TESTIMONY, REASONS AND RATIONALITY

 EVIDENCE AND ARGUMENTS

The belief that we are able to secure the substance of the world is grounded on yet another, much more substantial and deeply rooted, belief about reason and rationality as the fundamental and distinctive feature of human capacity. The faith in rationality sustains the long-held belief in a sure way to truth and to knowledge. Reason operates on a fundamentally different level from rationality. While forms of rationality refer to objects, reason focuses on the forms of rationality. 

Keywords: Reason, Rationality, Testimony, Epistemology, Testimony -belief, Justification, Evidence

INTRODUCTION

According to a traditional philosophical view, dating back to Aristotle and shared by Immanuel Kant and many others, what makes human beings different from the other animals is that human beings are rational or have reason. Reasoning may be taken to describe the activity of working out what to do or believe by thinking, in which case reason is simply the capacity to do that. The assumption that we largely lack reasons for accepting testimony has dominated its epistemology. Many conclude that any account of testimonial knowledge must allow credulity to be justified. 

TESTIMONY

The philosophy of testimony considers the nature of language and knowledge's confluence, which occurs when beliefs are transferred between speakers and hearers through testimony .Testimony is believing someone when they make a claim, and believing them because we think they know what they are talking about and are telling the truth. Testimony constitutes words, gestures, or utterances that convey beliefs. This definition may be distinguished from the legal notion of testimony in that the speaker does not have to make a declaration of the truth of the facts. For example, the statement or declaration of a witness under oath or affirmation, usually in court. Evidence in support of a fact or statement proof. Open declaration or profession, as of faith. Usually testimonies.

Central Issue about Testimony

We can divide our central issue about testimony along two dimensions. There are Descriptive and Normative. It’s yielding four distinct questions to investigate. There are Descriptive Local Question, Normative Local Question, Descriptive Global Question, and Normative Global Question. 

• Descriptive questions are questions which need answers that contain definitional information about the search term or describe some special events. We have proposed a new descriptive QA model and presented the result of a system which we have built to answer descriptive questions.
• Normative Question In philosophy, the adjective normative is used to describe statements that are based on values. A normative statement is a claim about how things ought to be

Interest in testimony and an unresolved tension 

Recent years have seen an intensifying interest in the topic of testimony. The ethics of witnessing has attracted considerable attention from different viewpoints, most prominently from philosophy, literature, history, as well as from film studies. The reasons for this are quite heterogeneous. One reason is certainly the impressive body of survivor literature that has forced thinkers to consider the significance of testimony and its impact on our understanding of the atrocities of the past.

Most of what we take to be knowledge has been learned from experts, as it would be impossible to have a direct, personal experience of everything we are told and taught. This is not only the case in academic and scientific work but also in early language acquisition and later in everyday life. It remains, in effect, continuous throughout our whole existence. Testifying in court or giving testimony of a spiritual experience are therefore only rare instances of a practice that is quite common, and yet these instances exhibit some features that are significant for the general practice of giving testimony.

The Broad View of Testimony

One of the main questions in the epistemology of testimony is how we are justified in forming beliefs on the basis of what people say. This, rather than what testimony is, is often taken to be the issue of central import from an epistemic point of view. In order to assess this broad approach to the nature of the testimony, it will be helpful to abstract away from some of the inessential differences between these individual characterizations of testimony and focus on what they all have in common. Since it is most natural to understand a ‘telling’ as an expression of one’s thought, let us say that the Broad View of Testimony is roughly

REASONS AND RATIONALITY

Reasoning is associated with the acts of thinking and cognition and involves using one's intellect. The field of logic studies the ways in which humans can use formal reasoning to produce logically valid arguments and rationality is the quality or state of being rational that is, being based on or agreeable to reason. Reason operates on a fundamentally different level from rationality. While forms of rationality refer to objects, reason focuses on the forms of rationality. This is why the objection from supporters of rationality mentioned before falters, namely, the objection that all conceivable questions would already be answered by the many versions of rationality so that absolutely no room and no issue remain for reason. By means of their diversity, rationalities might be capable of answering questions about objects in various ways, but what the relationship is between diverse rationalities a question which is becoming all the more urgent on account of plurality cannot be stated from the point of view of one.

What is Reason?

Reason in philosophy, the faculty or process of drawing logical inferences. Reasoning is the process for making clear how your evidence supports your claim. In scientific argumentation, clear reasoning includes using scientific ideas or principles to make logical connections to show how the evidence supports the claim. For example, “All men are mortal. Harold is a man. Therefore, Harold is mortal." For deductive reasoning to be sound, the hypothesis must be correct. It is assumed that the premises, "All men are mortal" and "Harold is a man" are true.

What is Rationality?

Rationality is the quality or state of being rational that is, being based on or agreeable to reason. It is implies the conformity of one's beliefs with one's reasons to believe, and of one's actions with one's reasons for action.

Rationality and the Value of Human Life

Many people hold that rational beings or rational life has a greater value than non-rational beings or non-rational life. They think that this value makes rational beings either uniquely morally important, or more morally important than the other animals. This view is naturally associated with the idea that it is rationality that makes us moral beings since that is an attribute that might appear to give rational beings a special value. But it is unclear exactly how the argument is supposed to go. Even if the capacity for moral goodness is a form of superiority, the fact that human beings alone are moral animals, if it is a fact, also makes us uniquely capable of moral evil.

Philosophical Conceptions of Reason and Rationality

The reason is often taken to refer to the action as opposed to the passive or receptive aspects of the mind in the philosophical tradition. The reason in this sense is contrasted with perception, sensation, and emotion, which are thought of as forms of passivity, or at least as involving passivity. The perceived world does not simply enter the mind, as through an open door. In sensing and responding to the world our minds interact with it, and the activity of our senses themselves makes a contribution to the character of the world as we perceive it. A person is called reasonable or rational when his beliefs and actions conform to the dictates of those principles, or when he is subjectively guided by them.

Rationality refers to a range of properties that characterize the mental lives of the creatures deemed rational. It can mean simply sane and well-oriented towards the world, and it can mean capable of acting intentionally and intelligently. In these senses, nonhuman animals can be rational. Rationality in this sense involves an awareness of the considerations that tempt us to believe and act in certain ways of our potential reasons and the ability to evaluate those reasons in accordance with a priori principles that determine whether they are good reasons or not.

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