Reductionism versus Anti-Reductionism about Testimony

Reductionism about testimony holds that a hearer's belief in what a speaker asserts is justified only if the hearer has, or could in principle produce, independent evidence — perceptual, inferential, or based on background knowledge of the speaker's track record — that testimony of that general kind, or from that particular speaker, tends to be reliable. Elizabeth Fricker's version, developed across "The Epistemology of Testimony" (1987) and later papers, does not require that a hearer consciously perform an inductive argument on each occasion of testimony, but insists that the hearer must be monitoring the speaker, at least tacitly, for signs of incompetence or insincerity, and that justification for accepting the testimony depends on this monitoring having gone well, so that testimonial justification is ultimately parasitic on the hearer's own independently-grounded assessment of the speaker's reliability, rather than being an unconditional default entitlement.