07/10/2025
Today, 16:00, Sir Charles Wilson Building, room 101A
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Seminar: Can Words Speak for Themselves? Personal and Impersonal Testimony in Mīmāṃsā Epistemology
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Professor Malcolm Keating (Leverhulme Visiting Professor in Philosophy)
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The paper addresses the tradition of Indian philosophy known as Mīmāṃsā, which distinguishes between personal and impersonal testimony. According to Kumārila Bhaṭṭa, personal testimony, or human speech, is justified when the hearer has positive, non-testimonial reasons to accept that the testifier’s claim is true. Impersonal testimony, by contrast, requires no such positive reasons but is justified solely by its delivery of meaningful content. Since Mīmāṃsā philosophers are primarily concerned with Vedic hermeneutics, much philosophical work to date has appropriately emphasised this latter form of testimony. In the paper, Professor Keating reconstructs Kumārila Bhaṭṭa’s arguments through his commentator, Sucarita Miśra, and concludes with preliminary reflections on the possibility of extending claims about impersonal testimony to non-Vedic contexts, particularly the question of whether testimonial justification is inherently anthropocentric, requiring communicative intentions.
Malcolm Keating, Leverhulme Visiting Professor in Philosophy, helps us to think about how Indian philosophers debated the value of testimony. Do we only trust words when we know the speaker is reliable, or can words carry authority on their own, without a speaker’s intention? Drawing on the work of Kumārila Bhaṭṭa and his commentator Sucarita Miśra, Professor Keating considers what this ancient debate can tell us about how we judge truth and meaning today.
Malcolm Keating is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts.
