Telling as Letting Know

Abstract

We often find out facts about distant times and places from the words of unexamined authorities. Francis Bacon was fined £40,000 nearly 400 years ago for taking bribes while in public office. Some of us know this just by reading popular books on the history of philosophy, not necessarily written by great historians whose strength of documentary evidence we have cared to establish first. I also know that I was born on the 16th of September. My mother told me so. Thus parents, books, teachers, newspapers, the radio, historians, eye-witnesses, laboratory-technicians and specialists tell us that p, and as a result, on many occasions — though not on all — we come to know that p.