Testimonial monitoring and the redundancy challenge

It is widely accepted that the audience has some role to play in acquiring testimonial knowledge, but the extent of the epistemic work she must undertake is contentious. At the very least, an audience should not accept testimony that p when she has good reason to believe that ~ p. Some take a stronger stance, however, arguing that the audience must demonstrate a counterfactual sensitivity to signs of untrustworthiness. Framed otherwise, some argue that the audience must monitor speakers and their reports if they are to acquire testimonial knowledge. In this paper, I present a redundancy challenge to this stronger view. The conclusion I forward is that, if one is to support the view that the attainment of testimonial knowledge requires monitoring, one’s defence of this position must appeal to something beyond reliability. As I will argue, if reliability is what matters, then monitoring becomes redundant. For the reliabilist monitoring theorist, this presents a dichotomy: they can prioritise monitoring views over reliabilism, looking beyond reliability to defend monitoring as necessary for testimonial knowledge; or they can prioritise reliabilism over monitoring views, conceding that monitoring is not needed to establish reliable testimonial belief formation. Either way requires a major revision to one’s epistemology of testimony.