1. I am grateful here to accounts, both written and spoken, of the doctrines of the school, from Arindam Chakrabarti and Bimal Matilal. This pair of theses seems also to be implicit in the anti-reductionist stance of C. A. J. Coady ‘Testimony and Observation’,Amer. Phil. Quart . 10, No. 2, April 1973, pp. 149–55.
2. Thus for me, the issue of what it takes for a testimony belief to be justified is one with the issue what it takes for it to be knowledge. Those for whom those issues are not the same — since they favour some other conception of knowledge — may read my account as being simply about justification.
3. I.e. a belief originally acquired through testimony, and whose status as knowledge still rests on that pedigree. In Fricker `The Epistemology of Testimony’,Proc. Aris. Soc. Suppl. vol. for 1987, pp. 57–83, I set out a framework which exhibits the complicated interrelations involved here, between original causation, sustaining, and available justifying support of a belief.
4. This argument seems to be implicit in Coady op. cit.
5. In this paper I am assuming that knowledge that such-and-such has been asserted is often had by hearers, and am focusing on the epistemology of the step from there, to knowledge of its truth. See §11.