Logos and episteme
Tyler Dalton MCNABB and Michael DEVITO
ABSTRACT: The reductionist and anti-reductionist debate features prominently within the larger canon of literature devoted to the epistemology of testimony. Reductionism is the thesis, roughly, that testimonial knowledge is reducible to some other, more general, form(s) of knowledge. We take anti-reductionism’s thesis to be the denial of reductionism. In this note, we develop an attempted counterexample to reductionism by way of discussing animal testimony. We don’t mean to suggest that the reductionist is without a response to the counterexample proposed, but we think it’s about time epistemologists start focusing on how broad we should understand testimony and to what degree, animals might guide our process in developing our epistemology of testimony.
