ABSTRACT

Having given an account of knowledge as the product of the exercise of intellectual virtue, we turn next to the question of the epistemic status of belief in testimony, which is the sort of belief that is involved in faith in a purported divine revelation. We believe on the basis of testimony when we believe a proposition p on the basis of someone’s asserting that p. Attributions of belief that take a person as their object, as e.g. ‘I believed Albert’, refer to beliefs formed in this way; they mean ‘I believed Albert when he said that p ’. Although we have an intuitive notion of what it is to offer testimony and what it is to believe someone’s assertion, these notions ought to be explicated and clarified for the purposes of our discussion. Testifying certainly involves making assertions about how things are, but it cannot simply be equated with the making of such assertions. A guess is an assertion, and so is an abusive remark like ‘You are a lying bastard’. A piece of testimony is an assertion that:

a) presents itself as intended to communicate information, and b) is vouched for by its speaker; that is, the speaker presents himself as knowing

what he asserts.