Olmos


Testimony and Socially Sanctioned Common Grounds     211

Making it Public: Testimony and Socially
Sanctioned Common Grounds1

Universidad Nacional de
Educación a Distancia

PAULA OLMOS

Abstract: Contrary to current individualistic
epistemology, Classical rhetoric provides us
with a pragmatical and particularly dynamic
conception of ‘testimony’ as a source made
available for the orator by the particular
community in which she acts. In order to
count as usable testimony, a testimony to
which one could appeal in further
communications, any discourse must
comply with specific rules of social sanction.
A deliberate attention to the social practices
in which testimony is given and assessed
may offer us a more accurate view of its
epistemological role.

Résumé: Contrairement à l’épistémologie
individualiste courante, la rhétorique
classique nous apporte une conception
pragmatique et particulièrement
dynamique du « témoignage » : c’est une
source rendue disponible à l’orateur par
sa communauté. Un témoignage légitime
auquel nous pouvons faire appel dans nos
entretiens doit se conformer à des règles
spécifiques de sanction sociale. Une
attention délibérée sur les pratiques
sociales dans lesquelles nous avançons et
évaluons des témoignages peut nous offrir
une vue plus exacte du rôle
épistémologique des témoignages.

© Informal Logic Vol. 27, No. 2 (2006): pp. 211-227.

Keywords:  argumentation, argument from authority, classical rhetoric, contextualism,

1. Gobalism, contextualism and pragmatism in studies of testimony

“How can you tell truth from lies?” he queried in his new, immovable manner.
“I don´t know how you do it in Russia,” I began, rather nettled by his attitude.
He interrupted me. “In Russia, and in general everywhere in a newspaper, for
instance. The colour of the ink and the shapes of the letters are the same.”
“Well, there are other trifles one can go by. The character of the publication,
the general verisimilitude of the news, the consideration of the motive, and
so on. I don´t trust blindly the accuracy of special correspondents but why
should this one have gone to the trouble of concocting a circumstancial
falsehood on a matter of no importance to the world?” (Joseph Conrad,
Under Western Eyes)



212     Paula Olmos

As it is well known, testimony of others, as a particularly interesting and traditionally
neglected source of information and knowledge, is a key issue in current
epistemological studies. Among the lines that divide the different standpoints about
what testimony amounts to in epistemology, the one that has been most widely
discussed and exploited is what distinguishes reductionist from non-reductionist
approaches. It is a distinction, though, that specifically regards different standards
for the justification of the knowledge acquired: either in need of further, independent
and ideally non-testimonial support (Fricker, 1987, 1994) or bearing a right in itself
to count as reasonably justified belief (Coady, 1992). The opposition has little to
offer in terms of defining or demarcating what we should, or actually do, consider
an instance of testimony and thus we might, in principle, expect a wide variety of
alternative descriptions as introductory remarks and assumptions in both
reductionist and non-reductionist papers. But this happens not to be so. In fact,
the most generalized view coincides with J. Lackey’s introductory setting in a
recent collective volume on testimony:

One of the main questions in the epistemology of testimony is how we
successfully acquire justified belief or knowledge on the basis of what other
people tell us. This, rather than what testimony is, is often taken to be the
issue of central import from an epistemological point of view. Because of this,
those who are interested in the epistemic status of testimonial beliefs often
embrace a very broad notion of what it is to testify. (Lackey-Sosa, 2006: 2)

The problem with this view is that it precludes the possibility of looking, in a more
detailed way, at the possibly very wide-ranging dominion to which the particular
view on justification that is being defended would apply and, thus, embraces in
advance, and without explicitly saying so, a globalist or universalist approach that
is, in many cases, subject to counter-examples. It seems that such a global approach
should correspond to a relatively homogeneous and well-defined dominion, while
a heterogeneous and complicated realm which, in our view, belongs to the concept
of testimony, and much more to the related issue of epistemic interdependence
(Kusch, 2002)—would demand some kind of further differentiation, probably based
on a certain contextualism. The reason why most current epistemologists do not
so embrace that alternate route seems to me to rest on the fact that they are, also
implicitly, accepting, as a basic frame, some version of the traditional division of
the sources of knowledge. Perception, reasoning, memory and testimony is the
standard quartet (Kusch-Lipton, 2002); sometimes introspection and intuition are
added (Audi, 2006); and sometimes inductive and deductive reasoning are separately
considered (Graham, 2006). As a result, their views on testimony as the social
component of knowledge merely complete an already well-construed
epistemological system of justification. This is specially so with reductionists, but
it is equally visible in many current non-reductionist approaches (Graham, 2006).
Although there is no necessary link, it usually takes some challenge to that neat
departmental view—the view that the only non-individual component of our
knowledge is the reception, within our individual epistemic machinery, of what



Testimony and Socially Sanctioned Common Grounds     213

others tell us—to produce the kind of awe in front of the conspicuously enormous
diversity of the dominion of testimony that usually determines a choice in favor of
contextualism. This is not the only possibility though. The awareness of this initial
diversity has led some authors to shift the focus from the problems of justification
towards a better definition of testimony. They search, thus, for some essential
traits that would be present as constitutive—or, at least, paradigmatic—conditions
in broadly all instances of testimony or the communication of information. The
alternatives are, again, varied. One route is trying some kind of genealogical method,
modeled for example on Craig’s (1990) approach, referring to an imaginary state
of nature or abstract pre-conditional state, in which humans would, as a matter of
fact (being what and how they are), require “good information” (Kusch,
forthcoming) or feel the need to  “trust others” (Faulkner, forthcoming), and so
give birth to a proto-institution of proto-testimony or proto-trust that would be the
model under which to approach the wide variety of its real instances. A second
possibility is to use the theoretical resources regarding general pragmatical
conditions of language use, comprehension and exchange to describe certain
features of the situation under which any testimony would be delivered, interpreted
and evaluated. Thus, G. Origgi (forthcoming) offers an account of testimony in
which the key concept is the “presumption of relevance” informing the articulation
between “trust” and “interpretation” in the evaluation of other’s utterances and
communications. There have been, finally, various attempts to analyze testimony
under the frame of the theory of speech acts, defining its own success and sincerity
conditions (Moran, 2006; Kauffeld and Fields, 2003). The most salient problem
with the last-mentioned proposal is that the different definitions provided by the
authors for a supposedly identifiable speech act stress different aspects of our
interest in testimony (ethical issues in the case of Moran’s account, veracity and
accuracy conditions in Kauffeld and Fields) and apply, in fact, to different ranges
of phenomena, revealing again the intuitive extension of a notion that is being,
somehow artificially, restricted for theoretical purposes.

In any case, these are, no doubt, interesting and very fruitful approaches that
define  general, and allegedly constitutive, frames in which to place our
comprehension of testimony. Nevertheless, it seems that a more contextual approach
that would address the real (current or historical) practices of giving, receiving,
evaluating and using (appealing to) testimony of others would have to go beyond
these general features, and probably contradict some of them. It does not seem
even possible to define in advance which parameters are going to determine the
relevant “context” for a particular institution of testimony. Moreover, neither
“context” nor “relevance” should, in our view, be seen as notions that can simply
“solve” the justificatory controversy between reductionists and non-reductionist.
In this sense, the view and defense of contextualism that N. Vassallo (2006) offers,
for example, seems to be restricted to the vindication of a device to decide, on the
basis of the issue’s “context”—in this case reduced, at least in the examples given,
to the “import” and “consequence” of the subject-matter—in which cases to apply



214     Paula Olmos

one or the other strategy for justification. And this is not, in our view, a very
interesting use of “context,” although it corresponds to the restricted view of
contextualism that is usually employed in epistemology. On her part, Origgi
(forthcoming) also begins by presenting her account as a “third way” between
reductionism and non-reductionism, even though her notion of a “presumption of
relevance” has much more far-reaching consequences for the way testimony should
be approached, because it really addresses the establishment of a particular frame
from which to “interpret” the testimonial exchange that excludes both globalist
standpoints.

Now, talking about real practices of testimony, the fact is that, beyond what
imaginary genealogies tell us about proto-testimony and its values for an abstract
community of human beings, what we really find are historically and culturally
situated, specifically field-dependent and role-dependent, and partially or totally
ritualized social practices in which there is an exchange of information that is
generally interpreted, evaluated and subsequently used according to the setting in
which it has been given. But the practical examples we typically find in epistemology
papers on testimony are usually described in such a way as to avoid these conditions.
Probably one of the situations most usually mentioned and discussed is that of the
stranger in a city who asks for directions to go somewhere. There is usually no
allusion to possible language problems (interpretation is deemed transparent); none
to the fact that a stranger must, indeed, know a lot of things about the city, the
context and the local discursive practices before asking for specific directions;
and none to any of the common grounds—views about politeness, proper address
or appearance but also about time and space conditions for going from one place
to another, etc.—that both participants must share in order for the exchange of
information to be more or less successful. It seems as though “asking for directions
in a strange city” would be the kind of situation to which urban, traveling, polyglot
and cosmopolitan academics are so accustomed as to consider it an everyday,
non-problematic instance that is good for a decontextualized analysis. But not even
this should be seen as such a universal situation or generalized practice. The first
traveler arriving at an unknown (to her) land would never act in such a way, nor
would people belonging to smaller or more closed societies, people who do not
usually travel, who are not used to guides or maps, and who would hardly arrive to
that situation in which “just a piece of information”what is asked, in concretewould
complete their epistemic needs in order to find their way. It seems reasonable to
think that in somehow “similar” circumstances, some of them would turn to highly
institutionalized informers in an interaction that we can no longer analyze neglecting
specific configurations of authority or expertise.

All these considerations indicate, to us, the importance of examining the different
specific practices of testimony institutionalized in specific cultures for specific
fields and actors. In some of them, the significance of the institutional setting and
procedures will be very evident (e.g., testimony in courts, declaring in a public
assembly, lecturing); in others, less so (e.g., private and familiar exchanges or, for



Testimony and Socially Sanctioned Common Grounds     215

some, asking for directions from a non-descript stranger). But, in any case, social
and generally implicit norms inform our taking part in all these exchanges, so that
any analysis that tries to avoid such pragmatic normativity and base its results in a
logical confrontation of pure claims with a view to their epistemological justification
will be certainly losing a lot of reasonable responses to its own problems.

It is refreshing, thus, to look at how the tradition of Classical rhetoric, from its
Greek sources on, has addressed issues of testimony from a much more
pragmatically conscious point of view. It does this, first of all, by taking a dynamic
and in medias res look at the complicated pool of social testimonial exchanges, that
is, by accepting that theories about testimonial utterances and their subsequent use
take place in an already working discursive society in which previous testimonies
have already become, to a greater or lesser degree, part of what is shared and has
been sanctioned by the community, in such a way that new utterances enter the
field of communication with certain aspirations—to attain particular positions—
and, so to say, against an immense contrast background. Classical rhetoric was
particularly interested in what a trained orator would subsequently do with received
testimony (and we will see that this notion includes more than we suspect). As a
result, although it seems to have paid less attention to the conditions in which
testimony is given and received, in fact what this kind of approach does is centre
on the dynamic aspects of an ongoing social interaction in which particular pieces
of information, from different sanctioned sources, are listened to, accepted, put to
use, brought out or remembered. All these actions or practices point to different
perspectives of the testimonial issue.

On the other hand, if anything, rhetoric has always been conscious of the
pragmatical and institutional context of utterances, and so the rhetorical approach
to testimony provides us with an interesting point of departure for a pragmatic
contextualism. The fact that, from its first theoretical expressions, rhetoric addressed
very specific and momentous public practices which determined many of its
Classical features, allows us to examine up to what point such a specific domain
makes its claims more or less generalizable or, on the contrary, too much related to
subsequently lost procedures.

From the point of view of a rhetorically inspired pragmatic contextualism, a
particular, situated practice of testimony would, accordingly, be a normative
institutional fact (Searle, 1969), and therefore subject to an analysis that would
take into account the norms that socially rule that fact or particular practice, however
sophisticated. On the other hand, the pragmatic dynamics of “the game of giving
and asking for reasons” (Brandom, 1994: 158), to which, in our opinion, the
notion of testimony belongs, require a more complex analysis than “the pragmatics
of saying and meaning things” (Kauffeld and Fields, 2003). They require at least
an analysis with more actors or roles, and especially with more stages, because it
is the subsequent appeal to testimony as a reason to accept a content that is the
specific mark of the different practices of testimony. Testimony delivered in “the
game of giving and asking for reasons” involves, not just the expression of some



216     Paula Olmos

thought or the representation of some reference, but a specific practice of openly
placing the contents of our claims within the social pool of reasons and beliefs that
can be subsequently appealed to as such (as testimony). Their content, thus, is
subject, in the first “disclose” stage, to both the institutional setting and the normative
restrictions of a complex net of expectations (previously assumed, and usually
implicit), background beliefs and “presumptions of relevance” (Origgi, forthcoming),
that, among other things, make possible our generally enthymematic way of putting
things (Vega-Olmos, 2006): i.e., it is subject to “the inferential articulation of the
social practice of giving and asking for reasons” (Brandom, 1994: 79). Only within
such a pragmatic context may their content become, subsequently, part of that
same socially sanctioned common ground, so that it will be available for use in a
second “appeal” stage as a privileged claim.

In the next two sections, we will try to present the main guidelines for both a
contextual analysis of the institutional setting of testimonial practices, and a dynamic
approach to the specific pragmatics involved in them, using suggestions from
both Classical rhetoric and contemporary pragmatic approaches. Section 4 will
provide an historical account of the Classical tradition of testimony and its
subsequent development.

2. Public and private practices of testimony

It is but becoming that weighty negotiations should be spread over many
days, that the same requests and arguments should be repeated in the same
words, at many successive interviews, and receive the same evasive answers.
Matters of state demand the dignity of such a procedure as if time itself had
to wait on the power and wisdom of rulers. Such are the proceedings of
embassies and the dignified patience of envoys. (Joseph Conrad, The Rescue,
A Romance of the Shallows)

If we are going to take a seriously contextualist approach to testimony, one of the
first things to do is to distinguish between types of testimony or, as we prefer,
types of testimonial practices. It seems possible to describe these in terms of the
agents involved, the norms that rule possible procedures, the physical and
institutional space in which these take place (Fredal, 2006), the field or dominion
that is usually associated with these practices, and the net of authorities (individuals,
established beliefs or facts) with which testimony will be contrasted, etc., and to
build a sociological description and analysis of some particular case or group of
cases (Shapin, 1994; Shapiro, 2002). On the other hand, our own hypothesis is
that it would be impossible to make an exhaustive inventory of these practices or
even to decide a general classification system, because these appear in history as
related to the most diverse dominions.2 However, we can have some guidelines or
heuristic hypotheses to approach them from a more general perspective.

In the influential book that somehow inaugurated the current discussion about
this issue in epistemological circles, C.A.J. Coady (Coady, 1992) distinguished
between formal and natural testimony, the paradigms of which would be,



Testimony and Socially Sanctioned Common Grounds     217

respectively, the statements of witnesses in a courtroom and exchanges “to be
encountered in such everyday circumstances as exhibit the ‘social operations of
the mind’: giving someone directions to the post office, reporting what happened
in an accident” (p. 38). By focusing on the latter, as most epistemologists do,
Coady seems to have tried to avoid the strictures of certain highly institutionalized
settings in order to attain a more fundamental view of the act of testifying. But it is
this kind of move that diverts our attention from the very conditions that explain
the way we take part in, interpret and evaluate particular testimonial practices.
Kauffeld and Fields (2003) have also mentioned this problem:

formal testimony [...] as a form that makes explicit much that is assumed or
goes unremarked upon in ordinary conversational settings, can give us
guidance as to where we should be looking in these less formal context to
find the element that we need.

Following this suggestion, our own heuristic hypothesis would therefore be the
opposite of Coady’s. That is, instead of considering formal (institutional, public)
practices of testimony as extremely ritualized, sophisticated and complicated ways
to deal with what we expediently solve, in a more essential format, in private,
natural, life, we propose to  contemplate these so-called natural practices as
cases in which, under certain social conditions  (just in certain cultures and, in
many cases, tentatively), it is possible to engage in a more relaxed “everyday”
exchange in which some of the more formal conditions can be (really or just
apparently) dropped or disregarded. It is the social setting that tells us, acculturated
individuals, whether and when that is possible, and we all have experiences of
being rebuked (or not even understood) when our assumptions about the possibilities
of a relaxed approach fail. Accordingly, instead of building a basic account of
testimony centered on everyday, allegedly universal, cases, to which “further
conditions” (Lackey, 2006: note 2) should be added in order to subsume the formal
ones, we propose, as rhetorical tradition has always done, to focus our interest on
paradigmatically procedural instances, such as courtroom witnessing, religious
rituals, speeches in the public assembly, public controversies, and embassies and
envoys, in which the rich variety of social conditions and normative constraints
(“internal constraints” in Kauffeld and Fields terminology) explain many features
that tend to become “transparent” in apparently less rule-governed instances.

There is, apparently, a certain genealogical idea behind this heuristic scheme. It
is the idea that somehow our sophisticated—or extremely local—field-dependent,
role-dependent, ritualized practices are prior to and the original source of our
apparently all-pervading democratic, cosmopolitan, egalitarian testimonial exchanges
with strangers. It could be a kind of historical hypothesis too, as opposed to
genealogies based on imaginary “states of nature”. But we would like to make plain
that we are not maintaining any realistic hypothesis about a certain historical or
cultural development, and least of all about any definite origins. Rhetorical theory
and any theory about public, institutional practices of talking to each other,
exchanging, sanctioning and using information start in medias res, with an already



218     Paula Olmos

working society, with its ongoing public and private, formal and socially-regarded-
as-natural, practices and realms. There are private practices of testimony that can
become formal and institutional at a certain point in certain cultures (we can think,
for example, of some historically situated institution of education in which teaching
becomes public and formal in a particular moment),  and  at the other extreme we
just have to think of all those situations in which the tendency among us has been,
for a long time, to keep dropping formalities. On the other hand, the kind of
conditions and more or less formal constraints that apply in the evaluation of
testimonies in a certain situation might change more than we think in apparently
rather similar settings. Just to give an illustration within argumentation studies,
recent empirical research about persuasiveness reveals even national differences
within contemporary Europe in the evaluation of the authority of testimony that
supports applications for research project funding. While in some countries the
authority of academic titles is still decisive, in others it is personal experience that
makes an “expert” (Hoeken-Smeulders, 2006). Again, we would not try to imply
any absolute priority—or any kind of priority—for what we have called public
(formal) practices of testimony in opposition to private (natural) ones. But it
seems that following rhetorical tradition and paying more attention to public and
formal testimonial practices could be a good alternative to the current
decontextualized setting based on an evasive model of natural testimony.

All these considerations seem to invite us to a holistic and interdisciplinary
approach to the issue of testimony that is explicitly rejected by epistemologists like
Fumerton (2006) in a rather peculiar way. Paradoxically enough, Fumerton points
out many of the difficulties faced by those trying to account for a sui generis
justification of testimony, and declares: “I suspect that there are all sorts of
background beliefs playing a critical causal role in the resulting ‘output’ beliefs”,
only to add: “But I’m a philosopher not a psychologist/sociologist/cognitive scientist”
(pp. 88-89). This is a view we find surprising enough when both from the sociology
of knowledge and from the rich and conspicuously interdisciplinary field of
argumentation studies, we can achieve a much more compelling analysis of an
ample variety of testimonial practices together with their particular means of
interpretation, evaluation and assimilation.

3. A  social net of common knowledge and experience

For bring me a man as accomplished, as clear and acute in thinking, and as
ready in delivery as you please; if, for all that, he is a stranger to social
intercourse, precedent, tradition and the manners and disposition of his fellow-
countrymen, those commonplaces from which proofs are derived will avail
him but little. (Cicero, De Oratore, II, §131)

Speaking about the conditions for the possibility of enthymematic argumentation,
Vega and Olmos (2006) make use of:



Testimony and Socially Sanctioned Common Grounds     219

the concepts of “cognitive environment” and “script” to depict a kind of
undeclared guide resulting from the common background of knowledge and
expectations shared by the agents that becomes the basis of the enthymeme’s
soundness and persuasiveness.

It is this same net of available socially sanctioned common grounds that makes
possible the dynamic pragmatics of testimony as involving three steps:

(1) the interpretation of utterances in their particular setting according
     to a “presumption of relevance” (Origgi, forthcoming);
(2) their inferential integration and contrast within a pragmatic frame of
    “giving and asking for reasons” (Brandom, 1994: 79, 89); and
(3) their possible incorporation into the net of socially authorized “usable
     testimony”.

By focusing on the epistemic evaluation of some particular piece of information
delivered within a testimonial exchange, studies of testimony usually disregard the
discursive texture and context of the practices involved. It is not, for example,
only the answer to an inquiry that counts, but also the question itself, the amount
of implicit presumptions that it carries in order to frame possible responses, the
realm of “relevance” that it (more or less successfully) delimits. Within “a civilization
advanced enough to exploit testimony as extensively as we do” (Sosa, 2006),
testimonies cannot be evaluated as isolated items.

This was clear from the beginnings of the theoretical consideration of our
practices, especially public practices, of exchanging reasons. Thus, Aristotle’s
Topics, beyond offering a series of devices to confirm, support, contradict or
undercut statements, places the notion of ta éndoxa (Vega, 1998) at the base of its
general approach to dialectic or public discussion. This term refers to those claims
that are plausible because socially reputed, that is, to those propositions “which
seem so to everyone, or to the majority, or to the wise—and either to all of them,
or to the majority, or to the most notable and reputable [endoxois] among them”
(Topics: 100b21-23), that is, express the point of view of everyone, of most people,
or of a few but accredited experts in a certain field. This can be seen as just a kind
of well-meaning “advice” to someone who wants to win such encounters  (“do
not say foolish things”, “stick to commonsense”) but it is in fact presented as an
almost constitutive norm of what it is to take part in understandable and reasonable
social discussions:

for no man of sense would put into a proposition that which is no one´s
opinion, nor into a problem that which is manifest to everyone or to most
people; for the latter raises no question, while the former no one would
accept. (Topics: 104a 5-8)

Thus, although Aristotle’s conception of a socially sanctioned plausibility (or
reputability) relates to the real pragmatic conditions of political, ethical and theoretical
discussions in Ancient Greece, it is still a paradigm of a contextually and pragmatically



220     Paula Olmos

conscious approach to discursive interchange. According to Vega (1998), Aristotle’s
conception and use of ta éndoxa might still provide us with interesting “hints” and
“guidelines” which could help orient our contemporary studies about argumentation
and which are, precisely: (1) the pragmatic approach to plausibility; (2) its
consideration in terms of doxastic attitudes (views, states of opinion); (3) the
gradual character of plausibility; (4) the continuity of an extended argumentation
domain, with demonstration and fallacy as external limits; (5) the treatment of
argument as a process of discursive interaction and conflict and (6) the controversial
character of plausibility (the implausibility of the counter-proposition and counter-
argument). It is this kind of  “endoxastic (socially reputed) plausibility” (Vega-
Olmos, 2006), moreover, that makes possible our usually enthymematic practices
of discursive interchange in which the agents share a common background of
knowledge and expectations (a cognitive environment and a script of common and
ordinary experience).

The pragmatic “space of giving and asking for reasons” presupposes, thus, an
already rich and more or less organized set of shared assumptions that places
particular utterances—candidates to become usable testimony—in a context of
contrasting assertions which takes care of their normative classification within the
common pool of beliefs and inferential connections. As Brandom puts it:

There are particular instances of believing or being committed that are non-
inferential in the sense that their acquisition was not the conclusion of an
inferential process. [But] There are no beliefs or discursive commitments that
are non-inferential in that what is expressed by a sentence can be understood
without mastering inferential relations that content stands in to others.
(Brandom, 1994: 216)

Thus, by means of the “presumption of relevance”, utterances are assigned to
(interpreted as belonging to) a particular field and practice and, at least tentatively,
have attributed to them a certain value or character (a degree of authority) that,
together with their institutional setting, delimits which elements of the previous
cognitive background should be affected by it. Once delivered and interpreted
within a pragmatic frame of giving and asking for reasons, utterances can become
usable testimonies, that is become part of a heritage belonging to a more or less
extended group—a field, a community—that can make use of them in subsequent
exchanges:

Putting a sentence forward in the public arena as true is something one
interlocutor can do to make that sentence available for others to use in making
further assertions. (Brandom, 1994: 170)

In order to count as usable testimony, any linguistic instance should, thus, have
complied with the specific norms the group or community has established in order
to authorize it: from the most basic conditions of its comprehensibility or
interpretability to the most sophisticated procedures for its acquiring a relatively
high cognitive rank.



Testimony and Socially Sanctioned Common Grounds     221

4. The use of socially sanctioned grounds in Classical rhetoric

For purposes of proof, however, the material at the orator’s disposal is twofold,
one kind made up of the things which are not thought out by himself, but
depend upon the circumstances and are dealt with by rule, for example
documents, oral evidence, informal agreements, examinations, statutes,
decrees of the Senate, judicial precedents, magisterial orders, opinions of
counsel, and whatever else is not produced by the orator, but is supplied to
him by the case itself or by the parties: the other kind is founded entirely on
the orator’s reasoned argument. And so, with the former sort, he need only
consider the handling of his proofs, but with the latter, the discovery of them
as well. (Cicero, De Oratore, II, §116-117)

Classical rhetorical theory from Aristotle on took care of this contextual frame in a
way that can be revealing for contemporary studies of testimony and which presents
interesting points of contact with certain modern pragmatical approaches. Thus,
Brandom (1994: 175), talks about two ways of supporting the legitimacy of an
assertion: a “content-based authority (invoked by justifying the claim through
assertion of other sentences from which the claim to be vindicated can appropriately
be inferred)” and a “person-based authority (invoked by deferring to the claim of
another)”, declaring, moreover, that this combination “is characteristic of asserting
as a doing”. His view coincides, in some way, with the traditional division contained
in Aristotle’s Rhetoric (1355b35 ff.) (and repeated for ages) between artificial
(éntechnoi, belonging to the art or technique) and non-artificial (átechnoi) proofs
or means of supporting a cause. If the former were based on topics, that is, either
accepted universal conditionals (maxims) or inferential schemes exploiting more
or less formal or material links (differentiae) (on “intrapersonal, intercontent
inheritance”, in Brandom’s terminology), the latter made use of socially inherited,
already authorized, public material, that is, “interpersonal, intracontent inheritance”.
These non-artificial (átechnoi) proofs, subsequently denominated testimony
altogether, comprise, according to Aristotle, five sorts of things: laws, witnesses,
contracts, torture (that is, confessions or claims made under torture) and oaths
(Rhetoric, I  15, 1375a23-1377b15).

Aristotle, and all the tradition after him, offers particular suggestions and rules
for the oratorical treatment of such extrinsic material (in Ciceronian terminology)
whose legitimacy (or relevance) is not provided by the orator but by a previous
public sanction of which the orator himself takes advantage. This kind of
interpersonal socialized material is, in principle, more varied and directly subject to
contextual and particularized conditions than the more abstract “proofs” or
argumentation devices based on logical or conceptual links, which comprise the
“artificial” means of support, and therefore presents a less classifiable casuistry
that leaves it out-of reach of a technique. From another point of view, these oratorical
devices are also considered átechnoi (non-technical or artificial) because, as Cicero
says in the paragraph quoted at the beginning of this section, they must be handled
directly, not being the result of rhetorical invention.



222     Paula Olmos

In any case, the category of testimony as inherited by rhetoricians up to early
modern times was never a completely fixed one. On the one hand, if it began as a
category closely related to forensic practice, as the classificatory lists of Aristotle
or Cicero suggest, it was soon increasingly related to recourse to reputed authorities
more than to circumstantial witnessing, and thus confounded and identified, from
an analytical more than a rhetorical perspective, with a ‘topic from authority’. On
the other hand, by means of this kind of theoretical treatment, the category was
expanded, as a model, to a widely generalized field of argumentation, and thus
classified among other rational and equally abstract schemes. This type of approach
is already present in Boethius’s De Differentiis Topicis (whose list of topics is
allegedly taken from Themistius), where the main division between artificial and
non-artificial proofs is dropped and where a new topic “a rei iudicio” appears.
This topic will be named “ab auctoritate” in the Petrus Hispanus’s 13th century
version of the topical system as presented in the Summulae Logicales, a most
standard source for at least three centuries (Green-Pedersen, 1984: 50).

Boethius’s definition of the topic “a rei iudicio” does not relate to Aristotelian
Rhetoric, where the átechnoi proofs were considered, but to his dialectic as exposed
in the Topics with the following wording: “quod omnibus vel pluribus vel sapientibus
hominibus videtur” (what seems true to everyone or the many or the wise). This
is again a paraphrase of Aristotle’s notion of ta éndoxa, but this time not as a
general basis for the practice of public discussion but as one of the means among
other rational, conceptual and logical devices (the rest of the topics) to be used in
argumentation. Although we cannot develop here this long story, it seems clear
that this Medieval move towards the restriction of this category of proofs to just
an ab auctoritate scheme—“unicuique experto in sua scientia credendum est” (any
expert ought to be believed within his science), in Petrus Hispanus’s wording—
talks about the reality of the social restriction of instances of sanction and the
complete transformation and limitation of the available social spaces and practices
of “giving and asking for reasons”.

However, we should not forget that the possible expansion of the forensic
model of the use of (appeal to) testimony in any kind of argumentation was always
present in the suggestion traditionally made to orators (and, later on, writers and
preachers) to keep a collection of sayings, sentences of sages, and commonplaces
to be used in public speeches, as propositions or claims of which one can take
advantage. These would function as Brandom’s “free moves”:

There are sentence types that would require a great deal of work for one to
get into a position to challenge, such as ‘Red is a color’, ‘There have been
black dogs’, ‘Lightning frequently precedes thunder’, and similar
commonplaces. These are treated as ‘free moves’ by the members of our
speech community –they are available to just about anyone any time to use
as premises, to assert unchallenged. (Brandom, 1994: 222)

From this brief historical review we might conclude that from the standpoint of
the rhetorical, public and interpersonal space of giving and asking for reasons, the



Testimony and Socially Sanctioned Common Grounds     223

category of testimony was always understood as that of usable testimony based
on different ways of institutionalized sanction whose legitimacy had to be
acknowledged by the members of the community in question. The classification
of such a category, difficult and ever-changing as it was, tended to be based on a
typification of sources that was also a typification of sanctions. Thus, the main
distinction was traditionally that between divine and human testimony,3 while the
latter was usually divided into public (or common) and private (or proper). This
last division should not, however, be identified with Coady’s (1992) mentioned
one of formal vs. natural testimony, because in the rhetorical framing of the
question, the setting was always a public normative one in which the opposition
regarded the distinction between highly institutionalized and general sanctions,
valid at any time (such as those of “written and unwritten laws, plebiscites,
deliberations of the senate, verdicts of the sovereigns, edicts of the magistrates,
replies of the prudent, the common opinion of doctors, proverbs and adages”4)
and the authority granted, at a particular time, to particular pieces of information
related to the case in question. (One of the possible divisions of this latter category
includes “spoken testimonies, either made of free will or forced by religion or by
rigor, and written documents”.5)

Taking in account the very long run of the tradition of Classical rhetoric and
dialectic and depending on things like the author’s period or the particular field for
which a certain text on rhetoric or argumentation was written, the appreciation of
testimony as a whole and of its different classes changed. Thus, near the end of
the 16th century, a Spanish author could make an admonitory remark presenting a
field-related restriction of the use of testimony. This would be tolerable in private
affairs and judicial causes, and, within the sciences, in theology (based on revelation,
or divine testimony), law studies (based on prevailing laws) and grammar (based
on the writers’ authority):

but in all other sciences, although it is valuable that our opinions and
standpoints should coincide with those of the leading writers, still, because
the force of reason has more weight than the dignity of its source, a proof by
testimony is not much worth6.

This kind of attitude is an indication of the subsequent historical loss of place of
authority as a valuable scientific source and sanctioned scheme of argumentation,
up to the point where, from a logical point of view, any appeal to authority or
testimony began to be seen as an ad verecundiam fallacy (Woods-Walton, 1982)7.
It is just recently that argumentation studies have began to contextualize and adjust
such a radical claim. On the other hand, it is not surprising that traditional
foundationalist epistemology, whose roots go back to the times where authority-
based science was at its lowest point, should have been at such pains to integrate
testimony and testimonial practices, including justifying practices and norms peculiar
to testimony. Again Brandom helps us put it:

Classical foundationalism considers only justifying in the narrow sense of
an inferential activity, not in the broader sense of vindication that includes



224     Paula Olmos

the communicational dimension appealed to by deferential entitling (the
authority of testimony). (1994: 204-205)

5. Conclusion

Current studies of testimony include many different perspectives that are sometimes
remarkably mixed up. When the idea is to center on the activities and situations
that happen to an individual knower and the amount of what she gets from outside
as already worked out—from others, from instruments etc.—the problem addressed
is usually trust and/or justification in that trust, but this starting point usually treats
that individual herself as an isolated and transparent element who appears just in
time to receive and subsequently evaluate information, as if she should not be
sharing a lot presuppositions and taking part in certain practices before receiving
it. Thus, any instance of testimony seems to be analyzed as if it were the first of its
kind, either in that person’s life or, as in genealogical accounts, in the community
history. The advantages of assuming an in medias res perspective come from an
awareness of the real setting of testimonial practices and procedures, and this is
important if we want to transcend an abstract analysis just in terms of the testimonial
product (knowledge or information).

Linguistic pragmatics comes to the aid of this situation and, thus, both from
the point of view of the “presumption of relevance” implicated in any exchange
and from the analysis of the inferential or other commitments involved in assertions,
we obtain new insights into the assumptions put to work in testimonial settings.
But when we call an assertion an instance of testimony, or take it, interpret it, use
it, or remember it, as testimony—and let us leave aside other types of testimonial
sources, as instruments, etc.—we want to say something more about it. We want
to place it within a dynamic and social frame for which the import of such pieces
of information involves, more than their specific accuracy or truth, the institution
and configuration of a shared net of authority and common grounds to which we
may always appeal. Even if we extend our analysis from Classical testimonial
practices to cover cases of private, casual and inconsequential utterances, the
point of view that sees them as testimonial (a derivative sense of testimonial to our
view) would refer them to a more comprehensive frame. Testimony is not just
what we say or listen to, but what we share and make public, what might be
socially sanctioned as proper and valid, or rejected; what once delivered becomes
part of a collective treasure (Brandom’s heritage). And this happens in different
institutional settings and comes in different practices, some of them derived from
others but finally distinct, that we should take into account in all their complexity.

Here we claim that Classical rhetoric, with all its limitations and peculiarities,
was on a better track to give a proper account, even a proper general account,  of
testimony than many contemporary decontextualized approaches. It addressed
issues of understanding, interpreting and using testimony in public settings and
civil and professional practices and not just from a merely descriptive point of



Testimony and Socially Sanctioned Common Grounds     225

view but also with an educational and training concern in mind. Moreover, it dealt
with the particular structure of the social systems of sanction and authority by
placing the dominion of spoken testimony as contiguous to that of agreed principles,
written laws and common notions. There is a lesson to be learned from Classical
rhetoric in this sense, a contextualist and pragmatic lesson that comes from its
realistic and dynamic consideration of the social practices of testimony.

Notes

1 Supported by a Spanish Ministry of Education and Science grant, Research Project HUM2005-
00365. (This article was one of two that received the J. Anthony Blair prize for an outstanding
paper by a graduate student presented at the OSSA 2007 conference. –The Editors)
2 The same happens with “fallacies”, for example in argumentation studies. Although some
authors maintain that, from a formalist point of view, there is a closed number of fallacies, the fact
is that the ways to deceive just develop, appear, disappear and change according to the changing
contexts. Only a theory that, from a restricted logical perspective, focuses on the argument as a
“product” (Vega, 2003: 190s.) can determine in an exhaustive way all possible fallacies.
3 I just know the case of Ralph Lever’s The art of reason, rightly termed witchraft (1573) that
added a category of Infernal testimony.
4 According to the list presented by Cypriano Regneri in his Demonstratio logicae verae iuridica
(1638): “leges scriptae et non scriptae, plebiscita, senatus consulta, principum placita, magistrarum
edicta, responsa prudentium, communis doctorum oppinio, proverbia et adagia”.
5 According to Pedro Simón Abril, Primera parte de la filosofía llamada la lógica, 1587 (2nd ed.
1886: 177).
6 P. Simón Abril, 1587. (2nd ed., 1886: 178).
7 Woods and Walton also point out: “Perhaps there is some truth in the observation that, ever
since the erosion of Aristotle’s authority, Western society has tended to be highly suspicious of
authorities” (1982: 87).

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Paula Olmos
Departamento de Lógica, Historia y Filosofía de la Ciencia

Facultad de Filosofía. U.N.E.D.
Edificio de Humanidades. Despacho 327.

C/ Senda del Rey, 7
28040 Madrid

Spain

 polmos@bec.uned.es