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.<\/p>\n
Speaker:<\/strong>\u00a0Dr. Jim Davies<\/p>\n Title:\u00a0<\/strong>The cognitive importance of testimony<\/p>\n Abstract:<\/strong><\/p>\n 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\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n