Australasian Journal of Philosophy Vol. 75, No. 2; June 1997 TESTIMONY, INDUCTION AND FOLK PSYCHOLOGY Jack Lyons I. Introduction There is widespread agreement among epistemologists that our testimonial beliefs (beliefs held on the basis of testimony) are generally justified. Most also agree that testi- mony is responsible for a vast portion of what we know. The controversy concerns how or why testimonial beliefs are justified. Is the justification of testimonial belief in some sense basic, or is this justification parasitic on more fundamental justificational princi- ples regarding, e.g., perception and induction? Although the latter position has an intuitive pull and has traditionally been the domi- nant theory, it has come under a good deal of attack lately. I want to argue here that at least some of this attack is unsuccessful. In C.A.J. Coady's important recent book on tes- timony [2], he argues at length against the idea that our justification for believing testimony can be reduced to inductive justification. According to an inductivist theory of testimonial justification (henceforth simply 'inductivism'), testimonial justification is just a special case of inductive justification; testimonial beliefs are justified because first- hand experience gives us inductive evidence for the claim that people are generally accurate in their reports. ~Coady takes Hume to be the classical advocate of this position (which he calls 'reductivism', since it attempts to reduce testimonial justification to a kind or kinds of justification more basic), and he insists that the inductivist theory is doomed to failure for a number of reasons. My goal here is to show that Coady's arguments against this roughly Humean project fail, and that while the particular inductivist theory advocated by Hume has some short- comings, certain modifications of this theory produce a far more tenable version of inductivism. In sections II-IV I will address three main arguments that Coady offers to show that induction cannot justify our testimonial beliefs. Not only do I think that there are serious problems with each of these arguments, but I think that the nature of these problems suggests a way in which an inductivist might go about making a positive pro- posal. In the remainder of the paper I offer a rough sketch of how that proposal might look and argue that our natural folk psychological abilities can and should be taken into consideration in an explanation of how our testimonial beliefs are justified. In the end, I will argue that at least one theory concerning the nature of our folk psychological beliefs provides a strong argument in favour of inductivism. I should begin with an important procedural point. I take the project at hand to be one of explaining how it is that normal people are justified in their testimonial beliefs. 2 This ' By 'inductive', I simply mean to capture all those cases of reasoning that are not deductive. Thus, unlike, e.g., Elliot Sober [ 11], I will consider abduction (i.e., inference to the best explana- tion) to be a species of induction. 2 I do not take the present project to be one of endorsing either internalism or externalism. A relia- bilist, for example, might very well be interested in reducing the reliability of testimony to the more basic reliability of induction. 163