Testimony is not disjunctive

Jennifer Lackey (Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 87, 177–197, 2006 ; Oxford University Press, 2008 ) argues that “testimony” in philosophy has one sense, but that sense—the concept expressed—is disjunctive. One disjunct she calls speaker-testimony and the other disjunct she calls hearer-testimony. A speaker then testifies simpliciter iff the speaker either speaker-testifies or hearer-testifies. Inadequate views of testimony, she argues, fail to recognize, distinguish and then disjoin these two “aspects” of testimony. I argue that her view about the semantics of “testimony” is mistaken and that her criticisms of two other views—mine included (Graham 1997 )—are ineffective. I argue that instead of one disjunctive concept, the word “testimony” expresses more than one concept; “testimony” means many things. In ordinary English, it names two distinct kinds of constative speech acts. In epistemology, it gets used a synonym for “assertion” (read broadly). In epistemology, it also refers to the process whereby we form beliefs on the basis of comprehending assertions—to communication or interlocution.