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 testimony 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 principles regarding, e.g., perception and induction?
Although the latter position has an intuitive pull and has traditionally been the dominant 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 testimony [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 firsthand 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 shortcomings, 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 proposal. 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 explanation) to be a species of induction.
2 I do not take the present project to be one of endorsing either internalism or externalism. A reliabilist, for example, might very well be interested in reducing the reliability of testimony to the
more basic reliability of induction.
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means (i) that I will be presupposing that people are generally justified in their testimonial beliefs and that they are justified in roughly those beliefs that they think they are, and
(ii) that the project at hand is not to convince the reader that testimony (often) produces
justified beliefs, but to explain why agents who form beliefs on the basis of testimony are
(often) justified. For this sort of epistemological project, the reasonings or other psychological processes that render reliance on testimony justified must be the kinds of
processes that normal people actually employ or at least approximate? Furthermore, I
take it that the issue concerns only the original justification of such beliefs, thus avoiding
contention about whether memory produces or merely preserves justification.
Coady has three main arguments against the roughly Humean project of inductivism:
(1) The individual simply doesn't have enough non-testimonial information at her
disposal to justify the relevant inductive inferences - very little of what we (hearers) have heard testified have we had the opportunity or even the ability to
personally corroborate. [2, pp. 82-85]
(2) The whole inductivist approach is deeply flawed, because if testimony were not
to some extent reliable, there would be no such thing as testimony. [2, pp. 85 ff]
(3) We cannot learn or understand a language without supposing that the speakers
of the language are telling the truth much of the time. [2, ch. 9]
Each of these arguments will require a considerable amount of unpacking; I will deal
with them in reverse order.
II. Truth and Language Acquisition
Thomas Reid was, as far as I know, the first to claim that we could not learn a language
if we did not believe that others usually spoke the truth [10, p. 196]. Since we do in fact
learn languages, Reid concludes that we must have some sort of innate bias that causes
us to believe that people are telling the truth, a psychological tendency which he calls a
'Principle of Credulity'. Coady's argument (3) invokes a Davidsonian version of this
claim: a hearer cannot interpret others without presuming that much of what they say is
true, i.e., radical interpretation requires a presumption of speakers' veracity. This argument is not aimed directly at what I am calling inductivism, since Coady takes the
argument to be general enough to cut against any theory that takes a basically reductivist
tack. In the next section I will address the uses to which Coady wants to put this and the
related argument (2) against inductivism in particular, but first I would like to make a
preemptive case for the claim that the Principle of Credulity and similar principles have
nothing to say directly on the subject of whether testimonial beliefs are inductively justified.
The notion of approximation is far less clear than many authors seem to think. However, I take it
that there is an intuitive sense in which people instantiate or approximate the statistical syllogism, for example, while there is no such sense in which people approximate certain rules of
probability, like believing all necessary truths to the degree of 1. This rough, intuitive notion
will have to suffice for the present paper.

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Suppose children are born with the Principle of Credulity. What should we expect
this to tell us about the justifications of our linguistic beliefs (beliefs about the meanings
of words and so forth)? There are two ways to go here. The first is to claim that if Reid's
'Principle' is really innate, then it is responsible for justifying the beliefs that it produces.
The second (and more interesting because less often noticed) approach is to claim that
the principle is only essential in that it gives u s a n innate bias, without which we simply
would not have the inferential power to learn a language. The standard view in language
acquisition has it that in learning language, children (at least tacitly) formulate and test
hypotheses, and certain innate biases serve to constrain the number and nature of
hypotheses that can be formulated. What is responsible for the formulation of the
hypotheses, however, need not be what is responsible for the later justification in accepting or retaining any given hypothesis. It is quite reasonable to claim that what justifies
this acceptance is the ability of the hypothesis to survive potentially falsifying evidence
and to account for the relevant data.
So there are two distinct procedures at issue here, hypothesis formulation and hypothesis testing. Although the former may be a sine qua non for language learning, it may
still be the latter that justifies my beliefs about my language. The bias toward believing
what people say is causally necessary for my justified belief about what their words
mean, but this causal responsibility does not imply justificational responsibility - the
principle is required for the existence, but not the justification, of the relevant beliefs. In
the same vein, the child's innate assumptions about the possible syntactic structures of
natural languages are required for understanding a language, but these assumptions play
no interesting role in justifying any beliefs about the language.
If the preceding account is right, then nativism about a Principle of Credulity and
inductivism about testimonial justification are orthogonal. The hypothesis of general
veracity combined with hypotheses about the meanings of utterances generally withstands falsification (people do not usually say something that I think means or implies
that the dog is in the room when I think that the dog is not in the room), provides useful
predictions (when people say something that I think means that the dog is in the other
room, and I go to find the dog, it is usually there), and in a general way, accounts for
why these people are making these incessant noises. So much for the preemptive argument about the irrelevance of the Principle of Credulity to whether testimony is justified
inductively or not. The general moral is that the innateness of a faculty without which we
could not have certain beliefs, still allows for the possibility that the beliefs produced by
that faculty are justified inductively (abductively, to be more precise about the current
case). I will next deal with the more specific arguments that Coady levels against inductivism.
III. Reliability Presupposed?
Coady's argument (2), like his (3), maintains that there is a fundamental flaw in the
Humean project of relying on merely first-hand experience to check the reliability of testimony, for we could not check the reliability of testimony if we were not able to first
detect instances of testimony. But the very detection of testimony presupposes the reliability of testimony.

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This difficulty consists in the fact that the whole enterprise of [inductivism]
requires that we understand what testimony is independently of knowing that it is,
in any degree, a reliable form of evidence about the way the world is. This is, of
course, the point of Hume's saying: 'The reason why we place any credit in witnesses and historians, is not derived from any connexion, which we perceive a
priori, between testimony and reality, but because we are accustomed to find a
conformity between them.' It is a clear implication from this that we might have
discovered (though in fact we did not) that there was no conformity at all between
testimony and reality. [2, p. 85]

Coady then goes on to argue that this 'clear implication' of H u m e ' s theory is, in fact,
false; we could not possibly have discovered a total lack of conformity between truth and
testimony. In such a case, he claims, there would be no such thing as the speech-act of
testifying, and no utterances would have any discernible content. So, by modus tollens,
Hume's theory is false.
There are a number of problems with this line of argumentation. For the moment, let
us grant to Coady that there is some sort of a necessary connection between truth and testimony (qua testimony) - i.e., that it is impossible that there be testimony yet it be
completely inaccurate. 4 Does Hume's theory imply the negation of this claim? No. Hume
is careful not to claim that there is no necessary connection between truth and testimony,
only that it is not the case that we believe witnesses because of such a connection, since
we are not aware of any such connection: Not only is H u m e ' s claim very likely true,
given that most people have never considered the issue, but the fact that we do not reason on the basis of a perceived necessary connection does not even begin to imply that
there is no necessary connection. And even if Hume had made the stronger claim, there
is no reason to think that this would be a central tenet of the inductivist position. It might
very well be the case that testimony has all sorts of interesting properties that have nothing to do with its role in the justification of beliefs.
Perhaps Coady thinks that having inductive evidence for p implies that p is contingent. But surely it is possible to measure a n u m b e r of right triangles and acquire
inductive evidence for the truth of the Pythagorean theorem, or to gather empirical (and
similarly inductive) evidence for an approximation of n. Hence, it cannot be a general
rule that induction implies contingency.
Does the inductivist project presuppose the reliability of testimony? In the previous
section, I described how an inductivist theory might explain children's learning of a language. This, I take it, is part of the inductivist project, to describe how children acquire
justified beliefs about the noises that they hear people making. As argued in the last section, abduction can explain how listeners come to have justified beliefs that the noises

This claim cannot be that there is a necessary connection between the way the world is and the
noises we hear people make (at least not any interesting one).
Hume's caution, of course, is not the result of his having noticed any sort of necessary connection. It is more likely a simple consequence of his general tendency to refrain from making
explicit metaphysical claims and to focus instead on psychological and epistemic ones.
Similarly, in his famous discussion of causation, Hume is careful never to deny the existence of
any necessary connection between cause and effect; he merely denies awareness of such a connection.

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other people are making are both meaningful and (often) true. There is no legitimate reason to insist that these two be handled serially, that first we discover the meaning then
the reliability. The inferential process I am offering here is abduction after all, and there
is nothing strange about having a set of hypotheses be the unit of testing where abduction
is concerned, since it is normally only sets of hypotheses that make clear predictions.
Thus, it is entirely possible that children acquire some evidence for the reliability of testimony at the very same time that they learn the language. This, however, is quite
different from presupposing the reliability of testimony.
Thus, I think that this phase of Coady's attack against the Humean project is unsuccessful. It is probably true that if there were no correlation at all between testimony and
the way the world is, then we would not be justified in our testimonial beliefs - that is,
we would not be justified in thinking that there were such a correlation. But I presume
likewise that if it were not the case that most people do not have three legs, we would not
be justified in our belief that they do not. Such counterfactuals are not indications of
what is inductively justified and what is not.
IV. Induction and the Paucity of Evidence Arguments
There is one more argument that Coady briefly mentions, and although he leans on this
one the least, we will see that it is really the hardest to reckon with. In addition to the
language-oriented arguments dealt with above, Coady argues that in order for induction
to justify our testimonial beliefs, we would need a much greater fund of direct, non-testimonial evidence about the world than we have:
[I]t seems absurd to suggest that, individually, we have done anything like the
amount of field-work that [inductivism] requires. As mentioned earlier, many of
us have never seen a baby born, nor have most of us examined the circulation of
the blood nor the actual geography of the w o r l d . . . This list [is] supposed to be
typical in that it indicate[s] areas in which we rightly accept testimony without
ever having engaged in the sort of checking of reports against personal observation that [inductivism] demands. [2, pp. 82-83, emphasis in original]

The very fact that we rely on testimony for so much of what we believe indicates that we
have not done a lot of independent solitary observation. This provides what I will call the
Weak Paucity of Evidence Argument:
WPA: Most people have personally verified precious few reports, and this little bit
of first-hand observation is not enough to inductively determine the general reliability of testimony. Any inductive argument for the reliability of testimony would
be an argument from too small a sample.
Although I want to return to this argument later, Coady considers a version of inductivism that takes into account various kinds of reports, and against this theory he offers
two arguments that collectively I will call the Strong Paucity of Evidence Argument,
SPA:

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(SPA i) For most of us, there are only a few kinds of reports that we might have
been able to verify personally. The rest will be completely without inductive support.
(SPA ii) Any given report can be classified in many different ways, only some of
which will yield inductive justification. But it is a problem for inductivism that
there is no principled level of generality at which to specify the different kinds of
reports.

The trouble with SPA, as I see it, is that it is too strong; I will argue that the assumptions
implicit in this two-pronged argument are sufficient to undermine induction in general.
Inductive inference has two main components: first, there is inductive generalization,
the process by which we come to form beliefs in statistical or universal generalizations. 6
In order, however, to apply the knowledge encoded in these generalizations to any particular case, we will have to engage in direct inference, the process by which we infer
definite (i.e., single-case) probabilities from the indefinite probabilities that we have
induced. (Definite probabilities are things like the probability that Brown is over six feet
tall, or the probability that my doing A at time t will lead to outcome 0. 7) Now the difference between W P A and SPA, in a rough and ready way, is that the first is concerned
with the size of the sample, while the latter is concerned with the representativeness of
the sample. But the problem that Coady raises in SPA is an extremely general one, for it
is the problem of the reference class for direct inference, not the problem of the reference
class for direct-inference-for-testimony. There is nothing in C o a d y ' s argument that
allows us to restrict the argument to testimony-related reference classes. Thus, if SPA
shows that induction is insufficient for justifying testimonial beliefs, it shows that induction is insufficient for justifying any beliefs. Coady thinks it is a 'perhaps dubious
assumption' that this problem of the reference class can be solved, but the generality of
this problem indicates that it can be solved, if induction in general is any good. The solution is worth looking into.
The classical and intuitive solution to the problem of the reference class was given by
Reichenbach [9]: when trying to figure out the probability of some particular event, we
are to embed that event in the narrowest reference class for which we have adequate
probabilistic information. 8 Reichenbach's principle serves an illustrative purpose; the
exact formulation of a theory of direct inference is not important here, but the assumptions underlying this epistemic principle are crucial to the current discussion. The first of
these assumptions is that we need not consider every reference class to which our target
6

Exactly what inductive generalization produces is somewhat controversial, but it will be irrelevant to the present discussion whether it produces beliefs in precise probabilities, beliefs in
ranges of probabilities, partial beliefs, degrees of belief, or what have you.
7 This terminology, which I borrow from John Pollock [8], helps to pinpoint a certain tension in
this argument: the first part of the argument (SPA i) assumes that there is a principled method of
classification for inductive generalization (such that we can have inductively justified beliefs
about the reliability of some, but only some, kinds of reports), and then (SPA ii) proceeds to
deny that there is any such principled method of classification available for direct inference. It is
hard to see how they could both be true.
8 A more precise formulation of this view is found in [8], which endorses something very much
like this and to which I owe much of the ensuing discussion.

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belongs. The second is that even some reference classes that we do consider can reasonably be ignored; m y k n o w i n g that this object, c, is a C and that most Cs are Ds gives m e
a reason to believe that c is (probably) a D. This sort o f inference, o f course, is eminently
defeasible, but the k n o w l e d g e that c is also an F does not, by itself, defeat m y original
inference. Certainly C & F is a narrower reference class than C, but if I do not know anything about h o w many C & F s are Ds, then I a m justified in ignoring the fact that c is also
an F. O f course, if I do know something about that probability, then I need to consider it,
but otherwise I do not?
N o w it might be thought that we need some positive reason for thinking that any narrower class is irrelevant in the sense that being an F, to continue with the above example,
does not change the probability o f being a D given that it is a C. However, this requirement is too strong. First o f all, since any object falls into indefinitely many reference
classes narrower than the one we take to be relevant, we would have to have indefinitely
many justified beliefs in order ever to be justified in an inductive inference o f this nature.
Second, consider a representative case: m y insurance agent knows the statistics for drivers o f m y age, gender, and driving record in this state. Yet m y agent also knows my
address, although she does not have any statistics for drivers o f m y age, gender and driving r e c o r d who live at my address. H e n c e m y i n s u r a n c e agent lacks any p o s i t i v e
evidence that m y street corner is not a particularly dangerous one. Nor, I will assume, is
she so dull as to assume that this is irrelevant information. Some corners are more dangerous than others. Does this mean that her belief about the approximate likelihood o f
my getting into an accident is unjustified, since she has not taken into consideration m y
street comer? Presumably not. Certainly, she would be more justified if her belief were
founded on a greater amount o f evidence (and hence would be justified in holding a less
tenuous belief and/or one that makes a more precise estimate o f the relevant probability),
but this does not imply that the less than fully informed belief is unjustified. If justification required us to be fully informed, we would not need induction.
The Reichenbachian principle is not idiosyncratic to testimony, nor is it limited to
direct inference. Inductive generalization must rely for its justification on something
quite similar; it seems clear that if all the swans I have ever seen are white, and all I
know about Australian swans is that there are some and that I have not seen them, I a m
still justified in m y belief that all swans are white, despite the (unknown to me) fact that
Australian swans are black. What justifies this inference appears to be the fact that there
is no narrower reference class about which I have any justified beliefs and which offers
me any reason for retracting m y inference. Similarly, if I have some inductive evidence
for the reliability o f testimony in general, then I am justified in thinking that you are
telling m e the truth unless your present report falls into a narrower reference class f o r
which I have some positive reason to believe your testimony is unreliable. The fact that

There are cases that this sort of theory will not address. For example, suppose I know that c is a
C and that c is an F, but I do not know the probability of c being a D given that it is a C&F, and
I know that the probability of c being a D given that it is a C is different from the probability of
it being a D given that it is an F. It is unclear what I should infer here, and as far as I know, no
one has a neat solution to this problem. However, it should be somewhat clear by this point and
more clear shortly, that this is everybody's problem, and to believe that induction is generally a
justification-conferring procedure is to assume that there is some solution to this problem, even
if no one has yet articulated it.

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you have dark hair is irrelevant to whether I am justified in accepting your testimony,
because I do not have any information concerning the reliability of dark-haired people's
testimony. Nor do I have any reason to reject your claim that, say, ulcers are caused by
bacteria rather than by excess stomach acid, until and unless I have some (positive) reason to believe that you might be lying or that you just are not in a position to know about
such things. Certainly we need to have some positive evidence for the general reliability
of testimony (i.e., we need to have inductive evidence for some relevant inductive generalization in order for direct inference to even get off the ground); yet we cannot, on pain
of general skepticism about induction, require that the agent have positive reasons for
thinking that probabilities will not change for narrower reference classes. This approach
yields a principled reference class for inductive generalization and for direct inference:
the narrowest one for which the agent has adequate probabilistic information. This, then,
provides a solution to both (SPA i) and (SPA ii).
The consequence of all this is that if Coady wants to maintain this argument against
the Humean theory of testimony, he is going to have to view all induction as suspect.
Without something like the Reichenbachian principle, we are simply faced with the (old)
problem of induction. Coady's philosophy may be closer to Hume's than we had been
led to believe.
V. Testimony and Folk Psychology
So far, I have argued that none of Coady's criticisms of the inductivist theory of testimony actually work. In particular, I argued that the necessary connections that may obtain
between truth and testimony and between truth and the learning of language are irrelevant to the question of whether our testimonial beliefs are justified via induction. I have
also argued that the Strong Paucity of Evidence Argument that Coady offers is too
strong, in that if it works against induction of testimony, it works against induction in
general. Yet this latter claim does not serve to refute the Weak Paucity of Evidence
Argument. This argument, I think, is the argument against an inductive theory of the justification of testimonial belief.
The central claim of WPA is that the number of reports that we have actually checked
is too small to justify us in our testimonial beliefs. The fact that so much of what we
believe we believe on the basis of testimony shows that correspondingly little of what we
believe could even possibly serve to justify induction. This argument, that any inductive
evidence for the reliability of testimony must be an argument from a small sample, can
neither be rendered a decisive argument against inductivism, nor can it be decisively
refuted until someone figures out how large a sample must be and how large of a sample
we actually are able to bring to bear in our inductive argument for the reliability of testimony. I will not take this route. Instead, I want to lessen the force of WPA by showing
how we, as epistemic agents, might acquire additional bases of evidence for our belief in
the general reliability of testimony, bases that are overlooked by WPA. That is, I want to
try to show that the inductive sample may not be as small as WPA assumes it is.
The central weakness in WPA, I will argue, is that it presumes that whatever inductive evidence we might have for the general reliability of testimony must be acquired by
checking reports against facts (e.g., perceiving that S says that p and perceiving that p).

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In what follows, I will try to enlarge the inductive base by arguing that we can also
acquire inductive evidence for the reliability of testimony by inferring it from (non-testimonially) justified folk psychological beliefs. This, of course, raises the question of how
we acquire our folk psychological beliefs, since this is obviously relevant to how such
beliefs are justified and whether they can play the role I want to assign them. To illustrate the relevance of our folk psychological beliefs to testimonial justification, I will
examine in some detail one particular psychological and philosophical theory about the
origins of our folk psychological beliefs. I will then try to show how this theory, the simulation theory, improves the argument for an inductivist theory of the justification of
testimonial beliefs.
The problem with Hume's treatment of testimonial belief is that it assumes that our
evidence for the reliability of testimony must come in the form of personally experiencing a correlation between reports and facts (or at least things that are taken by the agent
to be facts). This is what Coady has in mind when he speaks of 'verifying reports'; we
hear someone say that p and we find independent, non-testimonial evidence for p. All
that is sought here is a simple correlation between utterances and the world, without any
attempt to get inside the minds of the testifiers.
However, the folk, whose testimonial beliefs are in question here, are not behaviourists, and they (we) do not reason like behaviourists; in explaining and predicting
human behaviour, the folk do not appeal only to lawlike uniformities that obtain between
people's environments and their behaviour (between the facts and the reports), but also
to people's internal mental states. Our folk psychology is an explicitly mentatistic one. I
explain your dropping your car off at the brake shop in terms of your desire to have your
brakes repaired and your belief that the shop in question will repair them. Not only do
my folk psychological beliefs enter into an explanation for me of your behaviour, however; these same beliefs also account for a lot of my behaviour. My beliefs about your
beliefs and desires constrain the ways in which I am willing to behave around you.
Thus, in accounting for the justification for our belief in the general reliability of testimony, it is implausible to think that simple fact-report correlations are the only kinds of
evidence we bring to bear on the issue. We, as epistemic agents, also have at our disposal
a wide range of folk psychological beliefs that we can use to support statistical generalizations that are relevant to our belief in the reliability of testimony. Furthermore, our
folk psychological beliefs are clearly relevant to our reliance on testimony in that they
account for the way in which we engage in direct inference. When trying to figure out
whether to believe a particular report, we consider not only (not even primarily) the sort
of report being given; we also take into account the mental states of the person doing the
reporting (e.g., the speaker's possible motives for lying, the speaker's background experience, etc.). The folk psychological beliefs that are most relevant to the present topic are
(i) that people generally try to tell the truth (unless they have some motive to lie), and (ii)
that people are generally competent with respect to believing the truth. Call these beliefs
the Sincerity Principle and the Competence Principle, respectively. What needs to be
shown is that it is possible to have inductive justification for these two principles, evidence that is (a) not itself based on testimony (b) not justified by fact-report correlation
checking, and (c) derivable from justified folk psychological beliefs or the mechanisms
that produce these justified beliefs.

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I think it is fairly obvious how the Sincerity Principle and the Competence Principle,
if justified non-testimonially, provide evidence for the general reliability of testimony.
What needs to be shown is that these beliefs are susceptible to inductive, non-testimonial
justification. In the following section, I will focus on a particular psychological theory
about the origins of our folk psychological beliefs and how it could account for our
inductive evidence for our testimonial beliefs. I will try to show that this theory provides
some evidence for the claim that the Sincerity Principle and the Competence Principle
are justified via inductive generalization. Then I will show how this theory allows us to
use and modify these principles in direct inference.
VI. Simulation and Induction
There are numerous examples of folk psychological beliefs that, intuitively, are
justified, l Here are a few of mine: 'Fred bought that car because he wanted to have it',
or 'All the people in the room with me right now would say that they believe that the
lights are on if they were asked.' And a bit more to the point, 'People generally form
beliefs about the visual properties of their environments by using their eyes.' 'Every
American knows a toilet when she sees one and, for that matter, knows what the word
"toilet" means.' 'People do not generally lie unless they have some reason to do so.' I
classify all of these as folk psychological beliefs because they involve the ascription of
mental states to others, and it is beliefs like these by which the folk predict and explain
the behaviour of others. It is not only the content that makes these beliefs folk psychological beliefs; the previous beliefs count in part because I did not engage in any
empirical studies or rely on professional psychology to arrive at them. Furthermore, even
though reliability, for example, is not a mental state, to ascribe reliable belief forming
mechanisms is to make a claim about that person's psychological states. Thus I take
claims made by the folk about the truth and the justification of other people's beliefs to
fall under the rubric of folk psychology. This will be made more clear when I discuss the
details of the simulation theory.
To determine the source of the justification of these beliefs, we should look into the
source of the beliefs themselves. There are a number of psychological theories about the
origin of our folk psychological beliefs, and they fall into two main categories.
According to the simulation theory (see, e.g., [4], [5] and [7]), we form beliefs about the
mental states of others by using the mechanisms by which we form the corresponding
states in ourselves. We simply imagine ourselves in the other's position, and see what
states are produced; that is, we take our own mental state production mechanisms 'offline', feed in the relevant perceptual and other inputs, and simply introspect the
appropriate output. Being hit by an imaginary rock causes imaginary anger when I run
that input through my off-line mental state production mechanisms, so I predict of someone who has just been hit by a rock that she will be angry) 1
~0 Even if you think that belief-desire psychology is badly enough mistaken that it will not end up
in a finished science of the mind, this does not at all preclude you from thinking that ordinary
people are justified in their folk psychological beliefs (at least to some ordinary, non-scientific
degree of justification).
" I am, of course, glossing over a number of subtleties that make the view more attractive. None
of these subtleties will be relevant to the present discussion, however.

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How, then, would the simulation theory help inductivism? In section II, I claimed that
learning a language and learning that people's reports are generally accurate can take
place concurrently, and the consequent beliefs can be justified inductively (viz., abductively) even if Reid's principle of credulity is true. This would indicate that we have
done some first hand report checking, but what simulation can do is to give us further
evidence and expand on the inductive sample that WPA insists is too small by giving us
additional evidence for the Sincerity Principle and the Competence Principle. The role of
simulation is to provide the agent with a host of (justified) beliefs about single cases,
from which the agent can then induce the appropriate generalizations.
For instance, say I want to know whether Smith believes that there is a rhinoceros in
my living room. According to the simulation theory, I simply imagine myself in Smith's
position (sitting on my living room couch), feed the relevant perceptual inputs into my
(now off-line) mental state production mechanisms, and introspect whether these mechanisms produce an ersatz belief that there is a rhinoceros in the room. Since they do not, I
conclude that Smith would not have this belief. Then I ask Smith to consider the proposition that there is a rhinoceros in my living room and simulate her understanding my
request and forming the belief that there is not one in the room. I conclude that Smith
believes that there is not a rhinoceros in the room. Here is one folk psychological belief
of mine (it involves a mental state ascription) that (I presume) is justified and that is certainly not indebted to testimony for its justification. Now since I am justified in believing
that Smith believes there is not a rhinoceros in the room (on the basis of simulation), and
I am justified in thinking that it is true that there is not one in the room (on the basis of
perception), I am justified in believing that at least one person has at least one true belief.
I perform many such simulations with different people, and end up with a number of
beliefs that support the inductive generalization that people are generally competent in
forming beliefs.
Even though the above example involves my 'checking' Smith's belief in that I have
a justified belief that she believes p and an independent, justified belief that p, this still
constitutes an enlargement of the inductive sample mentioned in WPA, for Smith has not
said anything. Simulation offers a wider inductive sample than WPA assumes, because it
does not require us to check reports, since it does not require the existence of reports.
Simulation allows for belief checking without report checking. But simulation can do
more than this, for I do not even have to check each particular belief to be justified in
thinking it is true. Given that I am justified in thinking that I am generally competent in
my ability to form true beliefs, then the beliefs that I ascribe to people will be beliefs that
I would ascribe to myself if my situation were similar to theirs, most of which, by
hypothesis, I am justified in thinking are true. Given the ubiquity of such folk psychological beliefs, it seems clear that the inductive sample, at least for the reliability of beliefs,
must be a great deal larger than WPA supposes.
A similar story goes for the belief that people are generally sincere. If I am generally
sincere, then, ceteris paribus, I will make many individual ascriptions of sincerity to various people. And given that most of my folk psychological beliefs are justified, I will
have a wide sample of justified beliefs in the sincerity of people, from which I can
induce that people are generally sincere. So provided that I am generally sincere, and
provided that I justifiably believe that I am generally competent, simulation combined

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with inductive generalization will provide me with inductively justified beliefs that people are generally c o m p e t e n t and generally sincere. Even if I am e p i s t e m i c a l l y
incompetent, this incompetence is going to infect my third-person belief ascriptions in
just the way that it infects my own beliefs, thus giving me evidence that people form the
correct (by my own dim lights) beliefs? z
This is just a sketch, but if what I am claiming is right and if the simulation theory is
true, then the evidence that we have for the competence and sincerity of others is, indeed,
justified via induction, since it is inductive generalization that produces the general
beliefs in the first place. The way simulation works is by producing first a belief in me
about your mental states, then one about my sister's mental states, and so on. Simulation
thus produces only particular beliefs, not general ones, so the generalizations cannot be
the direct output of the simulation mechaflism. Apparently, if the simulation theory is
right, then whatever generalizations we believe must be inductively justified if they are
justified at all. Thus, whatever justified particular testimonial beliefs we come to have by
relying on these general beliefs will be inductively justified. In virtue of what are the particular simulated beliefs justified? It does not matter very much for the present
discussion; so long as they are in fact justified, it is irrelevant whether you want to say
that this is because the faculty that produces them is reliable or innate, or whether you
think that simulation only provides hypotheses to await abductive testing. '3 In more paradigmatic cases of induction, the particular beliefs from which the statistical or universal
generalizations are inferred are typically justified on the basis of sense perception, hut
we need not commit ourselves to a theory of perceptual justification in order to claim
that these generalizations are inductively justified. All that is relevant here is whether,
not how, the particular beliefs are justified (so long, in the present case, as they are not
justified via testimony, which they pretty obviously are not). So all that matters here is
that the beliefs we form on the basis of simulation are generally justified, and I doubt
that anyone wants to deny this, at least not that they are justified in some ordinary, everyday sense, which is all that is at issue here.
Thus we see two very different ways in which an agent can come to be justified in the
claim that most people are reliable in their reports. The first is the way that Hume and
Coady recognise: I see that S says that p and p, and I see that R says that q and q, and so
forth. Eventually, I acquire some inductive evidence for the claim that people are generally reliable from this procedure of checking reports against facts. When we take into
consideration our body of justified folk psychological beliefs, however, we find an additional, independent source of justification for the belief that people are generally reliable
in their reports, for belief is a straightforward inference from the (inductively justified)
Sincerity Principle and Competence Principle. This is the sense in which I have been
claiming that the inductive base is broader than what WPA is willing to admit; the central claim of W P A is that checking reports against facts does not provide enough
,2 This argument only flies if the epistemic agent in question is justified in believing herself to be
generally competent and is generally sincere. So all bets are off when it comes to pathological
liars and people who are not justified in thinking they are competent. This does not strike me as
a problem for the present theory, since it is not at all obvious that such people are justified in
their testimonial beliefs.
,3 The view that reliability justifies the particular beliefs is suggested in [4]. The abductive story, I
presume, will simply be an analogue of the one I sketched in section II.

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evidence to justify our reliance on testimony. The claim here is that even if W P A is right
on that count, it does not matter, since there are additional sources of justification for our
belief that people are generally accurate in their reports. TM
In addition to serving as the basis for inductive generalization, simulation can help
with direct inference. It can do this by explaining how we come to have positive reasons
for moving to a narrower reference class. As the discussion in section IV indicates, if we
do not have a positive reason to think that the particular instance at hand deviates from
the general case, we are justified in inferring that the definite probability is pretty much
the same as the indefinite probability. Direct inference, then, involves searching for reasons to think that the case at h a n d is significantly different from the general case.
Suppose, for example, that Jones tells me that p. Assuming that I am justified in thinking
that people generally do not lie, then I am justified in believing p unless simulation indicates that Jones may be lying (assuming I have no other information concerning p). I
simply imagine myself in Jones' situation and introspect whether I would be tempted to
lie. If I think I would be, then I should not believe p on the basis of Jones' saying so.
Similarly, suppose that you tell me that q, and I do not have any reason to think that
you are lying. Even though I am justified in thinking that you are sincere, you may not
be competent with respect to q. If I am justified in thinking that people are generally
competent, then I am justified in believing that you are, too, unless simulation indicates
otherwise. I imagine that q is true, I imagine myself in your situation, and I introspect
whether q would be obvious to me in your situation, and I repeat the process, only this
time imagining that p is false. If I cannot tell the difference, I wilt doubt that you can.
This should work whether projecting myself into your situation means imagining that I
am standing in the other room or imagining that I have just spent a year and a half studying the grooming habits of the Yellow-Footed Albatross. While this is nothing like a
complete theory of direct inference, it does indicate the role that simulation is capable of
playing.
This concludes my sketch of how the inductivist might resort to the simulation theory
in order to avoid the Weak Paucity of Evidence Argument. The simulation theory is particularly well-suited to an inductivist theory of testimony, as the role of simulation is to
provide to the agent who is doing the simulating a range of (intuitively, justified) particular beliefs about the mental states of others, from which can be induced generalizations
about people's belief-forming mechanisms and their reliability as well as generalizations
One anonymous referee has suggested that there is a sense in which the inductive base provided
by simulation is really as small as WPA suggests and that what the simulation theory does is to
explain how such a small base can do so much justificational work. According to this referee,
simulation 'gives us a very narrow "base" but enables us to recursively generate a huge expanse
of conclusions from that narrow base'. We are justified in trusting our simulator, and this justification allows us to generate justified folk psychological beliefs. In the end, however, all of this
higher-level justification (for our particular beliefs about people) rests on the lower-level justification for the principle 'trust your simulator', and it is in this sense that our higher-level
justification rests on a surprisingly narrow base. This is a very interesting point, and it may be
right, but this is not how I intend my claim that simulation broadens the inductive base. For the
present purposes, I am merely trying to show that our folk psychological beliefs, whatever the
ultimate source and structure of their justification, can and most likely do supplement the justification we obtain by checking reports against facts. So at least at this higher level, simulation
does provide a broader inductive base from which to justify our reliance on testimony. This
claim is all that is really needed to undermine WPA.

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about people's motives and consequently about their sincerity. In fact, if the simulation
theory is true, it seems quite obvious that our beliefs in statistical generalizations about
folk psychological matters must be the product of inductive generalization over a range
of simulation outputs? ~ And if I am right in insisting that our folk psychological beliefs
enter into belief in the general reliability of testimony, then it seems very reasonable to
hold an inductivist theory of testimony.
Most importantly, if simulation produces justified beliefs about the mental states of
others (as presumably it does if the simulation theory is true), then we can gather an
inductive sample (i.e., a set of justified particular beliefs from which to infer statistical
generalizations) without having to check individual reports. In this way, the inductivist
can avoid the WPA by expanding the agent's fund of first-hand experience of checking
reports, adding to it a pool of simulated experience.
VII. Concluding Comments
The goal of this paper has not been to show that inductivism is inevitable, but to show
that one set of arguments against it is unconvincing. One of the more interesting flaws in
the arguments against inductivism, I have tried to show, is a failure to appreciate the role
of our folk psychological beliefs in the justification of our testimonial beliefs. I have
argued that the simulation theory supports an inductivist position concerning the justification of our testimonial beliefs. I have focused on the simulation theory party because it
is a plausible theory, partly because it is friendly to inductivism, and partly because I
needed some theory to focus on for the sake of illustration. If nothing else, I hope it has
become clear that the nature of our folk psychological beliefs is relevant to the debate
concerning the nature of testimonial justification. Still, it is worth noting that the alternatives to the simulation theory do not necessarily cut against an inductivist view of
testimony.
The only going competitor to the simulation view is what is called in cognitive scientific circles the 'theory theory' (see, e.g., [6] and [12]), which, as I will use the term, is
merely the claim that our folk psychological beliefs are derived from a tacit theory we
possess concerning human psychology. The theory theorist must claim that our beliefs in
the sincerity and the competence of others are either learned or innate parts of this theory.~6 1 argued in section II that innateness does not speak to the issue of justification; it is
quite possible for the beliefs to be innate and still abductively justified. If, on the other
hand, the Sincerity Principle and the Competence Principle are learned, then presumably
they are either induced or are learned via testimony. Surprisingly, even in this case, the
inductivist need not concede defeat, for what is at issue is the justification of these
beliefs, not merely their origin, and it is hard to see how testimony could justify me in
~5 Contra Stich and Nichols [12], the debate between the simulation theorist and the theory theorist
is not about whether people possess folk psychological theories. The generalizations I am relying on constitute a theory, insofar as any set of generalizations does. What is at issue is the
nature of that theory and the role it plays in mental state ascription. The simulation theory must
admit that we do have folk theories; it is just that we do not (always) use these theories to make
third-person mental state ascriptions.
~6 According to Fodor [3], the whole theory is innate, afortiori these beliefs must be innate. Paul
Churchland, on the other hand [1], claims that the theory is learned, these two beliefs included,
presumably.

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believing these two principles. The fact that you tell me that you .are sincere is not sufficient to justify my belief in your sincerity. Perhaps your saying so makes me consider the
hypothesis and subsequently subject it to test, but in that case, it is no longer really a testimonial belief. Any genuinely testimonial support for the Competence Principle or the
Sincerity Principle would be hopelessly circular. If these beliefs are justified, then they
must be inductively justified on this version of the theory theory, so the theory theory is
at least compatible with inductivism.
This does not imply that our position concerning testimonial justification is independent of our position concerning simulation and the theory theory. On the contrary, the
simulation theory offers a strong argument against WPA in virtue of enlarging the inductive sample and a strong positive argument in favour of inductivism in that simulation
only gives us particular beliefs, so that the formulation of general beliefs will require
inductive generalization. The theory theories give us neither of these arguments, at least
not as obviously as the simulation theory does. Thus the cognitive scientific debate concerning the mechanisms underlying third-person mental state ascription is extremely
relevant to the philosophical debate concerning the status of testimony.
I hope that the general approach embodied here, combined with a number of the particular claims, suggests that the project of accounting for our justified testimonial beliefs
is better pursued by leaning on psychology than by leaning on the philosophy of language - I have tried to show that the arguments that Coady borrows from the philosophy
of language are unsuccessful and that the outcome of a cognitive scientific debate will
have an effect on the plausibility of inductivism. The basis on which we believe testimony is at least partly an empirical issue; it would be odd if we could resolve this issue by
the use of a priori arguments. It is not yet clear whether the simulation theory or some
version of the theory theory is going to turn out to be right (or perhaps something not yet
thought of). Certainly there are important theoretical considerations that bear directly on
these views, but there is also a lot of empirical work in cognitive development yet to be
done that will be very relevant to this project. Yet, despite this present uncertainty, I
think that the foregoing offers some reasons to be optimistic about an inductivist theory
of testimonial justification.~7

University of Arizona

Received March 1996

Revised August 1996

'~ Thanks to Alvin Goldman, the University of Arizona Epistemology Reading Group, and three
anonymous referees for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

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