Moran, the Brian D. Young professor of philosophy and chair of the philosophy department at Harvard University, presented his paper on "Being Told and Being Believed," a dissertation on the act of "telling" as epistemological testimony.
Moran's paper focused on the dynamic between a speaker and a listener.
Moran described "telling" as a device that "plays a role in getting someone to believe something" that goes beyond simple "evidential relations." For example, leaving already-broken china in the kitchen is evidence of some event, but not cleaning the mess does not constitute "telling" in and of itself.
His paper analyzed and criticized the writings of philosopher David Hume, among others. In particular, Moran presented a case against the Humean conception of knowledge gained from testimony as "a posteriori," which he explained meant legitimized by experience.
Moran cited the work of another philosopher. "If we could only have empirical grounds for believing testimony to be true [then it would be impossible to assume a correlation between testimony and truth]." In other words, everyday conversation would be stifled if the one party must always have previous experience or knowledge of what the other party says in order to believe him.
Moran claimed that no actual community exists where "utterances do not correlate regularly with meaningful, true language," showing that, contrary to the Humean picture, the hearer makes an "a priori" judgment that, as a rule, what others say to him is typically true.
Moran further emphasized that the hearer adopts a "special new risk … that adds a further layer of mediation between the speaker and the hearer."
The listener must worry that the speaker may be prone to lying or manipulation, a risk that he need not accept when simply learning through observation rather than through testimony.
Testimonial situations "place us at the mercy of the free disposition of another person," Moran said.
Moran cited a paper by philosopher Angus Ross. "Speaking is not like allowing someone to see you're blushing" because the act of speaking is a distinctly deliberate act, while blushing is involuntary.
"What we say is not constrained by facts about one's own nature," said Moran. Consequently, most speech behavior, with the exception of involuntary utterances (like speech during sleep), should not necessarily be taken for truth, even when the speaker presents himself as accountable for his assertions, Moran explained.
Moran concluded with a lengthy question-and-answer session during which attendees questioned the distinction between testimony and evidence, citing as a chief example the use of testimony as evidence in the courtroom. Moran said that the unique example fell outside of the construct of his paper.
Moran's interests include philosophy of mind and moral psychology, aesthetics and the philosophy of literature. He received his Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1989 and taught at Princeton University before heading to Harvard in 1995.
He has published previous papers on metaphor, on imagination, on emotional engagement with art and on the nature of self-knowledge. He is also the author of "Authority and Estrangement: An Essay on Self-Knowledge" (2001).