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Themes from Testimonial Injustice and Trust: Introduction to the Special Issue

Testimony has a specific epistemological vulnerability problem: What we come to know and understand is highly dependent on the cognitive labour and epistemic contributions of others. However, to form our beliefs merely on the grounds of a speaker’s words would be epistemically irresponsible, particularly since a speaker is capable of lying, deception, or error; hence, we require further justification for testimonial belief. Moreover, the capacity to make epistemic contributions, that is, to convey knowledge or other kinds of epistemic inputs (e.g. evidence, doubts, and critical ideas) conducive to knowledge (and one could add understanding) is often dependent on communicative reciprocation of or appropriate uptake by an audience. This raises questions about how we ought to assess testimony or testifiers or allow ourselves a critical stance, without violating the norm of due epistemic respect owed to speakers. An upshot of these considerations is that the moral attitudes that we bring to testimonial practices, e.g. trust and respect, can also be immediately relevant to our epistemic engagements. Specifically, we can wrong testifiers by unjustifiably discrediting their testimony or disbelieving them. The harm that we can inflict on others in their capacity as knowers, and as epistemic contributors in particular, has been a subject of philosophical inquiry in recent times and it is the entry point for some overlaps between the ethics and epistemology of testimony. Anscombe’s (1979, 150) phrase, ‘[i]t is an insult and it may be an injury not to be believed’ is often cited to motivate and underscore inquiries into what we epistemically may owe to testifiers and the concerns about speakers’ potential failure to successfully convey information the way they intended it. Let us call this ‘testimonial wronging’. As with other cases of wronging, testimonial wronging suggests that testifiers occupy a specific, simultaneously ethically and epistemically relevant status, the status of a knower. ‘Knower’ is therefore also an ethical concept that can be grasped only