The Mitigated Empiricist Cārvākas on Testimony

The mitigated empiricist Cārvākas maintained that knowledge could only be acquired via perception and commonsensical or empirically verifiable inferences. Consequently, they did not seem to regard testimony as a source of knowledge. However, they also seemed to offer their testimony to others. This seems puzzling, for there is something odd about offering your testimony to someone else while also denying that they can acquire knowledge on the basis of what you have just told them. What should we make of this? This paper argues that the best way of interpreting the mitigated empiricist Cārvākas’ position on testimony is by reading them as Local Reductionists. On this view, one can acquire knowledge on the basis of someone else’s say-so, but this is only because testimonial knowledge is reducible to – and thus nothing but – a combination of one’s perceptual and inferential knowledge.