Epistemology of Testimony

Keynote delivered for "Holocaust Remembrance and Representation," a conference to aid planning for the first Holocaust museum in Sweden.  This is a concise and, I think, quite accessible summary of a way of engaging Holocaust survivors and their accounts that differs from the conventional "testimony" model.  Based on nearly fifty years of work with survivors, the approach described here is grounded in multiple interviews (sometimes over years), deepening conversation, sustained exploration rather than simply declaration ("this I witnessed"), and collaborative intepretation and reflection.  Real relationships matter in what, how, and whether survivors retell ("learning together" as one survivor put it).  That approach also impacts whether survivors and their recounting live on in _other_ conversations which, the talk argues, is the only earthly way any of us live on.

I argue that a counterexample to testimonial reductionism proposed by Jennifer Lackey in Learning from Words (2008) fails to challenge a genuine reductionist view. Lackey purports to identify a case in which a hearer has a positive reason to accept a speaker's testimony, but in which the hearer nonetheless lacks justification for believing it. I argue that the reductionist should not count the case Lackey describes as one in which the hearer has a positive reason. Because it is a case of nested testimony, the claim involved is qualified according to a nested probability claim, which cancels its status as being based on a positive reason.

An epistemologist tells you that knowledge is more than justified true belief. You trust them and thus come to believe this on the basis of their testimony. Did you thereby come to know that this view is correct? Intuitively, there is something intellectually wrong with forming philosophical beliefs on the basis of testimony, and yet it's hard to see why philosophy should be significantly epistemically different from other areas of inquiry in a way that would fully prohibit belief by testimony. This, I argue, is the puzzle of philosophical testimony. In this paper, I explore the puzzle of philosophical testimony and its ramifications. In particular , I examine the case for pessimism about philosophical testimony-the thesis that philosophical belief on the basis of testimony is impossible or is in some way illegitimate-and I argue that it lacks adequate support. I then consider whether the source of the apparent intellectual wrongness of testimonial-based philosophical belief is grounded in non-epistemic norms and goals of philosophical practice itself and argue that such norms are implausible, don't conflict with testimonial-based philosophical belief, or else are mere disciplinary norms, lacking substantial normative force that would make it wrong to form testimonial-based philosophical belief.

We are becoming increasingly dependent on robots and other forms of artificial intelligence for our beliefs. But how should the knowledge gained from the "say-so" of a robot be classified? Should it be understood as testimonial knowledge, similar to knowledge gained in conversation with another person? Or should it be understood as a form of instrument-based knowledge, such as that gained from a calculator or a sundial? There is more at stake here than terminology, for how we treat objects as sources of knowledge often has important social and legal consequences. In this paper, I argue that at least some robots are capable of testimony. I make my argument by exploring the differences between instruments and testifiers on a well-known account of knowledge: reliabilism. On this approach, I claim that the difference between instruments and testifiers as sources of knowledge is that only the latter are capable of deception. As some robots can be designed to deceive, so they too should be recognized as testimonial sources of knowledge.

THIS PAPER RECEIVED THE 2020 ARTICLE AWARD FROM THE ORAL HISTORY ASSOCIATION. Engaging Holocaust survivors primarily as "witnesses" who provide "testimony"--which has long been the prevailing paradigm of practice with survivors--radically oversimplifies both survivors' lives and their accounts of their lives. Similarly, the conventional "testimony" model limits the extent to which we are likely to become engaged in, and implicated by, survivors' retelling. I have been making those arguments for over forty years. Here, the focus is primarily on teaching "beyond testimony": especially through immersion in survivors' recounting as a deliberate, situated, multiply contingent process in which students themselves become, in a survivor's phrase, "participants in a conversation ." In my classroom, collaborative exploration-that is, participation in conversation-replaces "receiving a testimony" as the guiding paradigm. Students' responses to such conversations are featured. One student wrote about a survivor who visited the class: "She was not 'just' a survivor, if I can say it that way. And that made her being a survivor much more significant. The 'not-survivor' part of her-the experiences and traits that are just like us or people we know-is what made the 'survivor part' real. Not a symbol of the Holocaust. But one of us." Engaging individual survivors as "one of us" rather than "symbols of the Holocaust" can transform how we teach about genocide, and the few who live after, even when only memoirs, recordings, and transcripts remain.

If we comb through the texts that Kepler produced in response to Galileo's discoveries we find an original perspective on the role of witnessing in astronomy -- one that is elaborated through references to procedures and standards of evidence of Roman canon and inquisitorial law

چالش های معرفت شناسانه بسیاری حول توجیه باور به خداوند در سه قرن گذشته وجود داشته است بگونه ای که برخی همچون پلنتینجا صرف تضمین را بجای توجیهِ استدلالی در این زمینه مطرح کردند و باور به وجود خداوند را باوری پایه نشان دادند. اما میلیون ها انسان بدون توجه به این چالش ها، باور به وجود خداوند را بدون آن که ایمان گرا باشند برای خودشان موجه می دانند. این توجیه از کجا ناشی می شود؟ آیا توجیه آنها از لحاظ معرفت شناسی قابل تبیین است؟
در این مقاله در نظر است ضمن تبیین جریانهای جدید معرفت شناسی اجتماعی و «گواهی»، اهمیت معرفت شناسیِ مبتنی بر شنیده های اطمینان یافته نشان داده شود سپس استدلال گردد که شنیده های اطمینان یافتة ما درباره وجود خداوند و صفات او که به پیامبران منتهی می شود و آن نیز به اقرار خداوند و تبیین او از خودش مبتنی است می تواند بهترین توجیه برای باورهای ما باشد. و در نهایت به این سوال پاسخ داده شود که چگونه گواهی خداوند بر وجود و صفاتش که ازطریق پیامبران به ما رسیده است می تواند یکی از بهترین توجیه های معرفتی برای باور به وجود و صفات خداوند باشد؟ و این نوع معرفت شناسی دینی چه مزایایی نسبت به قرینه گرایی و یا صورتهای گوناگون برهان آوری بر وجود خداوند و صفات او می تواند داشته باشد؟

Discussion of the phenomena of post-truth and fake news often implicates the closed epistemic networks of social media. The recent conversation has, however, blurred two distinct social epistemic phenomena. An epistemic bubble is a social epistemic structure in which other relevant voices have been left out, perhaps accidentally. An echo chamber is a social epistemic structure from which other relevant voices have been actively excluded and discredited. Members of epistemic bubbles lack exposure to relevant information and arguments. Members of echo chambers, on the other hand, have been brought to systematically distrust all outside sources. In epistemic bubbles, other voices are not heard; in echo chambers, other voices are actively undermined. It is crucial to keep these phenomena distinct. First, echo chambers can explain the post-truth phenomena in a way that epistemic bubbles cannot. Second, each type of structures requires a distinct intervention. Mere exposure to evidence can shatter an epistemic bubble, but may actually reinforce an echo chamber. Finally, echo chambers are much harder to escape. Once in their grip, an agent may act with epistemic virtue, but social context will pervert those actions. Escape from an echo chamber may require a radical rebooting of one’s belief system.

Excerpt of the published version (with permission by the publisher), including Table of Contents, Introduction, and Index.

The first comprehensive survey of the epistemology of testimony since Coady's 1992 'Testimony: A Philosophical Study' (OUP 1992).

From the reviews:

"A lucid, comprehensive, fair and balanced introduction to the epistemology of testimony, clearly useful for students and scholars alike." - Peter Graham (UC Riverside)

"A must-read for anyone interested in social epistemology." - Jennier Lackey (Northwestern)

In his work on the epistemology of testimony, Peter Lipton developed an account of testimonial inference that aimed at descriptive adequacy as well as justificatory sophistication. According to ‘testimonial inference to the best explanation’ (TIBE), we accept what a speaker tells us because the truth of her claim figures in the best explanation of the fact that she made it. In the present paper, I argue for a modification of this picture. In particular, I argue that IBE plays a dual role in the management and justification of testimony. On the one hand, the coherence and success of our testimony-based projects provides general abductive support for a default stance of testimonial acceptance; on the other hand, we are justified in rejecting specific testimonial claims whenever the best explanation of the instances of testimony we encounter entails, or makes probable, the falsity or unreliability of the testimony in question.

Kapitel aus dem Lehrbuch "Grundkurs Erkenntnistheorie"; Abschnitte: 1. Das Wort anderer als Wissensquelle; 2. Zeugnis und Sinneswahrnehmung im Vergleich; 3. Reduktionismus und Antireduktionismus; 4. Kann Zeugnis neues Wissen generieren?; Kommentierte Bibliographie; Fragen zum Selbststudium

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En este trabajo pretendo señalar en qué consiste el debate entre reduccionismo y antireduccionismo respecto de la justificación testimonial en la epistemología del testimonio. Para esto, se procederá de la siguiente manera: se expondrá las consideraciones epistemológicas de Hume y Reid sobre el testimonio para dar cuenta del reduccionismo y el antireducionismo en filosofía de la modernidad-temprana; por otra parte, se expondrá cómo se ha desarrollado dicho debate en la epistemología contemporánea. De esta manera, se pretende presentar una visión sistemática de las posturas involucradas en el debate entre reduccionismo y antireduccionismo en a la epistemología social.

Palabras clave: testimonio; reduccionismo; antireduccionismo; epistemología social

There seems to be a deep tension between two aspects of aesthetic appreciation. On the one hand, we care about getting things right. Our attempts at aesthetic judgments aim at correctness. On the other hand, we demand autonomy in aesthetic appreciation. We want appreciators to arrive at their aesthetic judgments through their own cognitive efforts, rather than deferring to experts. These two demands seem to be in tension; after all, if we want to get the right judgments, we should defer to the judgments of experts. How can we resolve this tension? The best explanation, I suggest, is that aesthetic appreciation is something like a game. When we play a game, we try to win. But often, winning isn't the point; playing is. Aesthetic appreciation involves the same flipped motivational structure: we aim at the goal of correctness, but having correct judgments isn't the point. The point is the engaged process of interpreting, investigating, and exploring the aesthetic object. Deferring to aesthetic testimony, then, makes the same mistake as looking up the answer to a puzzle, rather than solving it for oneself. The shortcut defeats the whole point. This suggests a new account of aesthetic value: the engagement account. The primary value of the activity of aesthetic appreciation lies in the process of trying to generate correct judgments, and not in having correct judgments. There seems to be a deep tension between two aspects of our practice of aesthetic appreciation. First, the practice of aesthetic appreciation seems deeply cognitive. We seem guided by an interest in getting things right. We not only look at art; we investigate it. We form trial judgments and then go back for more, re-watching and re-reading to make sure we've caught all the details. We talk about the reasons for our judgments, point out details to one another, and argue about what's truly great. The way we go about aesthetic conversation and aesthetic investigation seems to indicate that our aesthetic judgments are aimed at the truth. At the same time, we seem committed to principles of individuality and autonomy in aesthetic appreciation. For one, we seem to think that, in aesthetic appreciation, we must

Much of what we regard ourselves as knowing came to us from the testimony of others. But recently epistemologists have debated just how testimony can be a source of knowledge at all. Must we have some independent way to confirm what we receive through testimony, or is there perhaps some reason why we should suppose that testimony is all by itself an adequate source of knowledge? This problem, I claim, is actually a version of a much older and better known problem: the so-called problem of the criterion. I will first explain this other, older, problem, and lay out the available options for solving it. I will then show why I think the problem of testimony is simply a version of the problem of the criterion. I will conclude by arguing that the best way to solve these problems comes from a theory of justification that few epistemologists seem to support these days: holistic coherence theory. In doing so, I hope I will provide some powerful new reasons for reconsidering this theory of justification. 1

THE GUARDIANS OF MEMORY
AND THE RETURN OF THE XENOPHOBIC RIGHT

Translated by Alastair McEwen

Copyright © Bompiani, 2019
USA Edition copyright ©
2020 CPL EDITIONS
All rights reserved
ISBN 978-1-941046-32-6

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface
For a Memory Culture Beyond Victims and Perpetrators.
By Michael Rothberg. 9

Introduction
What Went Wrong? 19
By Valentina Pisanty

Chapter I, The Duty of Memory. 31
Chapter II, The Discourse of History 75
Chapter III, Collective Memories 109
Chapter IV, New Cinema of the Shoah 153
Chapter V, The Spectacle of Evil 201
Chapter VI, Denial and Punishment 229

Appendix 263
End notes 285
Bibliography 307
Filmography 329
Index 335

This article examines historicism as the expansion of historiography beyond its bounds, analogous to Physicalism, Naturalism, Psychologism, and Scientism. Five senses of historicism are distinguished: Ontological Historicism claims ultimate reality is, and only is, historical. Idiographic historicism considers historiography an empirical science that results in observational descriptions of unique singular events. Introspective historicism considers the epistemology of historiography to be founded on self-knowledge.  Scientistic historicism considers historiography an applied psychology or social science that can expand to overtake the social sciences. Methodological historicism extends the use of historiographic methodologies to unreliable or dependent evidence. The first four historicisms are inconsistent with historiography within bounds and implode. Methodological historicism describes proper historiographic methodologies that are applied out of their proper bounds, but are used in historiography based on the epistemology of testimony and the tracing of the transmission of information from historical event to historiographic evidence.

Key terms: Historicism, philosophy of historiography, Physicalism, Scientism, Epistemology of Testimony, Idiographic science, Introspection, self-knowledge, Neo-Kantian philosophy.

Welcome! Social epistemology investigates the social dimensions of knowledge. The goal of this course is to gain awareness, through philosophical reflection, of how background assumptions and implicit biases shape world-views and everyday epistemic activities. You will learn about how differences in cultural and social context impact on the way one perceives the world and others. Topics of the course include testimony, prejudice, epistemic injustice, feminist epistemology, and hinge epistemology. You will employ Ludwig Wittgenstein's metaphor of "hinges" as a theoretical tool to explore the blurred boundaries between common sense certainties and deeply entrenched prejudices. During the class, we'll be engaged in building an environment of inclusiveness and nondiscrimination from the point of view of race, gender, sexual orientation, origins, disability, etc. Please be respectful of differences and encourage your peers' participation.

Susan Haack, “Legal Probabilism: An Epistemological Dissent,” in Haack, Evidence Matters: Science, Proof, and Truth in the Law (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 47-77. (First published in Spanish in 2013.)

Abstract: In §1, I argue in some detail why legal standards of proof are best understood in terms of the degree to which the evidence presented must warrant the conclusion (of the defendant’s guilt or liability) for a case to be made. In §2, I show that it follows from my epistemological analysis that degrees of warrant cannot be identified with mathematical probabilities; and so, that “legal probabilism”—by which I mean the thesis that legal degrees of proof are to be identified with the probabilities that figure in the mathematical calculus of probability—is misguided. These arguments are completely general, applying to any kind of legal probabilism. The rest of the paper, however, focuses specifically on one popular form of legal probabilism—subjective Bayesianism; and shows how subjective Bayesian accounts fail, and my approach succeeds, in advancing our understanding of the evidence in two famous, and famously complicated, cases. In §3, I show that Kadane and Schum’s subjective-Bayesian analysis of evidence in the Sacco and Vanzetti case is seriously flawed—and that my approach can do significantly better; and in §4, to make clear that, though it isn’t probabilistic, my approach is nonetheless perfectly capable of accommodating statistical evidence appropriately, I turn to Finkelstein and Fairley’s subjective-Bayesian analysis of the evidence in Collins, showing that it, too, is seriously flawed—and, again, that my approach can do significantly better.

POWERPOINTS TO ACCOMPANY THIS PAPER ARE AVAILABLE IN THE SECTION LABELED “SELECTED PRESENTATIONS” BELOW (UNDER “MORE”). A LINK TO A YOUTUBE VIDEO OF HAACK GIVING THIS PRESENTATION CAN BE FOUND UNDER “LINKS” IN THAT SECTION

This chapter critically discusses the significance of trust and its theoretical cognates-distrust , trustworthiness and distrustworthiness-in social epistemology. Special focus is given to the following issues: (i) knowledge on trust; (ii) the entitlement to expect to be presumed trustworthy; (iii) the normativity of trusting; and the role of defective trust and distrust in cases of (iv) epistemic injustice; and (v) the uptake and spread of conspiracy theories.

This dissertation examines a body of formally and aesthetically innovative nonfiction and experimental films, videos, and installation works that have created new modes of cinematic testimony with new possibilities of viewer/listener engagement. I call such films cinematic testimony in order to make a distinction between them and the more common talking head interview film. When cinema is not simply a recording device but an aesthetically engaged practice, it creates a wholly new medium of testimony, something that cannot exist in any other form.

If testimony is typically associated with speech and primarily verbal expression, cinematic testimony has a much broader expressive scope. It includes not just speech but the voices, bodies, and gestures that articulate and give rise to this speech. It also includes a vast array of evocative and epistemologically significant possibilities afforded by mise-en-scène, bodily or cinematographic movements in and across space, the staging of reenacted or imagined events, the cinematic depictions of mental as well as physical landscapes, and various aesthetic strategies through which cinematic testimony can be shaped. The works of cinematic testimony explored here (for the most part made between 1985 and 2006) take conscious creative and ethical responsibility for their use of the medium. In deliberately creating new forms of testimony, they also reflect on, and reveal something about, the very nature of testimony itself.

Testimony is important because it serves as a source of knowledge about a shared world from the perspective of other human beings and signifies the emergence of as yet unheard voices in the public sphere. However, testimony also functions as the representation of a mode of relating (in both senses of the term) and thus as a model of human exchange. As more and more testimonial encounters occur through the medium of moving images, attention to the rhetorical and aesthetic forms of this relating, this saying—verbal, vocal, gestural, and cinematic—and not only the content of the said, seems all the more crucial to the future of ethical relations both within documentary film and beyond. Ultimately, this dissertation argues for the centrality of cinematic form in the production, reception, and analysis of cinematic testimony. Cinema’s use of its own language and voices, its own aesthetic forms, is as crucial as the embodied speakers’ use of theirs when it comes to articulating testimony through moving images.

Trauma is often seen as an event that blocks the victim's expressive capacities. It leaves people speechless, manifesting itself in various symptoms and post-traumatic disorders. Yet, it also generates a stream of narratives-textual, visual, or oral.

This course explores this dual nature of trauma: trauma as a tool of repression and silencing, and trauma as a prerequisite for a "talking cure." We will see how traumatic events are worked through storytelling-by creating narratives of loss, suffering, and displacement.

The course combines two types of texts: 1) key theoretical works on trauma, witnessing, and testimony, and 2) artistic representation of trauma, loss, and grief. Throughout the semester, we will be building close connections between these two types of traumatic representations.

I propose to study one problem for epistemic dependence on experts: how to locate experts on what I will call cognitive islands. Cognitive islands are those domains for knowledge in which expertise is required to evaluate other experts. They exist under two conditions: first, that there is no test for expertise available to the inexpert; and second, that the domain is not linked to another domain with such a test. Cognitive islands are the places where we have the fewest resources for evaluating experts, which makes our expert dependences particularly risky. Some have argued that cognitive islands lead to the complete unusability of expert testimony: that anybody who needs expert advice on a cognitive island will be entirely unable to find it. I argue against this radical form of pessimism, but propose a more moderate alternative. I demonstrate that we have some resources for finding experts on cognitive islands, but that cognitive islands leave us vulnerable to an epistemic trap which I will call runaway echo chambers. In a runaway echo chamber, our inexpertise may lead us to pick out bad experts, which will simply reinforce our mistaken beliefs and sensibilities.

There are many important dimensions of epistemic evaluation, one of which is justification. We don’t just evaluate beliefs for truth, reliability, accuracy, and knowledge, but also for justification. However, in the epistemological literature, there is much disagreement about the nature of justification and how it should be understood. One of the controversies that has separated the contemporary epistemological discourse into two opposing camps has to do with the internalism-externalism distinction. Whereas internalists defend certain core assumptions about justification from the pre-Gettier tradition, externalists generally think that the traditional conception is untenable and should be replaced.

In this compilation thesis, I argue for, defend, and develop a particular brand of internalism, both in general and with respect to specific sources of justification. In papers 1 and 2, I defend a couple of well-known arguments for mentalism and accessibilism. Moreover, I also point out how prominent versions of these theses are vulnerable to serious problems (e.g., about over-intellectualization and vicious regresses). Part of my goal in the first couple of papers is to figure out what commitments the internalist should take on in order to avoid the externalist's objections, while at the same time receiving support from considerations that have motivated internalism in the past. In papers 3 and 4, I start from the assumption that mentalism is true and attempt to answer the following questions: 1) which non-factive mental states can play a justification-conferring role with respect to empirical belief? And 2) why does this set of states play the epistemic role it does? In response to question 1, I argue that all and only one's beliefs and perceptual experiences have justificatory relevance. In response to question 2, I argue that one's beliefs and perceptual experiences are one's strongly representational states, and that strongly representational states necessarily provide support to certain empirical propositions. Having done so, I then defend mentalism about scientific evidence from a couple of prominent objections in the recent literature. Lastly, in papers 5 and 6, I argue for a particular brand of internalism about testimonial and memorial justification and show how that position has a dialectical advantage over its main competitors.

Words have powers, as do the people who understand them. A word has the power to stand in for or take the place of a thing. Vibrations in the air, or ink marks on paper, manage somehow to act as substitutes for people and places, planets and atoms, thoughts and feelings. It is to this extraordinary function that the Sanskrit term for ‘meaning’ calls attention: ßakti - the power or capacity of a word to stand for an object. People who understand words have powers as well; most remarkably, the capacity to acquire knowledge about people, places, planets and so on, just by hearing noises or seeing marks. This too is a power, just as surely as is the power to see or remember or reason. It is the power to receive knowledge from the testimony of others. It is not all that surprising that these two powers, the semantic power of a word and the epistemic power of a hearer or reader, should be connected; but it was the singular achievement of the Indian philosophers of language to analyse the nature of that connection in far greater depth than anyone had done so before.
The study of language, indeed, occupies a position of immense significance in India’s intellectual history. Many centuries before the emergence of organised philosophical schools, sophisticated linguistic techniques including rule-based grammars and quasi-empirical methods of investigation were being developed in order to explore the structure of the Sanskrit language. Påˆini’s 4th century BC grammar, which the linguist Leonard Bloomfield famously described as ‘one of the greatest monuments of human intelligence’ (1933: 11), proved an impressive model for later grammarians and philosophers of language.

Two principal claims will inform the theory of meaning whose contours are to be developed. The first is that the central function of a word is to stand for an object, and hence that the meaning of a word is to be identified with the object for which it stands. The Indian literature in general exhibits from a very early stage a preference for a ‘realist’ or ‘direct referential’ approach to meaning. This is in marked contrast to the western literature, in which that approach has only recently become widely respectable2. Attention to the indexical nature of many expressions led Indian philosophers to draw a distinction between two notions of meaning: the reference of an expression on any occasion of its use (padårtha), and a constant, unvarying meaning element, variously thought of as the ‘basis’ for the use (prav®tti-nimitta) of the term, as the delimitor of its scope (ßakyatåvacchedaka), or simply as what remains constant across contexts (anugama).

In Gadådhara’s general semantic theory, three levels of meaning are distinguished. Expressions have first a reference or denotation (ßakya), which is the object or event for which the expression stands. Second, expressions are associated with a property the Naiyåyikas call the ßakyatåvacchedaka or prav®ttinimitta, a delimiting property whose function is to distinguish the
actual reference from objects of other types. Gadådhara identifies this with the cognitive mode (vi∑ayatåvacchedaka) under which the reference is discriminated in an understander’s thought. The third level of meaning is what Gadådhara calls the anugama, a constant or invariant element in the meaning of the expression. This level has importance with respect to indexical expressions, expressions which have a different reference in different contexts. Since an indexical is not an ambiguous term, there must be a component in its meaning which remains constant across contexts. In the case of the word ‘now’, for example, the component is the rule that ‘now’ always refers to the time at which the speaker performs the utterance.

Another idea to inform the Navya-Nyåya account is that a language is primarily a device for the reception of knowledge. The Naiyåyikas develop an epistemology based upon the doctrine that epistemological agents are endowed with capacities or faculties for the acquisition of knowledge, pramåˆas. The perceptual and the inferential faculties are the paradigmatic examples. Just how such faculties are to be characterized is a difficult question, but it seems that they are processes whose non-defective function is the production of true beliefs. Beliefs produced by such a process, in the absence of defeating conditions, carry epistemic warrant. The extension of this idea to language motivates the claim that to be linguistically competent is itself to be endowed with a faculty the exercise of which leads to the acquisition of knowledge, knowledge gleaned from the testimony of others. From its earliest time, the Nyåya study language as essentially a device for the reception of knowledge from others.

The Navya-Nyåya philosophers of language, indeed, construct a taxonomy of referring expressions based on what is involved in discriminating the reference of a term. Having introduced modes of thought into the theory of meaning, they are able to give a new account of two important types of expression which earlier writers had little or no success in explaining: theoretical names and anaphoric uses of pronouns. I will look at the meaning of these terms in the final two chapters of the book.

This is a completely revised and rewritten version of my earlier book, Semantic Powers.

La entrevista única en cámara gesell, es una herramienta que posibilita la toma del testimonio de menores en casos de delitos sexuales por parte de un especialista y, a la vez, evita su revictimización en el proceso penal. El análisis de este medio de prueba pericial, debe responder a criterios de valoración provenientes no solo desde dogmática procesal penal, sino también, desde la epistemología del testimonio. De tal manera que, se tenga en cuenta al profesional especialista en psicología, la forma del interrogatorio y contenido del informe pericial, lo que sin duda, implica también desafíos para todo el sistema procesal penal.

Durante su visita a Buenos Aires en octubre de 1995, Jacques Derrida -autor de Schibboleth pour Paul Celan (París, Galilée, 1986)- leyó en el Teatro Nacional Cervantes la siguiente conferencia que adelantaba, según explicó, pasajes de un trabajo en curso. Su título en francés fue "Parler pour l'étranger (ou pour l'autre). Témoignage et responsabilité : une lecture de Paul Celan".  La traducción integró el dossier "Paul Celan: una lírica después de Auschwitz" de Diario de Poesía (Nº 39, primavera de 1996), cuya edición estuvo a cargo de  Ricardo Ibarlucía. Fue publicado con autorización del autor, gracias a las gestiones de Roberto Ferro.

| The filmic appropriation of archival imagery has become pivotal within the new archival economy of memory. What is particularly striking about this transnational trend is that more than a reproduction of images of the past for illustrative purposes, at stake in many recent appropriation films is a post-memorial fascination with archival images and simultaneously a critical interrogation of their epistemological gaps, their conditions of production, and their role in shaping the memory of historical violence. Yael

Qu’est-ce que la connaissance ? Que pouvons-nous connaître ? Et comment connaissons-nous ? Ces questions philosophiques classiques relèvent de l’épistémologie, qui excède largement l’histoire philosophique des sciences à laquelle elle se trouve trop souvent réduite. Attentif aux enseignements des sciences de la cognition comme aux exigences normatives de la connaissance, le présent volume introduit aux questions les plus débattues de l'épistémologie contemporaine de façon nouvelle et accessible. Ses chapitres ont été rédigés par une nouvelle génération de philosophes francophones dont les recherches s’inscrivent résolument dans les débats internationaux les plus vifs.

Death is certain in human existence, though we continually battle with its inevitability. Despite its ubiquity, it is a phenomenon conceived differently, depending on cultural, ideological, or idiosyncratic orientation. This paper is geared towards examining the Western conception of death as well as the African conception of death with a view to mapping out their points of convergence and divergence. In other for us to effectively do this, a conceptualization of death will suffice as well as a comprehensive expose on both the Western conception of death and the African conception of death with a view to laying a foundation for a comparative analysis of both conceptions of death. There are two fundamental questions about death that this paper will address; the first is the question of certainty while the second is the question of finality. In all, the comparative analysis will help us to understand how both cultures have attempted to answer the questions mentioned above.

Beginning with the theory of image governance, or the idea that images govern our interaction with reality, this study posits that witness operates as a governing image with unique governing characteristics. To understand these unique characteristics, contributions from nine disciplines and popular culture are woven together to construct a detailed moving image of witness based on how the term and other supporting terms are most often used in conversation, literature, art, and other media. Expressed in this moving image is the progression or series of movements occurring in time, space, and society which are implied by the term witness and supporting terms. Breaking up witness into this series of movements allowed a careful interpretation of the image and a detailed look into how the image governs reality, and especially how it governs communication. Analysis revealed a two-part progression: an event (which is experienced by a witness or witnesses) followed by the process of making that event public for a community—a relational process which involves the witness and the community in the shared work of producing public knowledge. This process, Event / Publication, was further broken into 24 sub-movements, each of which produced their own unique governing effects on reality and communication. Witness appeared as a complete act rather than as one of its many mistaken identities, such as law, trial, religion, advocacy, and protest. While these categories and many others play a role in witness, the image appearing in this study rejects these reductive explanations and instead incorporates them into the greater texture and diversity of witness as it has been used throughout history. Major contributions include the confirmation of abundant governing elements in images at close detail, a complete theoretical model of witness, greater insight into the subversive structure of witness, a revised early history of witness, and the use of behavioral science to challenge prevailing interpretations of witness. Major findings include the power of witness to draw assumed knowledge into the testimonial genre, as well as the absolute testimonial requirements of judgment, faith, mutual dependency, partial surrender of power, and nonviolence.

The central idea of this dissertation is that employing epistemic instruments to acquire beliefs and knowledge – artifacts such as thermometers, clocks, telescopes or GPS systems – centrally involves trust in other agents. Put differently, the epistemic work of the instrument-makers is relevant for the epistemic quality of the beliefs that a user can acquire with the instrument.
I argue that there is a genuine social epistemic source that I call “instrumentation”. This source of belief, warrant and knowledge is involved if the user relies on an instrument and accepts its outputs because she trusts the instrument-makers for the instrument’s reliability. In short: without a reliable instrument-maker, instrumentational knowledge for the user is impossible.

But, there is a received view in analytic epistemology that says otherwise. According to this view, no trust in other agents is involved when we use instruments, there is no such thing as a genuine social epistemic source called “instrumentation”. This received view is fueled by two usually implicitly-accepted intuitions. First, the “Natural Mechanism Intuition”, which says that when it comes to epistemology instruments function like any other mechanism in nature, which provides information about the environment, like – for example – koplik spots indicate the presence of measles. Second, the “Irrelevance of Etiology Intuition”, which says that as long as such a mechanism works reliably, it is irrelevant how it came about.
Against this, I argue that instruments are not like natural mechanisms since with instruments humans have a say concerning what shall be represented by the instrument and how. Natural mechanisms happen to be there in nature and can be discovered by us, but with “designed mechanisms”, such as instruments, we actively establish the mechanism and its relation to its environment. This difference between natural and designed mechanisms is also important when it comes to their etiology, the topicf of the second intuition mentioned above. With instruments (as with designed mechanisms in general), it is not irrelevant how they come about. This can be seen when we consider that instruments come with a seal of warranty. Instrument-makers in fact assume responsibility for the reliability of the instrument that they designed, manufactured and calibrated, and users are entitled to call for such reliability. If the etiology of the instrument is irrelevant, this de facto assumption of responsibility would be irrational. I therefore conclude that the Natural Mechanism Intuition is wrong and that the Irrelevance of Etiology intuition cannot be applied to designed mechanisms such as instruments.

This clears the way for showing how with instrumentation central bits of the user’s warrant are outsourced to the instrument-maker. This generates an extended body of warrant for the user that comprises not only the user’s proprietary warrant but also the proprietary warrant of the instrument-maker. This uniquely-structured warrant turns instrumentation into a genuine and social epistemic source of beliefs, warrant and knowledge.
I close by discussing some objections against my proposal that could be (and have been) brought forward by proponents of the received view. In the light of historical episodes and our actual practices of making and using instruments, I find these objections to be wanting.

This thesis addresses philosophical problems concerning improper
assertions. The first part considers the issue of defining lying: here,
against a standard view, I argue that a lie need not intend to deceive
the hearer. I define lying as an insincere assertion, and then resort
to speech act theory to develop a detailed account of what an
assertion is, and what can make it insincere.
Even a sincere assertion, however, can be improper (e.g., it can be
false, or unwarranted): in the second part of the thesis, I consider
these kinds of impropriety. An influential hypothesis maintains that
proper assertions must meet a precise epistemic standard, and
several philosophers have tried to identify this standard. After
reviewing some difficulties for this approach, I provide an innovative
solution to some known puzzles concerning this issue. In my view,
assertions purport to aim at truth, but they are not subject to a norm
that requires speakers to assert a proposition only if it is true.