In part three of the lecture, I want to look at some further implications of our model for understanding testimonial knowledge. And these would be implications for the epistemology of testimony in general, but also for religious epistemology in particular. So the first implication is that social location is important for epistemic position. So think of social location as being determined by one's personal relationships and by one's membership or participation in a community, the roles that one plays in a community, including the communities formal institutions. So social location is going to be constituted by this variety of relationships and roles that one plays in the community at these various levels of interpersonal, informal, social and formal institution. Now, such a location puts one in the position to receive testimonial evidence in the first place, that's clear enough. But it also affects the epistemic quality of that evidence, including whether testimonial knowledge or justification is thereby transmitted. So again, social location determines epistemic position, and that's easy enough to see if we look at our diagram again. So in the first case of knowledge generation, you've got the speaker outside the relevant epistemic community, and you've got the hearer inside. But in the second case, you've got the speaker and the hearer inside the same epistemic community. Now, the difference in social location there is going to clearly make a difference to epistemic position, at least on our model it does, because in the first case that testimonial exchange between speaker and hearer is going to be governed by the acquisition norms, or the norms governing the generation of knowledge or the norms governing getting information into the community in the first place. Those are going to be fairly high standards there, whereas the second testimonial exchange is governed by different norms. Those are going to be governed by transmission norms or the norms governing the distribution of information within an epistemic community. And again, the standards there are going to be lower. So here's a clear case in which the social location of the speaker and the hearer is making an epistemic difference. And of course we could think of a different case where you've got one speaker inside an epistemic community, and you've got then two hearers. One of those hearers is inside the same epistemic community as the speaker, whereas the second hearer is outside the relevant epistemic community. So now, you've got two hearers who might be listening to the very same testimony, but they're going to evaluate that testimony differently. And they should evaluate that testimony differently because one hearer is on the inside in the same epistemic community and evaluating according to distribution norms. Whereas the other hearer is on the outside of the epistemic community, presumably in some other epistemic community, and now treating the speaker as external to her own community. And therefore, subject to different norms when deciding how to evaluate the information that's coming from the speaker. So again, social location is going to make a clear difference in epistemic position of the speakers and the hearers involved in our cases. Okay, the second implication I want to talk about is that moral and practical aspects of the social environment have epistemic consequences. So in other words, what's going on morally, what's going on practically in terms of the relationships among persons within the social environment is going to have real epistemic consequences. So more specifically, the effective transmission of testimonial knowledge depends on moral and practical aspects of interpersonal relations, informal social roles and formal institutional roles. Now, that's going to be true for a number of reasons. First, the effective transmission of knowledge, the effective distribution of information is going to depend on phenomena such as trust, authority, expertise, and other aspects of social position all of which have clear, practical and or moral dimensions. Second, the very existence of personal relations, also, the very existence of informal relations and formal institutions, as well as one's participation in them, depends largely on their moral and practical value. So for example, one goes to a school or attends a church or is involved in some friendship, largely because of the moral and practical benefits, real or perceived. But this is why people usually participate in these different kinds of relationships. Or to put things another way, there's pressure to leave a social environment, or not to enter it in the first place if it fails to serve practical and or moral purposes. Third, the epistemic efficacy of a social environment is often parasitic on its practical and or moral efficacy. So for example, there's a reliable channel of communication between a mother and child, largely because the mother loves the child. And is motivated by that, and other moral and practical considerations to care for the child. There is a reliable channel of communication between a lawyer and his client, largely because the lawyer's paid by the client, and is motivated by that, and other moral and practical considerations to act in her interests. So there's reputation involved, there's professional ethics involved, there's licensing issues involved. Okay, a third implication of our model is that obstacles to transmission might be found in the hearer, but also might be found in the speaker and also might be found in the broader social environment. So if there's a failure of transmission of knowledge, we can look at various places where that might be explained. So here's three obvious examples: First, the problem might lie in the personal character of the speaker. For example, the speaker might lack moral virtue, or might lack the motivation, or the practical talent, or the intellectual competence to cultivate trust in the hearer. So in some failures of transmission are just because the speaker's failing to promote the requisite trust in the hearer. And so is in a way alienating the hearer from what he has to say. A second problem might lie in the informal community, so for example, a family say. Family might lack the motivation, or maybe the resources, to adequately teach its children about their own religious tradition. And so there's a failure in the informal community, maybe a failure of resources, for example, to affect the transmission that you'd like to see. Third, there might be a problem in the formal institution. For example, a church, which lacks the moral integrity or he practical competence to attract new members or to keep old members. Here's a more specific example: A combination of institutional arrogance and incompetence undermine the ability of the Catholic Church to address various sexual abuse scandals. This in turn undermined the moral authority of the church, for many of its members, which in turn undermined its teaching authority. This is an effective illustration of how the transmission of knowledge can be adversely affected by practical and moral considerations. So the idea is not that members of the church argued from premises about practical and moral failure to conclusions about epistemic authority. That's not what happened. Rather, effective channels of testimony were eroded or destroyed because members of the church became less trusting of the institution and its authorities, or in some cases just opted out altogether. So you've got a kind of breakdown of the practical and moral relationships that are required to support the epistemic relationships of transmitting knowledge. And that can happen on an interpersonal level, it can happen on an informal level, it can happen on an formal institutional level.
