Journal article
Expression, testimony, and other minds
- Abstract:
- People often tell us about their thoughts, feelings, and desires. This common practice has led some philosophers to claim that testimony is a fundamental way of knowing about others’ minds, a way of knowing that does not epistemically depend on any other way of knowing. In this essay, I shall argue that this view is plausible only if we assume a conception of testimony that aligns it with perception. By contrast, I shall argue that if we adopt a conception of testimony as a type of assurance, then testimonial knowledge would epistemically depend upon our having some non-testimonial knowledge of others’ mental states. More specifically, I shall argue, it would epistemically depend on knowledge based on expressive behaviour. Although one might naturally think this knowledge is either perceptual or inferential, I shall develop an alternative framework for explaining how expressions of mental states secure knowledge of others’ minds.
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
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(Preview, Version of record, pdf, 873.4KB, Terms of use)
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- Publisher copy:
- 10.1007/s11098-025-02443-4
Authors
+ British Academy
More from this funder
- Funder identifier:
- https://ror.org/0302b4677
- Grant:
- MCFSS23\230083
- Publisher:
- Springer Nature
- Journal:
- Philosophical Studies More from this journal
- Publication date:
- 2025-11-27
- Acceptance date:
- 2025-10-31
- DOI:
- EISSN:
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1573-0883
- ISSN:
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0031-8116
- Language:
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English
- Pubs id:
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2304970
- Local pid:
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pubs:2304970
- Deposit date:
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2025-10-30
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- Matthew Parrott
- Copyright date:
- 2025
- Rights statement:
- © 2025 The Authors. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.
- Licence:
- CC Attribution (CC BY)
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