Knowledge by Inference from False Testimony

Over at Certain Doubts Claudio has a post about knowledge by inference from false testimony.  Here are the cases:

The Spokesperson: The very reliable spokesperson for the president assures me that (q) the president is in Jordan. Based on my belief that q, I infer that (p) the president is not in the Oval Office. Suppose that p is true and q is false: A last-minute change in his Middle Eastern tour schedule now has the president in Israel, not Jordan. Don’t I know that p?

The Santa Claus Case: Mom and Dad tell young Virginia that Santa will put some presents under the tree on Christmas Eve. Believing what her parents told her, she infers that there will be presents under the tree on Christmas morning. She knows that.

First: An observation about the Santa Clause and Spokesperson cases. On the basis of parental testimony p = "Santa will bring presents and put them under the tree on Christmas" the kid infers q = "There will be presents under the tree".  If the parents want the kid to go on believing p they had better make q come out true.  There's some kind of connection, then, between q's coming out true and the intentions or knowledge or maybe evidence of the utterer of p.  She's been lead to believe q, through testimony that p, by a testifier that knows q. 

I think the case is similar wrt The Spokesperson.  The spokesperson's testimony that q, a strong proposition that the president is in a particular country, is based on evidence that is also evidence for p, the weaker proposition that the president is not in DC.  We've been lead to believe p through testimony that q from a testifier that knows p.  Here the spokesperson asserts q based on evidence e (knowledge of the president's itinerary).  The evidence e makes q likely, but it also makes p likely.  In fact, given e = "the president is scheduled to be in Jordan" as long as there exist non-DC rescheduling possibilities p is more likely than q.  Whenever the president is in Jordan he is not in DC and many of the possibilities made likely by e in which the president is not in Jordan are also cases in which he is not in DC (e.g., when a stop in Kuwait is extended). 

So, the suggestion here is that when the spokesperson utters q based on e, we "get in touch with" e somehow and that's how we can know p.  When the kid's parents say that Santa will put presents under the tree, she gets in touch with their intention to make it true that presents will be under the tree.  I don't know if this generalizes to account for our intuition to attribute knowledge to some true beliefs formed by inference from false testimony, but it strikes me as promising.

In any case, this isn't quite the tact that Claudio takes.  The post is rather involved, but the key idea seems to be to try to account for these kinds of cases through an epistemology of fiction.  I'm still trying to work out exactly how that is supposed to go, but Claudio's project strikes me as resting on a strange way of describing storytelling.  Here Claudio is using the notation "f-____" for "____ in fiction" (e.g., "f-true" for "true in fiction" or "f-assertion" for "assertion in fiction") :

On a foundationalist account, we rely on the peculiarities of f-assertion, assertion within a context of storytelling. F-assertion is peculiar in that the ritual that constitutes the act of storytelling does itself, as a rule, establish the storyteller as the sole, infallible authority on the matters reported on in his storytelling. Blindly trusting what the storyteller asserts does seem to be the appropriate response to storytelling. It does seem to be essential to constituting somebody as audience of an act of storytelling.

Something strikes me as funny sounding in the account of the status of storytellers.  When they are telling their stories it's not as if there is anything independent of the utterances themselves against which to measure thir truth.  Because of this, it strikes me as awefully strange sounding to talk of them testifying as authorities.  Authorities to what?  Fiction can be coherent or incoherent, but accurate/inaccurate? Authority strikes me as measured by how likely a testifier is to be accurate.  The storyteller while telling the story is engaged in the fabrication of a text that can later serve as a kind of f-truthmaker, but during the storytelling there's nothing to testify to.

Well, there's quite a bit more than that going on in Claudio's post that I'm still puzzling over, but I think that it is misleading from the start to think of storytelling as a kind of testimony of f-facts.

Comments

[Claudio]

Thank you for the comments, Jeremy. I've left a reply at Certain Doubts, okay?

Cheers,
Claudio

[matt666]

Out of curiosity, how is this not just a Gettier case?

[Jeremy Shipley]

In a Gettier case one has a JTB but not knowledge. In Gettier cases the theory says we know but our intuition says we don't. These cases are counter-examples to theories of knowledge (particularly in the epistemology of testimony) that do not attribute knowledge. These cases are just the opposite of Gettier cases because the theory says we don't know while the intuition says we do.