Aktuelles DFG-Projekt

Testimonial Assurance and Epistemic Authority

The project being proposed has two principle objectives. The first fundamental section (project area I & II) intends to develop an assurance approach for cases of testimonial exchange and to defend it against objections in which the utterance of an authority is the source of a distinctively testimonial kind of epistemic entitlement. The project will illuminate how, in such cases, the speaker executes a speech act of assurance which distinguishes itself from constative speech acts in both scope and content and which is subject to particular normative requirements in regard to appropriateness and felicity conditions. Moreover, in the context of this approach, the thesis will examine how the obtaining of epistemic entitlement is a specialised (transactional) process that is fundamentally linked with the idea of an epistemic superior and which role epistemic trust plays in this correlation.

In the second section (project area III), the assurance approach will then be used as a framework to provide new solutions to the central problems of explaining epistemic authorities. In particular, the thesis will examine what epistemic authorities are, how such authorities obtain normative power — for example how epistemic dependency between the parties involved is characterised — and how epistemic authorities differ from experts.

Key words: Epistemic Acceptance, Epistemic Authority, Epistemic Trust, Epistemic Goals and Norms, Epistemic Understanding, Testimonial Assurances, Testimonial Exchange, Testimonial Speech Acts, Testimonial Sources, Testimonial Transmission