Teaching and telling

Abstract

Recent work on testimony has raised questions about the extent to which testimony is a distinctively second-personal phenomenon and the possible epistemic significance of its second-personal aspects. However, testimony, in the sense primarily investigated in recent epistemology, is far from the only way in which we acquire knowledge from others. My goal is to distinguish knowledge acquired from testimony – learning from being told – from knowledge acquired from teaching – learning from being taught, and to investigate the similarities and differences between the two with respect to the interpersonal dimensions of their structures.

Keywords:

• second person
• testimony
• teaching
• learning

Acknowledgements

Thanks to audiences at the Universities of Leipzig and Warwick, and to Naomi Eilan, Paul Faulkner, Adrian Haddock, Ben McMyler, and Justin Shaddock for comments on a draft. This work was partly supported by the Research Council of Norway through its Centres of Excellence funding scheme, project number 179566/V20.

Notes on contributor

Will Small is a post-doctoral fellow at the Centre for the Study of Mind in Nature at the University of Oslo. He received his PhD from the University of Chicago in 2012. He works primarily in the philosophy of action, and on related topics in ethics, epistemology, and the philosophy of mind.

Notes

1. This is a crude summary. For a more nuanced discussion, see e.g. Fricker (1995) and Audi (2011, §3).

2. See McMyler (2011, Chap. 2) for discussion of a symptom: when, but only when, the audience believes the speaker, they acquire an entitlement to defer challenges and a distinctive right of complaint.

3. Of course, a speaker may, in telling someone something, have additional aims – aims that might be achieved regardless of whether she is believed.

4. If telling is an act for two, then a case in which I do my bit but you do not do your bit comes closer to success (is less defective) than a case in which I try but fail to do my bit and so you cannot do your bit.

5. The less demanding view might be cast as claiming that being believed is but a perlocutionary effect of telling (one characteristically aimed at, perhaps). But see Hornsby (1994) for an illuminating discussion of the idea that “performances of illocutionary acts in the absence of reciprocity are in some way defective” (198).

6. Cf. Kant's problem of the contract, on which see Korsgaard (2009, 189–191).

7. In focusing on this dimension, I am not claiming it can be completely disentangled from other dimensions. On the variety of aims of education, and questions of their compatibility and separability, see Peters (1973) and Robertson (2009).

8. A corresponding active responsiveness and engagement on the part of the learner is characteristically required for teaching and learning to be at its best; this goes beyond the relatively passive – though not mindless – comprehension of what is said that typically suffices, in propitious epistemic circumstances, for coming to know what one has been told.

9. It will be tempting to some, of course, to construe this active engagement as having merely causal but not epistemic significance. There is a danger here of restricting our conception of what forms epistemic dependence might bear to those exemplified by testimony. If knowledge can be transmitted through teaching, then we may well have to enrich our conception of epistemic dependence. (Cf. the discussion at the end of §3 above.)

10. On this conception of the role of the interpreter, see Anscombe (1979, 147); and for helpful discussion, see Wanderer (2013, §III). The much-discussed example of a creationist biology teacher who teaches her students evolutionary theory, something she herself believes to be false, is relevant here; but, as Wanderer (2013, 209) points out, even if the students acquire knowledge about evolution, this is obviously not an ordinary case of learning from teaching.

11. See e.g. Grimm (2010) and Roberts and Wood (2007, Chap. 2).

12. See e.g. Robertson (2009, 19).

13. Cf. Peters (1973).

14. As I have emphasized, this account of the nature of the teacher–learner relationship is not as such an account of what makes the learner's resultant state one of genuine knowledge or understanding. In particular, I am not making the anti-realist claim that being initiated into an epistemic community constitutes acquiring knowledge or understanding.

15. For further discussion, see Small (forthcoming).

16. Even those contemporary philosophers who think that understanding cannot be reduced to knowledge tend not to think that knowledge is itself to be understood by reference to understanding. In this they differ from a tradition that runs from the ancients to (at least) the early modern rationalists: see Burnyeat (2012) and Carriero (2013).

17. For instance, it might be held that “educators should be concerned not only to transmit expert knowledge with understanding but also to develop to some extent the cognitive skills required to produce and evaluate such knowledge” (Robertson 2009, 20). By contrast, it might be held that understanding is not as such merely contemplative (“seeing” connections) but is in some sense practical and thus as such involves the abilities and dispositions required to make new connections (see Elgin 1999, 123; Roberts and Wood 2007, 47).

18. Thus the abilities and dispositions that I have insisted belong to this wherewithal are in no sense opposed to, but rather may be said to partake in, the nature of judgment (perhaps better, the nature of the concept).

19. See Darwall (2006) and McMyler (2011, Chap. 5).

20. On the idea that a community's knowledge or understanding might outrun that of any of its members, see Polanyi (1962), Hardwig (1985) and Elgin (1999, 113ff). On the authority relations within an epistemic community, see Polanyi (1962) and Zagzebski (2012, Chap. 7).