- Humans acquire a vast amount of factual information through testimony, arguably more than they learn through experience.
- The extensive reliance on testimony is remarkable given that one often cannot verify testimonial information.
- What makes testimony distinct from storytelling is that it has an implicit or explicit assertion that the telling is true. The literary format and style of the Gospels is that of the ancient biography, a historiographic genre that was widely practiced in the ancient word. Thus, one can regard these accounts as a form of testimony.
A Natural History of Natural Philosophy (pp. 165-172)
A more plausible explanation is that young children are psychologically disposed to acquire knowledge through testimony and perception: the information received in this way is basic, in the sense that it is unreflective and not based on other beliefs. This leads them to the impression that they have always known these facts. Also, and perhaps more crucially, children do not make a distinction between knowledge acquired through testimony and knowledge acquired through direct experience.
…children treat testimony to scientific and religious beliefs in a similar way.
…children do not find religious testimony intrinsically more doubtful than scientific testimony.
The current empirical evidence indicates that testimony is a fundamental source of knowledge, similar to memory and perception (in line with antireductionism), but that children and adults are sensitive to cues for the reliability of informants (in line with reductionsim).
Books such as the recent Faith vs. Fact by Jerry Coyne rely on this to be the case [that testimony is a fundamental source of knowledge], while at the same time denying that such knowledge counts as knowledge. Sadly, some commenters here at TSZ believe that Coyne’s “way to knowledge” is “the only way to knowledge.” Taking Coyne’s word for it is hardly convincing.
Reliability is the key word.
Were it not important we’d just be gullible suckers.
Is Muhammed’s testimony to be credited? The testimony of the girls who accused people of being witches at Salem? Did snakes arise from where the Gorgon’s drops of blood fell?
Are courts supposed to accept testimony (with little or no corroborating evidence) of miracles at face value? No, your honor, I did not take the gold and bury it in my yard, God hid the bars in my yard.
That’s usually not held to be reliable, but somehow we’re supposed to believe in Bible miracles, and in the miraculous creation and transformation of life-forms that somehow follow the limitations of evolution.
Glen Davidson
thump thump thump
“Books such as the recent Faith vs. Fact by Jerry Coyne rely on this to be the case [that testimony is a fundamental source of knowledge], while at the same time denying that such knowledge counts as knowledge. Sadly, some commenters here at TSZ believe that Coyne’s “way to knowledge” is “the only way to knowledge.” Taking Coyne’s word for it is hardly convincing.”
No, accepting the statements of eye-witness testimony is merely a belief, not knowledge (regardless of what the paper you cite says, which merely serves to show it’s operating under a different definition of what knowledge is and might even just be using it colloquially). It’s something you believe because you were told, that doesn’t mean you can be said to know it, until you have verified it empirically.
When you try to prop up two literary sources against each other, as if to show a contradiction, you first need to show that they both use the terms in the same way.
Also, nobody is “taking Coyne’s word for it”, you either agree or you don’t and the reasons for agreement isn’t “because Coyne says so”. Further, you aren’t obliged to be convinced because someone else happens to agree or “take his word for it”. It’s amazing how many elementary errors in logic you’ve stuffed into so few words.
You really created a separate thread for this?
There is a difference between an unknown person writing about other unknown person’s alleged testimonies, an unknown person writing his own testimony, and a known person giving testimony of what they experienced themselves. Adding layer upon layer of transmission is going to hurt reliability, which ought to be doubtful even in the most direct cases when it comes to reporting highly improbable events without any independent corroborating evidence (alien abductions, anyone?)
fG
Mung,
Do you believe Jesus walked on water?
Or do you *know* he did?
Mung quotes De Cruz:
Memory and perception are notoriously fallible. Hence the phrase, “I would have sworn that…”
“Sincerity” can be misleading. Self-reported confidence in recollection and testimony is not a reliable predictor of the accuracy of testimony. A sincere, best effort recounting of a witnessed event doesn’t guarantee that the event occurred as recalled – yet provides cues to sincerity that lends the account spurious credibility.
Not to mention: People lie, and good liars understand and simulate the “cues for reliability.”
There are thousands of wrongful convictions every year, and eyewitness testimony is implicated in nearly three fourths of them. That doesn’t include false and purjured testimony. Just mistakes.
And what about alien abduction, Mormon tablets, bigfoot sightings? What about all the. Casually ascribed miracles?
Mung,
To give us a feel for your own standards regarding “testimony to miracles”, do you believe that the mass resurrection described in Matthew chapter 27 really happened? Why or why not?
I think we tend to judge the reliability of witnesses based on our experience with them. And on whether they generally make sense. It’s a Bayesian thing.
I’m 70 and have never encountered anyone who reported seeing a ghost or a UFO or a miracle or anyone levitating. But I have encountered convincing liars.
Mung said:
That’s a great point. BA just made a similar point over at UD. Indeed, should we take Coyne’s testimony because it is testimony?
For most people, IMO, the term “reliable” or “credible” is shorthand for “they are saying things I already agree with.” There is very little, if any, real internal reflection or examination of incoming agreeable information. When you examine what testimony is being rejected and notice a pattern of rejection that is in lockstep with that person’s ideological commitments, there might be a bias problem.
petrushka,
And the most convincing liars are those who can get themselves to believe their own lies, at least for the moment.
Mung:
I haven’t read Coyne’s book yet, but based on his other writings I would be very surprised if Coyne asked readers to “take his word for it.” Far more likely that he presented an argument so that readers can evaluate the evidence and reasoning for themselves.
Yet Coyne says
“Similarly, knowledge isn’t knowledge unless it is factual, so “private knowledge” that comes through revelation or intuition isn’t really knowledge, for it’s missing the crucial ingredients of verification and consensus”
So I am not sure why you think that Coyne counts raw testimony as knowledge.
I also suspect that “knowledge” in your quote from the book linked in the OP:
“The current empirical evidence indicates that testimony is a fundamental source of knowledge, similar to memory and perception”
is referring to something different from Coyne’s definition of knowledge. I don’t have access to the full book linked in the OP, but knowing its theme, I suspect that what they mean by “knowledge” in that quote is instead based on people’s private beliefs which people justify partly by testimony and partly by their personal priors.
In the summary to the chapter you are quoting from, which is available in the Amazon preview, the authors seem to confirm this interpretation of how they use “knowledge” (p 178). They say justification for believers comes from a theistic prior, and that testimony for miracles does not meet the criteria for truth that Coyne uses in his definition of knowledge (“conformity with fact; agreement with reality;”) for people who do not already have a theistic prior. So it would not count as knowledge for them.
So maybe your OP needs a cross-link in the equivocation thread?
keiths,
I prefer to reference a more reliable version of Christian scripture.
Ye of little faith. How do you explain the prophecy that the earth will be consumed in fire? How did they know about stellar evolution and red giants?
That, and corroboration. Ultimately, science depends far less upon the reliability of even an honest and capable individual witness and far more upon corroboration by many independent researchers/teams.
Glen Davidson
Patrick,
Don’t worry. I got confirmation from the Awkward Moments Children’s Bible:
The Walking Dead
Its true that we get the vast majority of our knowledge from others and all the new information we get is evaluated in comparison to everything else we know. So while we get most of our knowledge from others we also know that people can be wrong for many reasons, and some individuals are more reliable than others.
We can be sure the miracles of the Bible didn’t occur for many reasons including
– the events contradict what we already know about reality
– the miracles are charmingly anachronistic and are obviously related to many of the myths and stories that were popular in many cultures in the Mediterranean at the time.
– Just as Sherlock Holmes was able to solve a murder because a dog didn’t bark ( the murderer was the dogs owner) we know the miracles didn’t occur because of what didn’t happen. Many thousands of people interacted with Christ and saw his talks and ‘miracles’ but only a handful of people decided to follow him.( A success rate lower than fraudulent evangelists) If he had been doing miraculous things the entire population of Judea would have immediately followed him and news of his existence would have spread through the world at the speed a horse could gallop.
Corroboration, replication and consilience are the three weapons of science. Nobody expects peer review.
I know what you mean! 🙂
And with this you have built a nice little shield you can use to dismiss anything since, to you, it’s obviously just the product of some kind of bias. It goes both ways. Here you are making an excuse to dismiss everything you disagree with because it’s just the other person’s biases that has resulted in them believing these things.
This entirely depends on what reality actually is, and how it works. Depending on what reality is and how it works, verification and consensus might also act as filters as to what kind of reality/existence an individual is capable of experiencing/knowing. If reality is more of a fluid, observation-based framework, verification and consensus might be directions towards certain kinds of knowledge/experience, not things that define knowledge accurately describe experience.
This is also a good explanation for why so many people keep believing in extraordinary claims despite the utter mundanity of the evidence, such that a man turned water into wine, was resurrected, could walk on water and so on.
Rumraket said:
What would I need a shield or bias for? I believe what I wish to believe. My beliefs/assumptions don’t require verification, consensus or evidence.
I don’t need an excuse to dismiss that which I disagree with. I also don’t have to justify that which I believe. Free will is like that 🙂 I believe and disbelieve whatever I want, for whatever reasons I choose.
Great! Another bible for me to thump!
Rumraket said:
Or, they may be seeing different evidence than you, and may have experiences which serve as validation for those claims. Whether “true” or not, there’s no law against believing in such things, and it can often be of benefit to those with those beliefs.
I’ve personally experienced many miraculous events – in fact, one just this morning. I’d consider it lying to myself to try and convince myself such things don’t happen.
BruceS, I mentioned in the OP that Coyne has his own definition: “the scientific way of knowing.” My point is that his way is not the only way of knowing. Not sure what you think I’m equivocating over.
And most of us do not live our lives as if “the scientific way of knowing” is the only way of knowing, nor could we.
I think the relevant question here is, how is it that Coyne’s book is not testimony [or filled with statements of a testimonial nature]?
Would you mind providing a direct quote for the “that knowledge doesn’t count as knowledge” attribution? I don’t know Coyne, but it’s hard to believe he wrote precisely that.
keiths, after Jesus was resurrected, do you think he walked everywhere he went and that anyone close enough to see him could see him?
Or did he seem able to appear and disappear at will.
Sorry, but I find the Zombie Jew theory laughably naive. I don’t feel compelled to believe that the people who were raised appeared to anyone other than those that they appeared to. They were not necessarily visible to everyone. They did not necessarily have to be walking through the city like you or I would walk about.
Do you think they had to knock on the door to be let in?
So what you posted before is just some stuff you like to believe?
Considering that it pretty much was a generalized attack on others without support, nuance, or specific consideration of evidence and facts, I guess that would explain it well enough. Why you want to believe such worthless tripe I don’t know, however.
Glen Davidson
I don’t believe I offered that up as a quote from Coyne.
Nope. We have the same evidence. The blabble.
Well does he actually write anywhere that there’s some type of knowledge that we have that doesn’t count as knowledge? That’s what your paraphrase in the OP says, and it is self-contradictory. I’m curious what your basis is for the allegation that Coyne contradicts himself.
I took you to be comparing the de Cruz book you linked and Coyne in their conclusions about knowledge.
But, based on my reading of Coynes’s book and on the material I have seen from the de Cruz book, I don’t think they are using the term “knowledge” in the same way. Coyne uses a dictionary definition, while I understand de Cruz to be applying both cognitive science (to show how we might confuse knowledge with belief) and epistemology (to show how internalist justification versus externalist justification) can help explain why religious people might think raw testimony is enough to justify beliefs in miracles whereas non-believers might not.)
Is that a rhetorical question?
If not, and you’d like me to comment, then I’d need to understand what you mean.
What is testimony in your view? Are you claiming the whole book is just testimony in that sense?
I agree that Coyne’s definition of knowledge is self-serving (thought not circular and probably acceptable on the surface to many). But he has to make a special case for math, and he ignores complex issues when he pushes for non-cognitivism and claims that there is no moral knowledge. So there is definitely more to it which is relevant to contrasting science and religion, I suspect. However, I will leave that to KN who is better equipped than me to argue such a point (which I understand him to be doing, at least roughly).
“Truth” is notoriously hard to define, except via Tarski’s schema, which many people find unhelpful. I haven’t read any Coyne, but I’m guessing his “conformity to facts” is just intended to give a general idea of what he means by “true” rather than to offer a precise definition.
I think Coyne has basically adopted the view of positivism described here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positivism#In_science_today
“Positivism is defined as the belief that all true knowledge is scientific, and that all things are ultimately measurable.”
It’s a little discussed fact, but facts, in science, can change. Theories are a bit more stable.
So conformity to fact is not an authoritarian or dogmatic thing. It is simply conformity to the current consensus. In general, that’s pretty stable.
Ah “true knowledge”! 🙂
FWIW, I don’t agree with any of that. It’s not what I mean by “fact” anyhow.
This difference is the sort of thing that makes it so important discussions start off on the right foot. I note that if “fact” means comport with the scientific consensus, such consensus can never actually be wrong. I don’t think that’s consistent with ordinary usage at all. I think most people would now say, e.g., that it turned out that Ptolemy was always wrong, not that he was right at the time and became wrong after he died.
A Companion to Epistemology (Blackwell Companions to Philosophy)
Coyne’s book is testimonial in nature, not scientific.
walto,
According to Neil, Ptolemy is still right. It’s just that his chosen coordinate system fell out of fashion and was replaced by the more convenient heliocentric one. 🙂
Mung,
So do I!
You’ve replaced one naive belief with another. I don’t believe they appeared to anybody. The sensible position is that they were dead and they stayed dead.
From the other thread:
Why not accept #2, Mung? It’s more sensible than your watered-down version of #1.
Mung:
Okay, you got Jerry a sale. We’ll see.
I think you misunderstand me. Explanatory theories are not facts. Ptolemy was right in his facts, wrong in his theory or model. His observations were correct.
When we talk about whether the Bible is true of historically accurate, we are talking about recorded observations and whether they are accurate. Sometimes it is impossible to judge historical facts, except in Bayesian or likelihood terms.
Actually, no.
My position is that Ptolemy was not dealing with a true-false question (at that level).
petrushka,
You’re conflating facts with observations. Ptolemy believed the sun orbited the earth, and he was wrong about that fact.
Neil,
Your claim was that geocentrism and heliocentrism were just two ways of expressing the same underlying reality, just as “the dog barks” and “der Hund bellt” mean the same thing despite being expressed in different languages:
The problem, of course, is that geocentrism and heliocentrism cannot be reconciled. Your statement is wrong:
Heliocentrism fits with objective reality, but geocentrism doesn’t. That’s why astronomers are heliocentrists, and it’s why they rightly regard geocentrists as crackpots.
I have experienced none, none have been reliably demonstrated or independently confirmed, and they have this strange habit of mainly happening to people who are already deeply convinced that they can and do happen.
In particular, your mere say-so would be irrational for me to believe because extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Testimony isn’t extraordinary evidence particularly in the light of the many demonstrated failures of such testimony.
What is he testifying to?
You are calling well established models facts. I won’t disagree, but models are always wrong and subject to being replaced by better models. One might consider that facts are hierarchical.
My beef with the Bible is that the primary observations are tainted and unbelievable. In ptolemy terms. The date are fradulent. Nevermind the model.