidence,”*
deference to her will be appropriate only if I accept that she has a relevant epi-
stemic power, an expertise, which is superior to mine. Since ex hypothesi we each
have access to relevant evidence, I also have a basis for firm belief myself; so
this will generally be strong deference. In this type of situation a stronger kind
of deferring to another’s epistemic power, her superior authority, is involved. I
accept the other’s judgement as overruling my own, in light of my acknowledge-
ment of her superior epistemic power regarding the matter in question. Our Case
Two above instances such strong deference. Natalie has an expertise relative to
me on events going on in the perceptible distance. Thus she is better epistem-
ically equipped than me to make judgements about what is taking place on the
stage in the park, even though we are standing next to each other, and each able
to look towards the stage. If my vision is as good as Natalie’s, then I will ration-
ally defer to her testimony regarding what went on at the concert only if I was
not there myself. But if I know her sight is better than mine, I may and should
rationally allow her reports of her perceptual judgements to overrule my own
perceptually based judgements, when we are similarly spatially located.

We may thus conjecture that: Strong Deference is appropriate only when
the other has a superior expertise — an intrinsic epistemic power — to me.”!
This is largely true, although there are two counter-cases. First, it can be that
I have a basis adequate for firm belief, but S, while having no relevant greater
epistemic powers than me, has a stronger one which trumps it. For instance, I
believe that Tom is away on holiday on the basis of my memory of his testi-
mony of three weeks ago; but Chloe testifies to having seen Tom in town today.
It is not determined whether I should accept Chloe’s testimony in these circum-
stance, without further details. But there surely will be some cases of this kind,
where it is right to accept another’s testimony overriding one’s own previous firm

Elizabeth Fricker 237

belief, because she has had access to fresh evidence, though her relevant epistem-
ic powers are no greater than mine. One factor which would do the trick is if
Chloe’s testimony was independently corroborated by many others. This is our
second type of counter-case: I should bow to others’ testimony about some mat-
ter, even if their skills and evidential position severally are not superior to mine,
if weight of numbers is massively on their side. Notwithstanding these counter-
cases, our conjecture captures a general tendency.

3 . D E F E R E N C E O N M O R A L A N D A E S T H E T I C M AT T E R S ?

We started with the idea that it is rational to defer to another’s apparently sincere
testimony on some topic P just if I recognise that she is better placed than me to
judge whether P (and I am aware of no significant contrary testimony regarding
P). This being so, learning from testimony is possible only in domains where it
makes sense to think that one person can be better placed than another to make
judgements. This in turn requires some notion of objective standards of evid-
ence and correct judgement for the domain in question. If any basis whatever
on which a judgement is made is as good as any other, then the idea of anoth-
er’s being better placed than me does not apply. In fact this restriction imposes
little more than the very idea of judgement imposes in the first place. There is a
determinate content to judge only if there are standards for correct judgement,
independent of what seems to any particular individual to be correct. However, it
could perhaps be that this minimal notion of objectivity applies in some domain,
but for some reason someone else can never be better placed than me to make
judgements about it, or at least it could never be rational for me to believe this.
Some accounts of self-ascriptions of certain conscious mental states would place
them in this category. Exploring the possibility or otherwise of rational deference
to testimony may give fresh insights onto this topic, as well as others, though I
cannot pursue this thought further here.””

We are investigating the circumstances in which, and topics on which, it can
be rationally permissible, indeed mandatory, deferentially to accept another’s
testimony. Whether and if so in what circumstances deference to others’
testimony on moral and aesthetic matters is ever rational — epistemically and
morally proper — is a large topic, an adequate discussion of which would require
a separate paper. But I shall make a key preliminary point. The kind of objectivity
in standards of judgement which we have just seen to be required — the idea that
there are better and worse ways of arriving at judgements in the domain — is
relatively unproblematic, and no more than common sense, for both moral and
aesthetic judgements. Thus it is only a very moderate thesis to hold that there is
such a thing as superior expertise on moral and aesthetic matters. This view can
be held without commitment to any metaphysically outlandish and epistemically
problematic form of moral or aesthetic realism. The notion of objectivity which

238 Testimony and Epistemic Autonomy

must be invoked need not be understood in terms of correspondence with
wholly mind-independent facts, and more or less accurate means of homing
in on those. (There may or may not be any domains in which we wish so
to understand it!) The required notion of objectivity of judgements in the
moral and aesthetic domains can be explained in terms of better and worse
ways of arriving at judgements of the class in question, with better and worse
defined otherwise than in terms of homing in on mind-independent truth.”#
This being so, there is nothing immediately incoherent, or metaphysically neck-
out-sticking, about the idea of moral and aesthetic experts. The idea accords
with common sense, and normal practices of deference. Aesthetic experts are
those who are specially trained, experienced, and knowledgeable in a certain
area — say Baroque music, or Renaissance painting. One would defer to them
about the qualities, including aesthetic ones, of items in their field of expertise.
The idea of moral experts is equally valid. Some people are especially trained,
experienced, and knowledgeable in the kinds of considerations involved in
making moral judgements. Such expertise may be primarily in a specific field,
involving a particular kind of empirical matter.”$ A quasi-realist about the moral,
or aesthetic, can make perfect sense of expertise in these domains. I may defer to
an expert in an aesthetic field because I know my own opinion-forming processes
are crude and uninformed, untrained, in the relevant aesthetic — which amongst
Caravaggio’s paintings are the greatest masterpieces; or what is a specially good
example of an early nineteenth-century English transfer-printed cup and saucer.
(Learning through deference, I may come in time to be a bit of an expert myself!)

I might defer for similar reasons in a moral matter. Or I might defer, or seek
advice here, not because of a general lack of expertise, but because my consultant
is better placed than me — a relative expert — regarding the current matter. She
may know more of the relevant background facts about a difficult case regarding
custody of children in divorce proceedings, or she may unlike me be impartial,
not being involved in the situation as I am. Or I may just want a second opinion,
or to talk the matter over with someone else, as part of the process of forming my
own judgement. Would it be just, or cruel, to carry out my threat and deprive
my son of his Beano,”% for getting into trouble at school for fooling about in class
again? This is the kind of situation where one may want to confer, and maybe
defer to another’s judgement.

A full investigation of the possibilities for, and constraints on, rational
deference on moral and aesthetic matters must canvas more considerations
than those raised here. I suggested earlier that there may be constraints deriv-
ing from the meaning of aesthetic predicates — their tie to a specific non-
judgemental cognitive-cum-affective response in the subject — on the extent to
which deference on aesthetic matters is possible. (One possibility is that only
weak, never strong deference, is rationally possible.) For deference on moral
judgements, there are important ties with the idea of individual autonomy and
responsibility which may place limits. In the present paper I merely wish to

Elizabeth Fricker 239

point out that the idea of expertise on these topics is an everyday and apparen-
tly sensible one, and thus that deferential acceptance of testimony on these
matters is prima facie rationally possible, as well as being a common occurrence
(see Jones 1999).
We have briefly reviewed the various bases on which another person may some-
times be far better placed than oneself to make judgements about a certain subject
matter. We saw that such superior epistemic status is sometimes based in acci-
dents of location, and may be short-lived; but is sometimes based in intrinsic and
relatively stable differences in epistemic powers between two individuals. When
I appreciate that another person is thus expert relative to me, it is not merely
rationally permissible, but rationally mandatory, to defer to her judgement over
my own conclusions, regarding the subject matter in question. This being so, one
may question whether the supposed ideal figure of the autonomous knower, who
refuses ever to trustingly accept another’s testimony, a fortiori will never allow
her own judgement to be corrected by another’s, is really such an ideal after all. I
will return to this question in my final section. First I address my earlier question:
To what extent can one maintain one’s epistemic self-governance despite one’s
inevitable reliance on others’ testimony, and the technological fruits of others’
knowledge and expertise, in almost every area of one’s life?

4 . R E L I A N C E O N O T H E R S ’ W O R D A N D E P I S T E M I C
S E L F – G O V E R N A N C E

We have seen, as encapsulated in TDAP2, how it is rational to accept another’s
word on a topic, and even to allow her expressed judgement to override one’s
own prior opinion, when one knows that she is strongly placed epistemically,
and better placed than oneself, regarding the matter in question. For each of us,
her appreciation of her own circumscribed and feeble epistemic powers and small
position in the larger scheme of things, together with her grasp of folk psycho-
logy, including where applicable appreciation of others’ superior expertise and
epistemically more advantageous position, entails that deference to others’ opin-
ions is rational, in these circumstances. Lack of such appreciation of one’s limited
powers and others’ superior ones, and an accompanying refusal to bow to others’
judgement or advice even when they are clearly relatively expert, is pig-headed
irrationality, not epistemic virtue or strength.

Does this mean, then, that there is after all no loss of epistemic autonomy
incurred by the way in which, in our modern condition, we rely on others’ know-
ledge and its technological fruits for whole swathes of our fabric of knowledge
and in our daily lives (as sketched in my introduction)? It does not. It is cru-
cial for the maintenance of epistemic self-governance that our trust in the word
of others is given not blindly and universally, but discriminatingly. By trust-
ing only cannily, and with good grounds, we can do much to retain epistemic

240 Testimony and Epistemic Autonomy

self-governance. I shall return to this theme shortly. But there is still an important
loss of autonomy, as I will now explain.

I mentioned our awareness of our own cognitive limitations, our feeble powers.
We can only see what is here and now, and that only to a limited extent. Our
memories even of this are less than total and often corrupt, and our inferential
powers are feeble. A superior being, one who lacked our cognitive limitations,
and could do all the work herself, in finding out about the universe, could be epi-
stemically autonomous in a way that no one of us, with our limited research time
and processing capacities, is able to be. She would not need to take anything on
trust from another’s word, because she would have the epistemic power to check
up, to find out for herself about everything she wanted to know, without reliance
on others. We are not such beings, and so we can extend our knowledge beyond
a small base only through rational trust in the spoken or written word of oth-
ers. My trust in another’s word is rational when I have good grounds to believe
her competent about her topic and sincere, and by this means I can know about
all kinds of matters which I lack the time or talents to find out for myself. But
this knowledge from trust in testimony is knowledge at second hand (or third, or
fourth . . .), and as such my epistemic position vis-à-vis what I know is in at least
one respect inferior to when I know at first hand.

When I form belief that P through my trust in a speaker’s word given to me
that P, her testimony that P, I take her to speak from knowledge. That is, this
is a normative commitment of my accepting her utterance at face value, as an
expression of knowledge. If I come to know she does not speak from know-
ledge, this is a normative defeater for my belief. Additionally, in my own view
of knowledge as requiring adequate grounds, I must be disposed upon reflec-
tion to form the belief that she speaks from knowledge. This belief is an essential
justifying ground for my belief in what I am told and trustingly accept, and so
must itself be knowledge. In short: my reason for believing P true is because
I believe, or am disposed to form belief upon reflection, that my informant is
telling me what she knows. This being so, I know only because someone else’s
knowledge has been passed on, spread to me by the mechanism of telling, of
testimony.”&

Knowledge can be passed on in this manner through many links in a chain of
trusted testimony. But the regress must stop eventually with someone who knows
that P not from trust in testimony. The following axiom holds:

T: If H knows that P through being told that P and trusting the teller,
there is or was someone who knows that P in some other way — not in
virtue of having been told that P and trusting the teller.

It is a consequence of T that if someone knows that P through trust in testi-
mony, there must be some other way in which P is or once was known. Hence T
has the corollary:

Elizabeth Fricker 241

T corollary: For any proposition P that can be known, there must be some
way other than trust in testimony through which P can or once could
be known.”‘

Why cannot a chain of trusted testimony go in a circle, falsifying T? The
regress must end with someone who knows that P in some other way, because
knowledge requires evidence or grounds. When I know that P from someone’s
testimony, my personal ground for my belief that P, the warrant in virtue of
which I am entitled to it, is my knowledge that my informant knows that P. But
in taking P to be known I am rationally committed to an existential supposition:
that there is, that it is to say that some individual or group of persons between
them possesses, evidence or warrant for P, which is not just that someone they
trust has told them that P. As T expresses, knowledgeable belief based on trusted
testimony implicitly refers back to the existence of a non-testimonial ground or
warrant for what is testified to: the ground or warrant in virtue of whose posses-
sion the original teller(s) spoke from knowledge.”( Hence there cannot be a state
of affairs that is known of only through trust in testimony. A chain of testimo-
nially spread belief which went in a circle would lack any empirical grounding,
and what is believed would not be true unless by luck.”) Consonant with this
fact, there is a sense of ‘the evidence for P’, used in scientific-style discourse, when
it is asked: ‘‘What is the evidence for P?’’, in which someone’s testimony that
P is not evidence for P at all. For instance the question: ‘‘What is the evidence
that smoking causes lung cancer?’’ is not answered by responding: a lot of distin-
guished scientists have asserted that it does. The question asks for an account
of the real evidence, the evidence on which the experts’ conclusion is based.
The well-groundedness of belief spread about through testimony depends on the
existence of such non-testimonial evidence for P — that is, on its possession, per-
haps distributedly, upstream in the chain of informants.

Now we see the respect in which knowledge from trust in testimony is in one
way inferior owing to its being at second hand. When I know that P solely from
trust in testimony, I do not possess the evidence for P. Instead, my knowledge
is premissed on the existential supposition that there is non-testimonial evidence
for P, although I myself do not possess it. I am rationally committed to the pro-
position that a person or persons upstream in the chain of informants between
them possess that evidence — the grounds for believing P true. Where the propos-
ition is an empirical one that is part of a theory, I am also rationally committed to
the proposition that these others have evaluated the evidence and drawn conclu-
sions from it correctly (often, this ability is a large part of a special expertise the
others possess vis-à-vis me).#* Is it a weakness in my epistemic position regarding
P that my ultimate ground for believing P is this derivative second-order one, the
proposition — which I must be disposed to form belief in — that there is empir-
ical warrant,#! though unknown to me, for believing P? Where my informant’s
expert status vis-à-vis me is accidental, it does not seem a worry. — My son tells

242 Testimony and Epistemic Autonomy

me there is still some milk left in the fridge, and I believe him. But if it mattered
a lot I could easily check up for myself, and if what he told me were false I would
quickly find out. I can get to the first-hand evidence, if need be, and I can eval-
uate it correctly. But where my reliance on others depends on an expertise they
possess relative to me which is more deep-seated, and I lack the ability to check
up for myself if it seems worth it, the existential supposition and dependence on
others’ epistemic skills and truthfulness is more troubling.#”

Epistemic dependence on others is troubling first because it is risky — there are
many motives for deceit, and causes of honest error, on the part of each of us;
and while each can try to trust only where there is ground to expect sincerity and
competence, as elaborated below, each link in a chain of testimonial transmission
incurs its own risk of error. It is troubling second, because along with the epi-
stemic dependence on others comes a no less risky practical dependence on them,
in many areas — for instance, for maintenance of all the technological devices on
which one depends every day, from electric lighting to computer to driving one’s
car, and so forth. Third, epistemic dependence on others, while it extends one’s
knowledge base so enormously, also lessens one’s ability rationally to police one’s
belief system for falsity. There are many things a layperson believes for which she
would not know how to assess the scientific evidence which supports them, even
if presented with it. This being so, these beliefs of one will lack the characteristic
sensitivity to defeating evidence, should it come along, which is usually taken to
be a hallmark of belief which amounts to knowledge.##

I have spelled out the bad news for epistemic self-governance entailed by our
dependence on the word of others. The good news is that — as I already emphas-
ized — our trust in others need and should not be given blindly, but cannily, only
where it is due. Although cognitively limited beings as we are, we must perforce
rely on others if we want to enjoy the epistemic and technological riches of mod-
ern society, we can take care only to trust those we have good reason to hold
worthy of our trust.#$ Fortunately we all have some basic cognitive equipment to
help us assess both the sincerity and competence of others in many, though by
no means all circumstances. This is because we are all experts (though of varying
degrees of skill) in one special topic, namely that of folk psychology. Thus, where
we do not have access to or cannot evaluate the evidence for propositions in some
domain ourselves, we move one level up, and instead evaluate the experts, our
human sources of knowledge about this domain.#% But assessing an informant’s
trustworthiness is not always easy, and sometimes there are not sufficient epi-
stemic resources available to the layperson to enable a firmly based evaluation to
be made at all. The risks involved in trusting others are considerable, especially
where there are motivations for deception at work. As I have been arguing, there
is often good empirical ground for trusting others, and where so it is consistent
with our maintenance of our epistemic self-governance, our responsibility for our
own beliefs, that we believe on trust in the word of others, relying on their report
for the truth of something where we do not possess for ourselves the evidence,

Elizabeth Fricker 243

and may not even be capable of appreciating its significance. Moreover, as we saw
in Section 2, where I know another to be epistemically expert relative to me on
a topic, it is not just rationally permissible, but rationally mandatory for me to
accept her judgement in preference to my own, just so long as I have good ground
to trust her sincerity. Where there is not good ground to believe an inform-
ant trustworthy, however, epistemic self-governance entails that we should not
accept the reports of others. Caution and canniness should govern our response
to others’ testimony. Unless we exercise it, we fail to maintain responsibility for
our own beliefs.

5 . T H E I D E A L R E V I S I T E D

I return now to the figure with which I began, the autonomous knower, who
trusts no one else’s word on any matter, hence believes only where she herself pos-
sesses sufficient evidence, non-testimonial grounds, for what is believed. In the
light of the material of the last section we can clarify the autonomous knower
in this way: she never believes on the basis of a second-order warrant for belief,
the belief that someone else knows, someone else possesses evidence showing the
truth of the proposition believed. Is this figure really an ideal? We observed that
a superior being, with all the epistemic powers to find out everything she wanted
to know for herself, could live up to this ideal of complete epistemic autonomy
without thereby circumscribing the extent of her knowledge. Given the risks
involved in epistemic dependence on others we saw in the last part of the previous
section, this superior being is, I suppose, epistemically better placed than humans
are. That is, if she knew at first hand just as much as I myself know in large
part through trust in others’ testimony, she would be epistemically more secure,
hence both practically more independent, and — in some abstract sense — more
autonomous than I am. In the same way that I might regret that I cannot fly, or
live to be 300 years old, I might regret that I am not such a being.#&

But what of a human, with no more than human perceptual, physical, and
cognitive powers, who attempted to maintain a regime of complete epistemic
autonomy — that is to say, who never took anyone’s word for anything, and nev-
er deferred to another’s judgement on any matter? We have seen that rational
prudence dictates that one should bestow trust only where it is due; where one
has good grounds to believe one’s informant competent and sincere. But equally,
as encapsulated in TDAP2, where there is good ground to believe another expert
relative to oneself, it is not just rationally permissible, but mandatory, deferen-
tially to accept the other’s judgement. So what would this individual’s beliefs
about others have to be like, for her refusal ever to believe on anyone else’s say-so
to accord with maintenance of a rationally coherent system of beliefs? If ration-
al at all, she would be not an ideal, but rather a paranoid sceptic about others’
intentions and capacities. Or perhaps she would be severely cognitively lacking,

244 Testimony and Epistemic Autonomy

simply lacking any adequate grasp of what other people are, their capacities and
positions in the world — not a master of folk psychology, but an individual sol-
ipsist. She cannot ever admit that anyone else knows anything which she does
not independently know herself since — as we saw — to admit this is to provide
oneself with a second-order warrant to believe that thing oneself (‘A knows that
P’ entails that P, and this entailment is a priori and obvious). One might won-
der also whether she trusts the recorded beliefs of her own past self, as written
down in her personal diaries and other records. The human would-be epistemic
autonome on closer investigation is not an ideal, but either paranoid or severely
cognitively lacking, or deeply rationally incoherent. We all can remember occa-
sions on which someone we know has irrationally refused to change her opinion
in response to testimony from someone evidently better placed to judge of the
matter than she is. The individual autonome carries this irrational tendency to its
irrational extreme.

For each one of us the extent and occasions on which she should accept and
rely on others’ testimony is a delicate matter, decisions about which require
careful assessment on particular occasions. But that there are some occasions on
which it is rational deferentially to accept another’s testimony, and irrational to
refuse to do so, is entailed by her background knowledge of her own cognitive
and physical nature and limitations, together with her appreciation of how other
people are both like and in other respects unlike herself, hence on some occasions
better epistemically placed regarding some matter than she is herself. I may
rationally regret that I cannot fly, or go for a week without sleep without any loss
of performance, or find out for myself everything which I would like to know.
But given my cognitive and physical limitations as parametric, there is no room
for rational regret about my extended but canny trust in the word of others, and
enormous epistemic and consequent other riches to be gained from it.

R E F E R E N C E S

Adler, Jonathan (1994), ‘Testimony, Trust and Knowing’, Journal of Philosophy, 91:
264 – 75.

Blackburn, Simon (1984), Spreading the Word (New York: Oxford University Press).
Burge, Tyler (1993), ‘Content Preservation’, Philosophical Review, 102: 457 – 88
Clement, Fabrice, Koenig, Melissa, and Harris, Paul (2004), ‘The Ontogenesis of Trust’,

Mind and Language, 19/4: 360.
Coady, C. A. J. (1992), Testimony: A Philosophical Study (Oxford: Clarendon Press).
Davidson, Donald (1984), Enquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford: Oxford Uni-

versity Press).
Descartes, René (1641), Meditations on First Philosophy, in The Philosophical Works of

Descartes, ed. Haldane and Ross vol. i. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967).
Fricker, Elizabeth (1994), ‘Against Gullibility’, in B. K. Matilal and A. Chakrabarti

(eds.), Knowing from Words, (Amsterdam: Kluwer Academic Publishers), 125 – 61.

Elizabeth Fricker 245

(1998) ‘Self Knowledge: Special Access versus Artefact of Grammar — A Dicho-
tomy Rejected’, in C. Wright, B. Smith, and C. MacDonald (eds.), Knowing Our Own
Minds (Oxford: Clarendon Press), 155 – 206.

(2002), ‘Trusting Others in the Sciences: A Priori or Empirical Warrant?’, Studies
in History and Philosophy of Science, 33: 373 – 83.

(2005), ‘Testimony: Knowing through being Told’, in I. Niiniluoto, M. Sintonen,
and J. Wolenski (eds.), The Handbook of Epistemology (Netherlands: Kluwer Academic
Publishers).

(forthcoming), ‘Second-Hand Knowledge’, Philosophy and Phenomenological
Research

Goldberg, Sanford (2001), ‘Testimonially Based Knowledge from False Testimony’,
Philosophical Quarterly, 51: 512 – 26.

Goldman, Alvin (2002), ‘Experts: Which Ones Should You Trust?’, Philosophy and Phe-
nomenological Research, 63/1: 85 – 110.

Grice, H. (1957), ‘Meaning’, Philosophical Review, 66: 377 – 88.
Hardwig, John (1985), ‘Epistemic Dependence’, Journal of Philosophy, 82: 335 – 49.

(1991), ‘The Role of Trust in Knowledge’, Journal of Philosophy, 88: 693 – 708.
Jones, Karen (1999), ‘Second-Hand Moral Knowledge’, Journal of Philosophy, 96: 55 – 78.
Locke, John (1690), An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, abridged and ed. John

(London: Everyman, 1993).
Lyons, Jack (1997), ‘Testimony, Induction and Folk Psychology’, Australasian Journal of

Philosophy, 75: 163 – 78.
McDowell, John (1994), Mind and World (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press).
Quine, W. V. O. (1953), ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’, in his From a Logical Point of

View (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press).
Schiffer, Stephen (1972), Meaning (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Welbourne, Michael (1994), ‘Testimony, Knowledge and Belief ’, in B. K. Matilal

and A. Chakrabarti (eds.) Knowing from Words (Amsterdam: Kluwer Academic
Publishers), 297 – 313.

N O T E S

1. See McDowell (1994). I am talking here about humans, and how they are psycho-
developmentally able to acquire language-and-thought; not about other logically
possible intelligences, nor the philosophical fiction who springs instantaneously into
existence, a functional replica of a human. ‘Testimony’ here is to be taken broadly,
to include verbal teaching and coaching by others. It would be a mistake to obscure
our dependence on trust in others’ sincerity and competence, in this developmental
process, through a definitional stop.

2. By ‘simple trust’ I mean: trusting response to what others tell or teach us, by one
who as yet lacks the conceptual resources to entertain doubts about the reliabil-
ity of others’ teaching. This is the inevitable initial condition of the infant learn-
ing its first words through interaction with its carers. (However many writers on
testimony exaggerate how long this initial condition persists — don’t underestimate
children — they get wise pretty soon! See Clement, Koenig, and Harris (2004).)

246 Testimony and Epistemic Autonomy

3. A distinction cannot be drawn between analytic versus synthetic, amongst the famil-
iar platitudes involving cluster concepts like these, and so many other of our con-
cepts. See Quine (1953).

4. Mature visual experience is basically the result of the visual system’s best guess as to
what is out there, given the proximal stimulus to the retina. Some of this is hard-
wired and hence culturally invariant, notably the perception of 3-D shaped solid
objects. But perception is also soaked by thicker, culture-specific concepts, so that
its perceptual deliverances to consciousness are much richer: it’s a mobile phone; a
tomato; my daughter — these and their like are typical parts of the content of percep-
tual experience, not inferences from it.

5. Complete epistemic autonomy, as described here, by definition requires not relying
on anyone else’s testimony for any of one’s knowledge. I shall explore whether a
weaker, but crucial, notion of epistemic self-governance — epistemic responsibility
for one’s own beliefs — is consistent with accepting things on other people’s word
for them.

6. That is to say, there is — as will be developed below — a set of conditions regarding
speaker’s and hearer’s circumstances such that both the offering, and the accept-
ance, of testimony on a topic is objectively epistemically appropriate just when
they obtain; so that a speaker gives testimony epistemically properly, and a hear-
er epistemically properly accepts it, when each knows these to obtain. (Where the
speaker or hearer believes justifiedly, but falsely, that they do so, her act or response
is subjectively but not all-in epistemically proper.) See Fricker (forthcoming) for a
supporting account of the speech act of telling. I there show how the nature of the
communicative speech act of telling is crucial to the question when, and on what
basis, the teller may properly be believed — to the epistemology of telling, and testi-
mony more broadly. The qualification ‘epistemic’ to the type of propriety here is not
idle — a telling could be epistemically appropriate, but grossly inappropriate in some
other dimension, e.g. irrelevance, or rudeness.

7. When going for detail some qualifications are needed here. First, for statements
made with sentences containing indexicals, understanding may require grasping an
appropriately related content or proposition, rather than the very same one — same
referent but different senses: ‘‘I’m hungry’’; ‘‘It’s hot here’’, uttered in a telephone
conversation. Second, there can be cases where something is correctly conveyed by
testimony, although the utterance is partly misunderstood; it may be that only the
correctly understood part is believed. See Goldberg (2001).

8. There clearly can be Gricean (Grice 1957; Schiffer 1972) acts of communication
which do not employ language as their medium. There are also non-literal message-
conveying linguistic utterances such as ironic or sarcastic ones. And a speaker may
succeed in getting her message across, be correctly interpreted and believed, despite
using words wrongly in some respect — not in accordance with the constraints and
permissions of the literal meaning of the sentence she mistakenly employs. Even
where communication of what is literally asserted in the speech act occurs, presup-
positions and conventional implicatures may be conveyed too. These acts all share
with paradigm tellings the successful getting across of a message. I shall not investig-
ate here the respects in which they differ; except to say that where what is conveyed

Elizabeth Fricker 247

is not explicitly asserted there is, I believe, a diminution in the responsibility for
the truth of what is got across incurred by the utterer. This is one reason to reserve
the term ‘telling’ for acts of communication via explicit assertion exploiting literal
meaning, as is done in ordinary parlance.

9. I am being careless here about distinguishing sentence types from particular utter-
ances of them effecting speech acts, and the role of context in fixing what precise pro-
position a particular utterance of a sentence expresses. This matter, though crucial
and pervasive in natural language, is tangential to the current point. The fastidious
reader may imagine the necessary complicating adjustments.

10. ‘‘There are very beautiful pictures in the Uffizi in Florence, though I have never seen
them.’’ — this sounds deviant to my ear. As opposed to ‘‘There are said to be very
beautiful pictures in the Uffizi, though I have never seen them’’. On the other hand
‘‘There are famous paintings by Botticelli in the Uffizi, though I have never seen
them’’ sounds fine.

11. I form belief that P on the basis of trust in another’s testimony that P, when I do so
because I take her utterance at face value, as an expression of her knowledge that P.
In so doing I take her word for it that P. There is a variety of other cases where a
hearer forms belief that P in response to observing testimony that P, which are not
cases of trust in that testimony. Fricker (forthcoming) contrasts these cases with the
case of trust in the testimony, and argues that the latter relatively narrow category
is the key epistemic kind to discern, in theorizing how knowledge can be spread by
means of testimony. The condition proposed in TDAP for forming belief in what is
stated would not be correct, for a broader category. Rather, it further characterizes
the narrow category.

12. There is scope for further refinement here: it could be that an informant is very
unlikely to form a belief that P which is not knowledge; but is more prone to error,
or careless judgement, than not-P. This kind of one-sided reliability is quite plausible
in some cases — e.g. someone who is slow to make a judgement of guilt of anoth-
er — and a hearer could be aware of this epistemic disposition of an informant. But
more usually, someone will be in this way reliable regarding P only if she is also
similarly reliable regarding not-P. TDAP as formulated specifies this stronger con-
dition. Perhaps someone could be self-deceived, so that she in some sense ‘really
knows’ that P, while kidding herself, and telling others, that not-P. TDAP concerns
knowledge expressed in conscious judgement, and so excludes repressed knowledge,
if such is possible.

13. In contrast with her competence, or expertness as I am here calling it, I think that
one is entitled to presume a speaker sincere, unless there are specific cues or other
evidence calling this into question. This fact is not an epistemic principle special to
testimony, but is fall-out from correct general principles governing the ascription of
mental states to other persons. See Fricker (1994).

14. The issues here are delicate. Mere weight of numbers of concurring testifiers does not
per se increase the probability of correctness; it depends on the details regarding the
likely explanation of how they have come to hold their expressed beliefs. See Gold-
man (2002) for an excellent discussion of what epistemic resources a layperson may
have, to decide which to trust out of two experts giving contrary testimony.

248 Testimony and Epistemic Autonomy

15. For instance regarding various future matters: the weather, currency and interest rate
movements, etc. Here one should defer to and act on the basis of the best advice;
while being aware that it is not knowledge — hence hedging one’s bets accordingly.

16. An account such as Wellbourne (1994), which holds it sufficient for the recipient
of testimony to come to know, that the hearer speaks from knowledge, is purely
external and as such violates my requirement. However accounts like Burge (1993)
or Coady (1992), which maintain an entitlement to trust testimony as such which is
however defeasible, can be seen instead as proposing a specific thesis regarding how
internal rationality is satisfied, in this case — albeit one with which I disagree. (In the
case of perception, it is plausible that epistemic responsibility permits one to take
one’s senses on trust, unless aware of defeaters.)

17. This is why one knows so little about what goes on during one’s children’s days
at school!

18. Can I know this, without begging the question — ungroundedly trusting her testi-
mony over mine? Certainly: I have found on many previous occasions that what she
has judged from a distance proves correct, as we get nearer. The fact that expert-
ise is time and circumstance relative, often transient, means that another’s epistemic
expertise relative to oneself can often be conclusively established by oneself, despite
one’s own inferior epistemic power.

19. Expertise of S has been defined as relative to another person, H. But we can easily
extract a more general concept of expertise, which is a superior epistemic power
regarding some topic relative to all those without the specialist training or skills in
question — the layperson or non-specialist.

20. The notion of ‘access to relevant evidence’, and certainly of two persons having equal
access to relevant evidence, is fraught with difficulty, given the theory-dependence of
one’s observational powers — as my cricketing example above illustrates. It does not
bear much theoretical weight in the present argument, and all I require is that there
be some cases where it clearly applies, and others where it clearly does not. I intend
that it holds of Case Two, and similar situations.

21. Is superior expertise also normatively sufficient for strong deference? No, since two
people both with superior expertise to me may supply contrary testimony. Apart
from this, I cannot think why else it should fail to be.

22. Fricker (1998) argues, on precisely this point, that accepting the possibility of cor-
rection of one’s self-ascriptions of mental states made through avowal, by other
evidence from one’s behaviour, which might be pointed out to one by others, is a
condition for one to be ascribing a genuine concept in these self-ascriptions.

23. I here make a large, but unoriginal claim, which requires at least a fat book for
adequate defence. I have in mind positions like the ‘quasi-realism’ of Blackburn
(1984).

24. The inextricable interweaving of fact and value in the considerations relevant to a
final conclusion on a complex matter reinforce this point. Consider, for instance, the
members of a panel appointed to draw up proposed legislation controlling research
using human embryos. Both scientific and moral expertise are required, and intel-
ligent conclusions rest on inextricable understanding of both. Another example of
a specific partly moral expertise is making decisions about when children should be
taken away from their parents and into care.

Elizabeth Fricker 249

25. The Beano is a popular comic-strip magazine for children, in the UK.
26. Knowledge requires grounds, and if I trust a speaker who tells me something true but

does not herself know it, my own belief will be based on a false premiss and so not
be knowledge. This is the general conception of knowledge I favour, and my account
of knowledge from testimony is shaped by it. Even if a different view of necessary
conditions for knowledge is taken, that the speaker knows what she tells is clearly a
rational commitment of a belief based on trust in testimony.

27. The ‘other ways’ may however include deduction, induction, or inference to the best
explanation from premisses some of which were supplied by diverse bits of testi-
mony. See Fricker (forthcoming). The tense qualification is important here — the
original informant may have since died, or simply forgotten what she once knew and
told to others.

28. T and its corollary do not imply the stronger claim: For any P which is known,
there is someone who knows it in a way which has no epistemic dependence on
testimony. This stronger claim is false, as is explored in Fricker (forthcoming). The
source of testimonially spread knowledge that P may have learned some of the
facts from which she inferred P from others’ testimony. Thus the ultimate, non-
testimonial evidence for any complex theoretical proposition may be possessed only
distributedly, by the members of a group. See Hardwig (1991).

29. This remark remains true, but needs careful explanation, when we are dealing with
facts constituted by human practices — the boundary between two countries, what
something’s name is, and so forth. The testimony itself would not make the belief
true, but enough people acting on belief in it would do so.

30. My belief is premissed on these suppositions not in the strong sense that I must
occurrently believe them; rather, they are normative commitments of my form-
ing belief on trust in testimony. As such, I must come to acknowledge them if
talked through it — and my trust is normatively defeated if I come to believe any
of them false.

31. I say ‘warrant’ here rather than ‘grounds’, since there are some types of belief — e.g
some beliefs regarding one’s own mental states, and perhaps basic perceptual
beliefs — which are empirically warranted, but not by grounds for belief.

32. Epistemic dependence of this sort is explored in a series of seminal articles by Hard-
wig (1985, 1991). Hardwig suggests the schema: ‘H has reason to believe that S has
reason to believe that P ! H has reason to believe that P.’ The schema only holds of
prima facie reason, however — I could know that S has reason to believe that P, while
myself being aware of defeaters for those reasons. Our present point is that the reasons
in question are different. As I have been emphasizing, the ground for belief supplied
by trust in testimony is a second-order one. My reason to believe is that I believe
that my informant knows that P, hence that she or someone upstream of her has a
non-testimonial warrant to believe that P. My original source’s reason to believe is
this non-testimonial warrant, the evidence for P.

33. A further point is that once the original source of a testimonially spread belief is no
longer available, the original warrant for the belief is no longer retrievable. However
this feature characterizes most of our beliefs. Cognitively limited beings that we are,
we generally form a belief from the evidence, then store the fact in memory and

250 Testimony and Epistemic Autonomy

jettison the evidence. The lack of sensitivity to potentially refuting new evidence is,
in contrast, a risk of testimonial belief only.

34. It should be abundantly clear by now that I am against all accounts of how know-
ledge may be gained through testimony which do not require that the recipient
trusts only where she has good grounds to do so. They are inconsistent with the
requirement of individual rationality, that epistemic self-governance in the sense of
responsibility for policing one’s beliefs for truth, is maintained by the individual,
the thinking, believing, and acting subject. A rational individual cannot delegate this
responsibility to others, although as I am elaborating here, the requirement can be
discharged by moving up a level: evaluating the reporters, when we are unable to test
their reports for truth directly.

35. In Fricker (1994, 2002) I discuss how non-question-begging evaluation of the dual
components of a speaker’s trustworthiness, her sincerity and competence, is often
possible. See also the excellent discussion in Goldman (2002).

36. No heavy commitment to the coherence of the conception of this superior being is
intended or incurred. I use her merely as a heuristic device in the development of my
argument.