The reliability of testimony and perception: connecting epistemology and linguistic evidentiality
نویسندگان
چکیده
Epistemologists have argued that there are three basic sources of belief: perception, testimony and inference. These three belief sources correspond directly to the way in which many languages mark statements morphologically for sources of evidence for the statements (evidentiality). In this paper, we connect generalizations from the fields of epistemology and evidentiality. We also introduce a new method for investigating how reliable people find different types of evidence to be. A study based on this method indicates that speakers of English rank different sources of evidence according to the same criteria that govern the use of grammaticalized evidential marking.
منابع مشابه
How DoesStrawson Unify Epistemology, Ontology and Logic
Strawson’s conception of analysis as a ‘connective linguistic analysis’ makes it possible for him to achieve an indefinitely large range of ideas or concepts among them are certain numbers of fundamental, general and pervasive concepts or concept-types which not only are pre-theoretical or ahistorical, but also together constitute a structural framework only within whichlogic, ontology and epis...
متن کاملPerception Development of Complex Syntactic Construction in Children with Hearing Impairment
Objectives: Auditory perception or hearing ability is critical for children in acquisition of language and speech hence hearing loss has different effects on individuals’ linguistic perception, and also on their functions. It seems that deaf people suffer from language and speech impairments such as in perception of complex linguistic constructions. This research was aimed to study the pe...
متن کاملMaking it Public: Testimony and Socially Sanctioned Common Grounds
Contrary to current individualistic epistemology, classical rhetoric provides us with a pragmatical conception of ‘testimony’ as a source provided to the orator by the particular community in which he acts. In order to count as usable ‘testimony’, any linguistic instance must comply with specific rules of social sanction. A deliberate attention to the social practices in which ‘testimony’ is gi...
متن کاملSocial Epistemology: Theory and Applications
Epistemology has had a strongly individualist orientation, at least since Descartes. Knowledge, for Descartes, starts with the fact of one’s own thinking and with oneself as subject of that thinking. Whatever else can be known, it must be known by inference from one’s own mental contents. Achieving such knowledge is an individual, rather than a collective, enterprise. Descartes’s successors lar...
متن کاملEvidence Marking in Research Articles: An Investigation of its Sources and Relative Reliability through Quality Markers
Evidence occupies a paramount position in any logical endeavor and research article is consensually considered a predominant site of such an endeavor. One interesting area of rhetoric which addresses the source and reliability of evidence is quality metadiscourse. In this qualitative study, quality metadiscourse strategies (i.e., evidentials, hedges, boosters and disclaimers) are examined to in...
متن کامل