Can You Trust Testimony? – Philosophy Tube

1. 

   @darrellee8194

   February 23, 2026 at 3:25 pm

   Why do we trust testimony? Because we have to.
   You don't need justification, when there is no choice.
   Why do we rely on any method? Because it has proved useful and mostly reiiabe in the past (general induction from experiences).

2. 

   @thevirtualjim

   February 23, 2026 at 3:25 pm

   Our intelligence is based upon pattern recognition. If I ask multiple people where the pub is and they give me the same answer, that is the pattern and I can assume it to be true, unless other factors are involved. If i have a history of asking a random person a question and most/all of the time they are correct, then that is the pattern that says i should accept directions from random people i haven't met before. If I have had experiences with a single person and they usually give me correct info, then that pattern shows i can believe them in the future.

   if everyone I have asked a question to lies to me, I can expect the same to be true in the future because of the pattern i recognised.

3. 

   @HapleaaaRPG

   February 23, 2026 at 3:25 pm

   2:57

4. 

   @johnharding7318

   February 23, 2026 at 3:25 pm

   i just found this video and it reminded me of a story, some years ago i stopped a van i was driving and asked a passing pedestrian "Can you tell me how to get to the powder monkey pub"
   The guy paused for a moment before confidently informing me. "Nah mate you cant get there from here"
   This happened on @Philosophy Tube old stomping ground of Newcastle

5. 

   @eleSDSU

   February 23, 2026 at 3:25 pm

   As someone who likes to ask for directions instead of using GPS, no, you cannot believe testimony just because you understand it.

6. 

   @bassem500

   February 23, 2026 at 3:25 pm

   Of course there are unjust laws. For example, it was legal in many countries of the world to hold slaves. These laws were abolished.

7. 

   @Tulin730

   February 23, 2026 at 3:25 pm

   I want to see the cinemasins video. Where is that one?

8. 

   @CanteLizzie

   February 23, 2026 at 3:25 pm

   Abby you're so cute. The show has changed so much since this but even these original videos are enjoyable and entertaining 🙂

9. 

   @SasskiF

   February 23, 2026 at 3:25 pm

   5:27 925K subscribers at time of me watching. Going strong Abi!!

10. 

    @senorpoopEhead

    February 23, 2026 at 3:25 pm

    Back when you thought 25k subsbscribers was a lot, lol.

11. 

    @gofar5185

    February 23, 2026 at 3:25 pm

    individual testimonies heard and what then read in western media/literature are not the same…

12. 

    @gofar5185

    February 23, 2026 at 3:25 pm

    … they are realized to be fake friars because of extremely worried women testimonies confessions in the confessions cubicle… that are then retold to the guardia civil…it is said that philippines is 80% roman catholics for survival and better economic situation during the spanish friars eras…

13. 

    @gofar5185

    February 23, 2026 at 3:25 pm

    kindly allow me: in the spanish friars era in the philippines (18th century), because of testimonies of extremely worried women in the rc confessions cubicle… many uprisings were curtailed before getting materialized… the fake friars reveal the testimonies confessions of some troubled women… to the authorities (guardia civil)… what the filipinos did decades later is: if you cant beat them, join them… many filipino became rc priests who sincerely preached about hardships because of ignorance…

14. 

    @MarkSudduth1

    February 23, 2026 at 3:25 pm

    Personally, I use the "Trust but verify" principle. So when I ask Olly where the pub is and he gives me directions I'll trust him but I'll verify that he's given me accurate directions by following his directions and if they lead me to the pub I will have verified that Olly gives good directions and will ask him for directions in the future, but if his directions don't lead me to the pub then I will have verified that Olly gives bad directions and is possibly a shady character who is not to be trusted in the future.

15. 

    @moonbean2765

    February 23, 2026 at 3:25 pm

    I think there’s also a practical approach to this question, which is that whether you accept testimony depends on the stakes. So you would be less willing to immediately accept testimony in a court case than you would from the guy who’s telling you that the pub is on south street. Also in low stakes situations, like finding the location of a pub, the extra effort it would take to confirm the testimony isn’t worth it because not much is lost if it does happen to be a lie.

16. 

    @gcampbell1448

    February 23, 2026 at 3:25 pm

    watching this in 2020 and wondering if Olly ever thought he'd have over 25× the number of subs he's celebrating in this video

17. 

    @pratyushjadaun

    February 23, 2026 at 3:25 pm

    If you ask for a proof for the testimony to be true and that person should have a reason to tell the truth, isn't it equally important to have a reason for it to be false, and even more than the former, for the person to be lying as truth is the natural response and falsification needs a reason, so unless you have higher stakes in it or if you can justify a falsification, the person is probably telling the truth and even if he is not, the stakes are not high enough to debate over its correctness. It is foolish to double and triple check something by testimonies you don't trust over every little detail, if you can just go and check for yourself if the pub is on the south street or not.

18. 

    @andrewhoward6946

    February 23, 2026 at 3:25 pm

    So, I'm probably a few years late to the party, and probably nobody will see this. But I would argue I'm a reductionist who generally acts like they arent.

    I've asked people where things were many times in the past, and looking back their instructions are generally useful, even when given by people I have no prior relationship with.

    Would that be acceptable evidence? "People usually tell the truth about things like this, so I'll trust this person too"?

19. 

    @diablominero

    February 23, 2026 at 3:25 pm

    The testimony plus the fact that it is being given by a human and I know some stuff about humans (in general) is enough reason to tentatively accept it as probably true. If I were interacting with an octopus that I'd taught to speak, it might not have the same instinct not to lie, so I'd need more reasons to trust it. If I'm talking to a human but really want to be sure that I'm right to believe them, I can rationally ask a few other humans for confirmation because it's plausible that I get an exceptionally deceptive person the first time, but it's so unlikely as to be inconceivable that I pick (at random from the population) twenty exceptionally deceptive people in a row. So I suppose I'm reductionist, but probably the most anti-reductionist kind of reductionist.

20. 

    @evelienheerens2879

    February 23, 2026 at 3:25 pm

    I love how this still checked out back in 2015

    We are on the brink of an era where even digital voice and video recording can easily be faked. You could make a video of anyone saying anything, and the hottest product in the world is misinformation. 80% of Americans cannot agree across the isle on basic facts. Expert testimony in court can be bought, in fact could always be bought as it turns out. Asking for directions or the time is currently one of the few forms of testimony one can rely on. In part because it is four swipes on your phone away from verification.

    The late 20th century was called the information age, we are now living in the post-information age, or the post-fact age.

21. 

    @bekandrew

    February 23, 2026 at 3:25 pm

    This topic is particularly important for recent events with the #metoo movement and other people who are not necessarily seeking legal action against abusers, but just want to be believed to receive or give acceptance/companionship/support/validation/counseling. I see a lot of people sudenly going reductionist as soon as the topic of sexual assault gets brought up when they would have believed what the person said otherwise.

22. 

    @hotshotx1598

    February 23, 2026 at 3:25 pm

    You can never truly trust anybody because you can never truly see their thoughts and perspective. You can only ever truly know your own.

23. 

    @je-pq3de

    February 23, 2026 at 3:25 pm

    yeah mate it actually hit 26000 subs by now

24. 

    @piersquareddotnet

    February 23, 2026 at 3:25 pm

    You being a local to the place I'm visiting is itself reasonable evidence of you being an expert on the location of the pub.

    But, you're also conflating true and honest. You may honestly say the pub is on South Street, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it is true. Honest being defined here as a statement you believe to be correct, true being defined as how accurately that statement corresponds to the current state of affairs. It may be true that you believe the pub is on South Street, because you were there last week. But a sudden change in the state of affairs made the pub move to Center Street without your knowledge. This makes your statement honest, but not true.

25. 

    @Amy-zb6ph

    February 23, 2026 at 3:25 pm

    I think there are some testimonies that can be trusted enough to go with them. For example, if you tell me that the pub is on South Street, even if I go there and can't find the pub, it doesn't hurt me at all and I can always ask someone else. However, when the stakes are higher, we should all ask for evidence to back up the testimony. An excellent example would be this terrible election that we've just had in the US. Trump said things like, "I'm going to make America great again, believe me," and a lot of people did believe him. Now, it's pretty clear that he was just talking out of his ass and had no plan to do anything but charge the government for his weekend golf games and hopefully make himself more money since he relies on name recognition to make most of his money. A lot of us were saying that he wasn't offering any evidence of how he would do anything to "make America great," but enough people believed him on the sheer weight of his testimony that he won the election. In this case, it was dangerous to just believe what he said.

26. 

    @BlahBlahUsername1

    February 23, 2026 at 3:25 pm

    Human beings are the absolute worst when it comes to testifying, especially in a court of law. Do I trust it? Absolutely not.

27. 

    @Sam_on_YouTube

    February 23, 2026 at 3:25 pm

    Not sure if the quote was said by the man himself, but the character in the largely historically accurate play of Thurgood Marshall said to Matrin Luther King, you have 2 rights, the right to break the law and the right to go to jail for it. When King argued back with Thoreau's Civil Disobedience, Marshall pointed out that. Thoreau wrote Civil Disobedience from jail.

28. 

    @maartendj2724

    February 23, 2026 at 3:25 pm

    "Take my word for it, you rely on testimony a lot."

    Nice one.

29. 

    @PvblivsAelivs

    February 23, 2026 at 3:25 pm

    I would say that the testimony is not warrant to believe. But it does give you something to check. In your example, you probably asked where a pub was and can then go to South Street to see if the testimony is correct. Once you make your own observation, you are no longer relying on the testimony.

30. 

    @SockTaters

    February 23, 2026 at 3:25 pm

    Your General American accent is spot on, if not a bit deep #8~})-|<

31. 

    @BGriffith1992

    February 23, 2026 at 3:25 pm

    Burge's point and game theory are sufficient to justify belief in the pub example.

    The guy implies he knows where the pub is by telling you where it is, (Burge) and he has no reason to lie (game theory).

    the breaking points are the guy's competence and his motivations, which needn't be called into question as a matter of practicality.

32. 

    @CosmicNerdStudios

    February 23, 2026 at 3:25 pm

    is the pub on south street?

33. 

    @p3tr0114

    February 23, 2026 at 3:25 pm

    Testimony or 'word of mouth' is evidence.
    Whether it is sufficient enough to hold up any beliefs is dependent upon what is at stake.

    If someone gave me directions to a shop I would believe it because it is evidence and there is little at stake.
    When the stakes get larger such as someone's life then I would require more evidence to act.

    The grounds on what I would believe someone's testimony is because it is evidence and all evidence is linked to survival.
    You wont survive for long if you reject people's testimony.

34. 

    @SteveLamberts

    February 23, 2026 at 3:25 pm

    Culture plays a role too. Ask an Asian for directions and he will give you directions to please you, regardless of whether he knows where you want to go or not.

35. 

    @anchor83

    February 23, 2026 at 3:25 pm

    Well unless you know something about something that other people don't (i.e. being an expert) you really are on the same knowledge level as the person giving Testimony really… so you don't have any reason to trust your own knowledge more than the other persons… and in extension no real reason not to trust that persons testimony until otherwise proven. The alternative is as already stated to be frozen in a sphere of knowledge nullification. If you can't trust another cognitive agent with the same setup for determining truth as you yourself have you can't trust any kind of information given to you including that of your own sensory stimuli.

36. 

    @mikaeljensen4399

    February 23, 2026 at 3:25 pm

    The central point about the truth of testimony is the context that it is presented within. You are not only given the testimony itself but are presented with it in a certain way. Also it falls within a given set of circumstances. If I have previously looked at a clock and found the time to be 10 past 3 pm and later told that the time is 4 pm, I can evaluate the circumstances and say that to much time or not enough time has past since last time I looked at a clock and thus i can make the judgement "false" or I can evaluate the time passed since to be about right and assign within reason the judgement "true". However this is only about pragmatic interaction. 

    If the question is about a deeper question such as a verdict in court testimony on such grounds are not enough, One must also consult other reasons and justifications for the truth of the testimony. Or if it is about a philosophical or scientific question the testimony is meaningless itself. It is about the content of the testimony and the argumentation behind it that justifies any judgement regarding the truth of the statement made in the testimony. The consequences of relying on a given testimony must be reviewed before setting the parameters of acceptable justification.

37. 

    @truthseeker1890

    February 23, 2026 at 3:25 pm

    I think Testimony will more likely to be true (The probability of the testimony to be true is high) If we take the testimony of an increasing number random individuals, the more the random individuals, the higher the probability of the testimony to be true.

    Because if we took the testimony randomly it will be nonsense that all the random individuals are lying or planned to lie, and it will be very unlikely for all of them to be wrong about their testimony.

    It's like a probability distribution function, if n get's larger then the probability will get closer to 1 (which is equivalent to truth).

    But that doesn't mean that it is necessarily true for the testimony to be true, its approximately the same as collecting evidence.

    So for your example if I asked more than one person (randomly) for the direction of the pub and all of them told me the same direction, then it's very likely for the pub to be in that direction.

38. 

    @FromRussiaWithLuv007

    February 23, 2026 at 3:25 pm

    Can we trust other people. Let's throw some solipsism in this. The only thing we can be certain of is our own existence. Thus any "other" people are extensions of ourselves. We trust other people because we would not try to deceive ourselves (usually)

39. 

    @godiamcrazydude

    February 23, 2026 at 3:25 pm

    Simple, you just accept testimony pragmatically. It's more useful (most of the time) to have possible information about something than not having any at all, since that possible information can lead to certainty while having no information at all leaves you, well, with no information at all; no conclusion to reach. Of course when it comes to more complex and rather extraordinary claims, you rely on evidence to determine if the testimony is true or false; in the above statements I was referring to trivial scenarios, or scenarios where you simply have no other choice but to accept testimony as true.

40. 

    @today273

    February 23, 2026 at 3:25 pm

    My view is based on what Bayesians call "prior probability". In the past, most testimony I've received from the people around me has been (mostly) true. As such, if I receive testimony from someone, the chance that they're telling the truth should be higher than 50%. If I have other evidence to go by regarding their trustworthiness, I can shift my prior probability of truth to account for that and end up with my posterior probability.

    On the other hand, if most of the testimony I received was false, I'd be inclined to doubt it. I think most people unconsciously work like this. If person X lies to you often, you're less inclined to believe them than someone who usually tells the truth. In the case of X, p(truth) is too low to be easily believed.

    For a random stranger, one's inclination to trust them comes not from the stranger's own actions, but from how frequently other strangers have been honest/dishonest. You generalise from those experiences.

    (I think this is somewhat reductionist.)

41. 

    @johnenglish947

    February 23, 2026 at 3:25 pm

    Reductionism seems to have a flaw in infinite regress.If the reliability of a statement can be reduced to a few basic warrants,then aren't these warrants themselves unreliable because they rely upon the testimony of people at a previous point in time? Think of asking someone for directions to a local pub.Wouldn't you be depending on warrants such as the truthfulness of the person, which itself is only verifiable by considering the testimony of people who have known him? If so, when would we ever arrive at a statement which we know to be unarguably true?
    The problem of relying on testimony rests upon whether the person providing the testimony is generally more likely to speak the truth than lie.Here the interesting point to note is that lying requires some degree of creative effort.It would involve thinking up a plausible alternative explanation to satisfy the listener, while on the other hand telling the truth requires no conscious effort whatsoever except the correct recollection of the incident.So telling the truth would simply involve reading something off your memory which is generally far easier for most people than creating an ingenious lie.So unless the person has a special reason to lie( which he would not, if he is merely a random contributor), it is far more likely that the person simply related what he remembered.
    As for the inaccuracy of memory, this is not a problem of much magnitude.For most practical purposes of using human testimony, a generally reliable recollection of the incident which includes the main points of interest( which it would certainly do) would be sufficient.To return to our first example, someone asking directions to a pub would not need a detailed,comprehensive explanation but would be quite satisfied with any easy-to-follow explanation that would get him to the pub.
    So it seems to me that both arguments in support of reductionism, namely, inaccuracy of memory and lying, don't really hold water.Looking forward to what you might have to say.

    Cheers,
    English

42. 

    @altpressisglam

    February 23, 2026 at 3:25 pm

    An interesting perspective on this can be found in Jose Medina's book "Epistemology of Resistance" and Miranda Fricker's "Epistemic Injustice".

43. 

    @laquishaadams1854

    February 23, 2026 at 3:25 pm

    Witness testimony has been shown unreliable, often statistically so. I think how trustworthy it is depends on context. And…. that's it. No super-long post, this time. 😛

44. 

    @TheSamzidat

    February 23, 2026 at 3:25 pm

    I'm not sure whether it's rationally justified, but in my personal life, I always take testimony as justified on its own unless I have some external reason to doubt it, (like the person has lied to me, the person has been manipulative, the proposition makes no sense or would lead to a contradiction if I took it to be true.) I tend to think if you're a practicing reductionist in real life, then you're a bit of a prick, constantly doubting what everyone tells you and demanding that they provide evidence for something as small as what they watched on netflix the night before. (I think this also has some interesting implications for the testimony of sexual assault survivors and people believing them or not.)

45. 

    @deathpigeon2

    February 23, 2026 at 3:25 pm

    One objection to Clever Cypriot would be that, though we could potentially create a scenario in which ease of exit of a state was sufficient to make living in the state consensual, this doesn't give ease of exit from laws in general. We can only consent to which set of laws we wish to follow, not the existence of law itself. This also means that, if every state shares some set of laws, those laws are never consented to because there is nowhere we can go to escape them. We could only establish consent in this manner if there were some area without laws where individuals could live to which it is sufficiently easy to move to.

    In addition, this just strikes me as a specific form of a posteriori philosophical anarchism rather than a defense of political obligation.

46. 

    @deathpigeon2

    February 23, 2026 at 3:25 pm

    Would trust in an individual function as a sort of acceptance principle? That is, I wouldn't, in general, accept someone's testimony, but, if I know the individual in question and I know they are trustworthy, then I would accept their testimony unless I had reason not to. In this way, there is still testimony, but sufficient distrust in what others say. Rather than accepting or rejecting testimony en masse, we are, thus, accepting or rejecting testimony based upon the individual giving the testimony.

    Beyond that, for people you don't know well enough to trust or you know well enough to distrust, you could accept their testimony given sufficient reason to accept it, for example someone you trust agreeing or you having independent verification or the content of the testimony being confirmable a priori.

47. 

    @Brian0033

    February 23, 2026 at 3:25 pm

    Would it be legitimate to make an argument from convenience for why one should believe casual testimony? The consequences of not believing testimony are that simple day to day tasks become much more difficult as all information needs to be gained first hand, while the consequences of believing testimony might be that you would occasionally be deceived or misinformed. Can I just say that i should believe testimony, except in the face of a reason not to, just because it makes my life easier?

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