Introduction

This book presents an overall view of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book intended to have broader scope on the term testimony. A Philosophical Introduction provides an epistemology of testimony that surveys this rapidly growing research area while incorporating a discussion of relevant empirical work from social and developmental psychology, as well as from the interdisciplinary study of knowledge-creation in groups. The past decade has seen a number of scholarly monographs on the epistemology of testimony, but there is a dearth of books that survey the current field. This book fills that gap, assessing the strengths and weaknesses of all major competing theories. A final problem with the Broad View is that it fails to account for the fact that, as we saw in our discussion of testimonially based belief, the information conveyed by a speaker is not limited to the statement expressed by the speaker.