Past Event

Please join us on Thursday, September 26th from 12:00 to 1:00, Dunton 2203, for the first talk in our 2013-2014 Cognitive Science Colloquium series. There will be light refreshments before the talk.

Speaker: Dr. Jim Davies

Title: The cognitive importance of testimony

Abstract:

As a belief source, testimony (believing things said or written by other people) has long been held by theorists of the mind to play a deeply important role in human cognition. It is unclear, however, just why testimony has been afforded such cognitive importance. I distinguish three suggestions on the matter: the number claim, which takes testimony’s cognitive importance to be a function of the number of beliefs it typically yields, relative to other belief sources; the reliability claim, which ties the importance of testimony to its relative truth-conduciveness; and the scope claim, according to which testimony’s importance is a function of its relative representational power, non-numerically conceived. After laying out these three suggestions, I go on to argue that there is little hope of grounding testimony’s cognitive importance in either the number claim or the reliability claim. I conclude with a tentative exploration of the basis and plausibility of the scope claim.

This is based on a paper written with David Matheson. You can read the paper here:
http://www.jimdavies.org/research/publications/principia/2012/DaviesMatheson2012.html