El próximo miércoles, 18 de marzo, a las 11 h, en la Sala de Juntas de Filosofía, tendrá lugar otra sesión del seminario TeC-FiloLab. En esta ocasión nos acompañará Tim Kenyon, Vice-President Research en la Brock University (Canadá). Más abajo tenéis el título y el resumen de su charla, así como una breve nota sobre la trayectoria de Tim.
Title: Testimony for humans
Abstract: The content of testimony is naturally prone to change over retellings. This includes retellings over a series of different speakers, and retellings on different occasions by a single speaker. I summarize some empirical results in the social psychology of communication that isolate these phenomena, as well as aspects of language pragmatics that help predict it. Yet these observations are in some tension with an idea prevalent in social epistemology: that testimony is characterized instead by content preservation, as Tyler Burge put it, and that content preservation underwrites a general entitlement of audiences to accept testimony upon encountering it, other things being equal. Norms of testimony are often thought to play a key role in supporting this general rational entitlement to accept testimony, by securing content preservation against error and mutation due to factors like dishonesty, incompetence or carelessness. But that is not how testimony works. On the contrary, norm compliance is often the direct cause of content distortion or dissolution, even as it moderates distortions that could otherwise be worse. The upshot isn’t scepticism about testimony; it’s a realistic view of testimony as an epistemically valuable but fundamentally human practice. These observations motivate a non-ideal epistemic approach to testimony as an epistemic commodity with a natural tendency to decay and a limited lifespan.
Bio: Tim Kenyon is Vice-President, Research at Brock University (Canada) and Professor of Philosophy. Before joining Brock in 2018, he was a faculty member at the University of Waterloo, where he served as Chair of the Department of Philosophy and Associate Dean of Arts (Research). His research focuses on critical thinking, debiasing, and the epistemology of testimony, and he has been widely recognized for his teaching, receiving the University of Waterloo Distinguished Teacher Award. Kenyon has also held leadership roles in the discipline, including serving as President of the Canadian Philosophical Association (2015–16).