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ABSTRACT
There is good reason to regard John Locke’s treatment of testimony as perhaps the most important of the early modern period. It is sophisticated, well developed, pioneering, and seems to have given shape to the later debate that would occur between Hume and Reid. I attempt to do three things in this essay. First, I argue that Hume’s landmark treatment of testimony is an appropriation of that developed by Locke. Second, I suggest that understanding Locke’s view of testimony is of critical importance to Locke’s broader epistemology. Finally, I claim that Locke’s reflection on testimony is valuable in its own right in that it is not confined to isolating the conditions under which testimonial beliefs are warranted or justified. Locke’s interest is, rather, in a variety of doxastic states, or degrees of assent, that testimony may serve to ground.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Robert Pasnau for valuable comments on an earlier draft of this paper as well as two anonymous referees for their helpful comments. The paper was also benefitted by insightful discussions at a conference on Testimony and Authority in Early Modern Philosophy at St. Norbert College and the Mountain-Plains Philosophy Conference at Weber State University.
Notes
1 Lackey and Adler’s valuable work on testimony are cases in point. They, like many others, are keenly aware of how much contemporary thought regarding the epistemology of testimony has its roots in Hume and Reid (Adler, Belief’s Own Ethics, 136–7; Lackey, Learning from Words, 142, 155). Yet, they take essentially no notice of Locke who, as we’ll see, seems to have shaped much of the thought of Hume and, as a consequence, also Reid.
A cause of this may be that Locke’s dim view of opinion has been taken to constitute his view of testimony. (See, for example, Coady, Testimony, 13–4; Fricker ‘Testimony and Epistemic Authority’, 225; Moran, ‘Getting Told and Being Believed’, 272, n.1; Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief, 147.) On account of this, it seems to be supposed that, at least for the most part, Locke does not regard testimony as a source of belief that bears substantial epistemic weight. As will be seen, this is an important mistake.
2 While Shieber, ‘Locke on Testimony’, appears to be something of an exception, the work is largely dedicated to providing a suitable understanding of the historical context of Locke’s treatment of testimony, and correcting some misconceptions regarding it. As a consequence, the work deals little with Locke’s epistemology of testimony itself. LoLordo, ‘Locke on Knowledge and Belief’, approaches something much more like an account of Locke’s epistemology of testimony. However, given that her discussion of Locke on testimony constitutes only a brief segment of a broader chapter, quite a few important dimensions of Locke’s view are (perhaps unavoidably) left unaddressed. Wolterstorff, John Locke and the Ethics of Belief seems to have a sense of the importance of Locke’s discussion of testimony and dedicates some room to it. Yet, given that it is only tangentially related to his aims, his treatment of it amounts to little more than a summary.
3 See, for instance, Moran ‘Getting Told and Being Believed’: ‘Hume’s famous discussion of the believability of reports of miracles is the locus classicus for attempts to understand the epistemic status of testimony’ (273). See also Lackey (Learning from Words, 142).
4 Like Wolterstorff, I view bk. IV as the centre of gravity of the Essay (Wolterstorff, John Locke and the Ethics of Belief, xiv). I, moreover, view Locke’s notion of proportionate belief (see Wolterstorff, John Locke and the Ethics of Belief, 77) – the idea that the degree to which we assent to a given proposition ought to accord with the probability of that proposition on an adequate body of evidence (IV.xvi) – as, in many ways, the centrepiece of bk. IV. (For a similar view, see Ryle, ‘John Locke’, 160.) Locke’s treatment of testimony is interwoven with, and seemingly indispensible to, his expression of the principle (IV.xvi).
5 Later he reiterates this idea, referring to testimony as one of the ‘two foundations of Credibility’ (IV.xvi.9).
6 All in-text citations refer to the Essay Concerning Human Understanding (ed. Nidditch) (1979).
7 Though Ayers, for instance, gives some attention to Locke’s view of testimony, almost the whole of his discussion concerns Locke’s treatment of ‘divine’ testimony, or divine revelation, which Locke seems to regard as an exceptional case (Locke; Volume I, 118–24). For this reason it does little to illuminate his view of testimony simpliciter, which will be my focus.
8 Indeed, as will be apparent, I think it unhelpful to categorize Locke’s account in these contemporary terms.
9 In this matter, as in others in Locke’s epistemology, he appears to be a pragmatist insofar as the way he approaches epistemology is guided, in several senses, by what is at stake.
10 This, of course, is a rough characterization of the opposing views of Reid and Hume, at least as they’ve been contemporarily represented.
11 It is not only in the Essay that we find this emphasis in Locke. In The Conduct of the Understanding, he claims, ‘In the whole conduct of the understanding, there is nothing of more moment than to know when and where, and how far to give assent’ (33.241).
12 Gilbert Ryle, for instance, describes Locke’s remarks regarding how degrees of assent ought to be proportioned to probabilities as ‘the central moral of [Locke’s] Essay’ (‘John Locke’, 160).
13 As mentioned above, Fricker (‘Testimony and Epistemic Authority’, 225), Moran (‘Getting Told and Being Believed’, 272, n.1), Coady (Testimony, 13–4) and Plantinga (Warranted Christian Belief, 147) appear to take Locke’s dim view of opinion to be constitutive of his view of testimony. On account of this, they seem to suppose that he, at least for the most part, does not regard testimony as an important source of belief. McNulty, ‘Lockean Social Epistemology’, offers a helpful and detailed discussion of the difference between the two doxastic states, for Locke.
14 Notice that Locke does not seem to include what we merely believe as able to ground probability. Hence, if we think of coherence (as I put it below) in terms of fit with our total evidence, this would only be suitable for Locke if what is considered evidence are items of knowledge.
15 It is worth mentioning the relevance of this point to an extant debate in Locke scholarship – namely, whether sensitive knowledge is, for Locke, genuine knowledge. Though the idea has received much resistance, (e.g. Allen, ‘Locke and Sensitive Knowledge’; Nagel, ‘Sensitive Knowledge’) it has been argued that ‘sensitive knowledge’, for Locke, doesn’t actually amount to bona fide knowledge, but rather, mere assurance – the highest degree of assent (Rickless, ‘Locke’s “Sensitive Knowledge”’). If this is correct, however, one would expect to find perception listed among the grounds of probability, given that assurance is a mere degree of assent, and, as such, must be sustained by a mere probability. On account of its not being so listed, it seems there is yet more evidence for regarding sensitive knowledge to be genuine knowledge.
16 Audi calls testimony an ‘essential source’ of belief or knowledge (‘Sources of Knowledge’, 81). Lackey claims that, ‘Our dependence on testimony is as deep as it is ubiquitous’ (Learning from Words, 1). Something like this idea, however, has been expressed as early as Augustine: ‘Unless we believed what we were told, we would do nothing at all in this life’ (Confessions, vi.5). (See also, On the Trinity, xv.12.)
17 One may think here of the six forms of background evidence Adler discusses as potentially underwriting testimony (‘The Epistemological Problems of Testimony’; see also Adler, Belief's Own Ethics, 148–53). Though there are some similarities between the two sets, they are importantly different in that Locke’s criteria regard specific reports, while Adler’s criteria regard testimony generally.
18 It is worth noting, however, that there is reason to question whether this last criterion – namely, ‘the manner of their delivering their testimony’ – does, in fact, correspond to Locke’s ‘design of the author’. For Hume goes on to mention two specific ‘manners of delivering testimony’, namely, ‘with hesitation, or … [with] too violent asserverations’. This seems to suggest that the ‘manner’ Hume may have in mind pertains to how the speaker carries herself, rather than to the motivation behind a written work, for example.
19 Fogelin notes the similarity between Locke and Hume on this issue (A Defense of Hume on Miracles, 7–9).
20 I, however, acknowledge that non-reductionists may regard substantial lack of coherence between one’s experience and a given report to constitute a defeater for that report. There seems to be substantial resemblance, here, between Locke’s regard for the bearing coherence has on testimony, and Adler’s suggestion that testimony will be weighed on the basis of (among other things) prior plausibility (Adler, Belief's Own Ethics, 151–3).
21 It is worth noting, additionally, that the notion of belief properly proportioned to evidence is among the most prominent hallmarks of Locke’s thought (see Ryle, ‘John Locke’; Wolterstorff, John Locke and the Ethics of Belief; Boespflug, ‘Locke's Principle of Proportionality’) (see pp. 14–5 below). It may be telling, then, that Hume waits till §10 – his essay on miracles – to give his famous expression of it: ‘A wise man … proportions his belief to the evidence’ (An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, x.170). Invoking Locke’s norm for believing only to use it against him would be a natural dialectical tactic that would fit well with the reading I am proposing.
22 A very similar point is found also in Shieber, ‘Locke on Testimony’.
23 Shieber, for instance, suggests that Locke should be considered a hybrid theorist, ‘Locke on Testimony’.
24 The label is Wolterstorff’s (John Locke and the Ethics of Belief, 77).
25 Locke, interestingly, regards the ‘concernment’ (or pragmatic consequences) of particular beliefs to influence the obligations we have with respect to those beliefs (e.g. to acquire grounds, or gather evidence).