Knowing from Words

Contemporary epistemologists and philosophers of language have come together in this volume to address an important issue at the confluence of these two branches of philosophy, namely: Can we "know" facts from reliable reports? Besides Hume's subversive discussion of miracles and the literature thereon, testimony has been bypassed by most Western philosophers; whereas in classical Indian (Pramana) theories of evidence and knowledge, philosophical debates have raged for centuries about the status of word-generated knowledge. "Is the response 'I was told by an expert on the subject' as respectable as 'I saw' or 'I inferred' in answer to 'How do you know?'" is a question answered in diverse and subtle ways by Buddhists, Vaisesikas and Naiyayikas. This book makes available those debates, translating from Sanskrit some contemporary Indian Pandits' reactions to Western analytic accounts of meaning and knowledge.This book is intended for advanced undergraduates in philosophy, for researchers - in Australia, Asia, Europe or America - on epistemology, theory of meaning, Indian or comparative philosophy, as well as for specialists interested in this topic of knowledge transmission and epistemic dependence.