The department of philosophy of the College of Arts at the university of Basra organized a seminar on the epistemology of testimony in Robert Audi by Dr. Sajjad Salih Shunyar.
This seminar shed light on a contemporary epistemological problem which is the epistemological value of testimony by the president of the American philosophical association and the most prominent supporter of the foundational theory. In procedure, this research overlaps with other disciplines such as Philology and rights. It affects epistemologically other areas. This research needs to be investigated to solve its problems. If not, there will be an epistemological gap in the body of knowledge based on these testimonies.
This session introduced Robert Audi and his contributions and the significance of testimony to grasp it conceptually. It also an attempt to reveal the epistemological circumstances of testimony in a multi-theory framework to a theory of extension, mediation and narrowing. He enters its parts and decomposes its theses into two parts: the formal testimony and the informal one. He concludes with the psychology of testimony where there are two sides of epistemological opinions. We find the independence of testimony as an epistemological prompt or its lacking of such a thing. Thus, two sides emerge: reductionists and non-reductionists. At this point, research comes to its basic problem: the epistemological report of testimony and how much it depends on it as a perfect epistemological evidence.
