Abstract
Philosophers have become increasingly interested in testimony (e.g. Coady, Testimony: A philosophical study. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1992; Kusch & Lipton, Stud Hist Philos Sci 33:209–217). In the context of argumentation and persuasion, the distinction between the content of a message and its source is a natural and important one. The distinction has consequently attracted considerable attention within psychological research. There has also been a range of normative attempts to deal with the question of how source and message characteristics should combine to give rise to an overall evaluation of evidential strength (e.g. Walton, Witness testimony evidence: Argumentation, artificial intelligence, and law. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2008). This chapter treats this issue from the perspective of the Bayesian approach to argument (Hahn & Oaksford, Psychol Rev 114:704–732, 2007a; Hahn et al., Informal Log 29:337–367, 2009) and summarises empirical evidence on key intuitions.
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Notes
- 1.
In fact, because it is the case both that A,B |-- A&B and that A&B |-- A as well as A&B |--B, the MIN rule (Eq. 1) can only be satisfied consistently in the case of the conjunction by assuming that Plausibility(A&B) = MIN Plausibility(A), Plausibility(B) (see also Walton 1992, pp. 36, 37; Rescher 1976, p. 16, Theorem 3).
- 2.
The lottery paradox concerns the tension between the fact that it seems rational to believe that each individual ticket of a lottery is likely to lose, yet the conjunction of all of these individual beliefs is false. The preface paradox involves imagining the statements of a book each of which engenders great confidence but which are likely to include an error. Much has been said about these ‘paradoxes’ of rational acceptance. On the present view, what they illustrate is the simple point made here, namely, that one would not want to evaluate conjuncts without consideration of the relationships between statements. The ‘paradoxes’ are consequences of the way seemingly ‘objective’ probabilities concerning lottery tickets or coin flips combine. Hence, any theory of rational belief that wishes to reflect basic mathematical facts about processes of sampling with (coin tosses) or without replacement (lotteries) must respect these combination properties also.
- 3.
If P(A) + P(B) is greater than 1, then P(A & B) will be at a minimum when P(A & ¬B) = 1−P(B).
Therefore, P(A & B) will be at a minimum when it equals P(A)−(1−P(B)), that is, P(A) + P(B )−1. Note also that this means it is the sum of the two probabilities that determines the lower bound on the probability of the conjunct, not the minimum of these two probabilities.
- 4.
The term ‘evidence’ is used here and in the following to refer to anything that might be considered in support of a hypothesis (i.e., a ‘reason’). Hence, the term is used more broadly here than in many discussions of testimony; specifically, something can be evidence for a hypothesis even if that hypothesis turns out to be false, that is, what is often referred to as ‘potential evidence’ (Achinstein 1987); likewise, the term ‘evidence’ as used here includes information which, objectively, turns out not to be diagnostic (cf. Graham 1997); information which is subjectively non-diagnostic is likewise referred to as evidence in this chapter and simply constitutes evidence that is maximally weak.
- 5.
This simple case is also familiar from, for example, Bayesian treatments of the Humean position on miracles; see, e.g. Tucker (2005) and references therein.
- 6.
While there have been very detailed examinations of the impact of source credibility within social psychology (e.g. Birnbaum et al. 1976; Birnbaum and Stegner 1979; Birnbaum and Mellers 1983), these studies have not simultaneously manipulated the diagnosticity of the message content. Finally, both message content and source characteristics have been manipulated simultaneously in a large number of social psychological studies of persuasion (e.g. Chaiken 1980; Petty et al. 1981; Petty and Cacioppo 1984, of many). However, differences in theoretical focus have meant that the data from these studies have typically not been analysed in such a way as to address the question of how these two factors combine because as indicated in the ‘Introduction’, persuasion researchers have typically considered source and content as alternatives that are indicative of two separate cognitive routes to persuasion and have consequently used these factors almost exclusively as a means by which to isolate these different routes. Hence, a comprehensive review by Pornpitakpan (2004) lists fewer than a handful of studies examining the combined effects of message source and content on persuasion.
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Hahn, U., Oaksford, M., Harris, A.J.L. (2013). Testimony and Argument: A Bayesian Perspective. In: Zenker, F. (eds) Bayesian Argumentation. Synthese Library, vol 362. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5357-0_2
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