Most of what we would say we know or would be willing to assert flatly, to pass on in our own voice, we have come to know from the words of others, face to face, or via encyclopaedias, newspapers, textbooks, radio and television broadcasts, etc.
I use the phrase ‘the words of others’ rather than the term ‘testimony’ or ‘hearsay’ advisedly; what we learn from newspapers, bulletin boards, news broadcasts etc., is not ordinarily called ‘testimony’ nor do we call it hearsay. But it is the words of others. Moreover, testimony is more or less restricted to what goes on in more or less formal proceedings, especially courtroom proceedings. It is not always a matter of transmitting knowledge, either to a judge or to a jury. Eyewitness testimony is intended to transmit knowledge. If you, on the jury, believe a witness, and the witness knows what he says to be the case, then you come to know those things, and typically, you will feel free to pass them in your own voice. Expert testimony, however, need not provide such knowledge; enough if it gives grounds for doubt. Testimony may be somewhat or even highly theoretical, (merely) expert opinion, not plain matter of fact.
I need to say more about the phrase ‘in our own voice’. It is central to the words of others being a transmission of knowledge . To pass on what we have acquired from the words of others may be in our own voice, flat assertion; or it may be with (what I shall dub) prefacing. If I take myself to have come to know something, I pass it on flatly, in my own voice, without preface. For example, if I have seen in the paper that an exhibition of Picasso's work is on at the local art gallery and someone asks me if there is anything worth seeing in town this weekend, I will say that there is a Picasso exhibit on. I won't, unless I am rather oddly sceptical, say that apparently the exhibit is on or that according to the paper it is on. And it would be bizarre to say that I have it on good authority, or from a reliable source. Of course, if the person to whom I passed on this information was doubtful or asked me how I knew, I would readily say I had read it in the paper. When we are passing things on, transmitting what we take ourselves to know, we typically do it, as I have put it, in our own voice, not with prefaces, such as ‘apparently’, ‘according to so and so’, ‘I have heard that’, etc. If we are challenged or questioned, we give as our answer to ‘How do you know?’, or ‘Are you sure of that?’, replies such as that we just saw it on the news, read it in the paper, were told by someone on the bus, etc.
These observations are observations that I assume will be agreed with. They are facts about a practice that is pervasive and not parochial to our sector of civilization. Knowledge that is transmitted via the words of others and our believing others when they make plainly factual statements, is, as I said at the outset, probably the largest store of knowledge each of us carries around in his head.
It is easy to be (or purport to be) sceptical about this when you engage in philosophical reflection, in particular in the turmoils of epistemology. But then the other, less controversial vessels of knowledge, also become fragile in the acid of scepticism. I refer to memory, inference and perception.
Those three, because they are more individualistic – involving processes and procedures that take place here within and not out there in public – can seem more secure than our fourth source of knowledge, the words of others. I can justify a claim that P or a claim that I know that P by saying that I read it in the paper or heard it from a neighbour, and normally do so unless intimidated by philosophy; this fourth source of knowledge is more socially constituted, dependent on communicative practice. So it can seem insufficiently individualistic to ease Cartesian compulsions, compulsions which while nowadays weakening in force, have marked – perhaps scarred – philosophy since the C17th.
Assuming that we accept these observations and recognize ourselves in the practice of the transmission of knowledge, let's ask whether there are limits on such transmission and that they may be. Are the contents in the vessels of transmission restricted in some ways? Do those contents affect the manner in which we, with our own words, transmit further what we accept from others? What about distrust of or doubt about our informants? Does our reception of transmission from others always involve belief and knowledge or is there a manner of acceptance that is short of believing or coming to know?
A way to investigate this matter is to ask when are we not willing to pass on in our own voices contents we have, in some way, accepted from other? These will be cases where what I have called prefaces come into play, prefaces such as:
a. Apparently…
b. I have it on good authority…
c. A local resident told me…
d. An expert on ____ has advised me…
e. Someone whose judgment I trust has said…
There are at least three regions where we do not pass on content in our own voice even when we accept the content to such an extent that our actions are influenced by the transmissions. These regions are ethical discourse, aesthetic discourse, and (usually higher) theoretical discourse. Examples from the three regions will show this. The limitations in these three regions call for explanation. I suspect that the explanation lies partly in the fact that in these three regions, one clause in the general principles of transmission (GPT) fails. Here is that principle:
1. If A asserts that p to B, and A knows that p, and B believes A, then B comes to know that p.
2. A thereby licenses B to assert that p.
The clause that fails is ‘A knows that p’. If that is a factor in the explanation we seek, it suggests that in our three regions (and perhaps in others, such as speculative or interpretive discourse) assertions may not be claims to knowledge though they are claims to truth. What may be showing itself here is an aspect of the difference between fact and theory, as well as between fact and value. Many philosophers (too many) have long treated the difference between facts and values as semantic, holding that value judgments are neither true nor false, but in some other line of business than claims to truth. The epistemology of ethical or aesthetic discourse may very well be distinctive without those discourses having to be downgraded to expressions of feeling or attitude or strivings to influence the actions of others.
A good deal more no doubt needs to be said about this proffered general explanation of the limits on what can be transmitted as knowledge. For now, I wish only to illustrate that there are restrictions in the three regions I have mentioned:
High Theory: If a physicist friend tells you that there are things in the world that are at once particles and waves, things called electrons, you will be willing to say to others, in an appropriate context, perhaps that there are such things as electrons; but when you speak of this bewildering duality of wave/particle, you will be disposed to a prefatory: ‘And according to physicistsÉÉ..’. Understanding what the words we speak mean, not just believing that these words say something true, is a condition of speaking in our own voice. With high theory, we should notice: there is a difference between saying that P and saying that ‘P’ is a truth. You can know that the German sentence ‘Schnee ist weiss’ says something true without knowing what it means, that snow is white. The religious are willing to say such words as ‘I believe in one God who is Father, Son and the Holy Ghost’, and to say them acknowledging that they have no clear idea how so much logic can be so apparently violated by those words. There is even a heresy whose central doctrine is ‘Credo quia absurdum est’, ‘I believe because it is absurd’. A distinction is to be made between ‘representational belief’ and ‘belief proper’; and so a difference between believing that ‘P’ states something true and believing that P.
Ethical Discourse: Imagine: a new lecturer has been appointed to my department. A graduate student I am supervising, a conscientious young woman of good judgment, has been sitting in on the lecturer's class. Somewhat distressed, she comes to me and says she feels she should tell someone that the new lecturer is appallingly obscure; but not only that, also contemptuous toward students who press him for clarification. I see the need to take action. When I go to the Head of Department, I do not say flatly, in my own voice, that the lecturer is obscure and contemptuous; I preface what I report by saying that a student has complained to me with those very words. I may or may not mention her name. I might even approach the new lecturer himself, hoping to help him in his early days; perhaps his arrogance is protective covering. I have accepted that there is bad behaviour taking place, enough so to take the news to the Head of Dept. or even to the culprit. I may even have outright believed the student's complaint, but I still do not pass on the content in my own voice. And this applies generally to ethical contents. (It is possible to overlook this point when we think of our knowledge (or at least our total and utter conviction) that, e.g., what the Nazis did at Auschwitz was evil. After all, we did not ourselves witness any of it. But this does not mean that our knowledge stems from hearsay that the mass murdering was wrong. We make that judgment from the facts that we were informed of via the words of others.
Aesthetic Discourse: It is even clearer with aesthetic discourse, in particular the words of critics, and I mean critics we have come to respect and trust because always, or almost always, we find that our own encounters with the relevant works evoke in us responses much like those of the critic. So if such a critic gives a film four or five stars, I shall want to see it for myself. But I will not assert to anyone that it is a fine film until I have seen it and responded as I was quite sure I would. The reviewer transmits to me enough to influence my action and give me confidence that I will admire the film. Further, if a critic whom I have come to admire and respect, praises something I have deplored or vice versa, I may decide to take a further look and be open to changing my mind. I may not change my mind, but I may. That is a large part of what critics are for. An apparent exception here is the willingness of most of us to say, e.g., that Helen of Troy was (not merely must have been) a beautiful woman, and to say it without prefacing. I suggest the exception rather proves the rule, that in the context of speaking of antiquity, it is so obvious that we are going by hearsay that we need not be explicit. The context constitutes a preface.
Another inhibitor of transmission involves problematic contents, which usually run alongside problematic informants. The default condition of transmission is to believe what we are told, or to accept in the nonbelieving ways I have indicated, the contents passed to us. Speaking of a default condition is a way of locating the onus of challenge. If you do not have specific reason to distrust a source or specific reason to doubt a content, the normal way of going on is to believe or accept what you have been told. If you fail to take advantage of information passed to you and fail in a way that raises issues, you will be held accountable for not acting on information that you possessed or at least that had been imparted to you. If a native of the town with the river running through it tells you the ice is too thin for crossing and you dash ahead and nearly drown, its down to you. He can, as perhaps he rescues you, say ‘I told you so mate; you must be nuts’. I think it can (almost) be said that you rushed onto the ice knowing it was too thin; at least that you had been so informed.
I want now to make some observations about a difference between ethics and aesthetics. My point concerns the appropriateness of citing the authority of others in responding to challenges to claims you might make about art or about ethics. I have noted that you cannot cite the columns of your local film critic to justify a claim you have made that a movie is superb. To speak that way, licences others to believe that you have seen the film for yourself. This inference is so obviously legitimate that I am inclined to say it is a matter of logic or sense-making that you cannot used the words of others in this way for these purposes. Let me put that by saying that so to use the words of others here is logically objectionable, or at least problematic.
But when it comes to ethics, the citing of others to justify your own judgments, it seems not always logically objectionable or, at least, problematic; rather it is morally objectionable, or, at least, problematic. If you judge that abortion is wrong, there are good reasons that can be offered, and also if you judge it sometimes to be all right, even if all right is a matter of the lesser of evils. There is unresolved conflict about the issue, with thoroughly decent people on both sides. But if I ask you what is wrong with abortion and you say only that your religion or the Pope forbids it, I find myself wanting to criticize you for not having a decent reason for your position, for a failure of responsibility. Better surely just say it seems wrong than to lean on your religion's chief authority.
Still, it says something about religion that citing a religious authority seems only morally, not logically problematic. Suppose we are a family, discussing whether to seek euthanasia for Uncle Louie, who has pleaded for help in committing suicide. We reach an impasse; I pick up the phone and call Peter Singer. After some conversation with him, I announce that we should go ahead and assist Louie's suicide. It would be absurd if, when you asked me why I now think it is OK, I said that Professor Singer just told me so, though I didn't understand his arguments, have not made them my own, do not really understand well enough what he said, beyond saying it would be all right, a good thing to do. This looks more like logical failure, as in the case of art works. This is, I believe, because there is no such thing as moral or ethical expertise. By contrast, If the issue had been whether to buy a Volvo or a Honda, and I supported my vote for a Honda by citing a respected consumer magazine, even if I did not understand the reasons given for favouring one car over the other, nothing would have been amiss. This is because there are experts in this field. Once we are persuaded to help Uncle Louie kill himself we may very well rely on experts as to the best means and do so without understanding why one kind of killing is preferable to another.
So we should distinguish between being fully transmissible, inducing belief and knowledge, and being only acceptable – inducing confident expectation or disposition to act in certain ways. A possibility is that the fully transmissible seems naturally to be called (mere) information, or ‘plain fact’. That may be why our sources can be plain folk, not necessarily experts; because the things known and transmitted are things of a sort knowable by all of us in our inexpert ordinary humanity.
It is also worth noting, for those reluctant about the default condition being believing what we are told, that it would be impossible to live together if the default condition were otherwise. Try to imagine what it would be like if our standard reaction to the words of another were doubt. If the onus is on your informant to allay that doubt he could only try to do so by saying something further; but you doubt anything he has to say, including his avowal truthfulness.
