Jennifer Lackey interviewed by 3AM: On Testimony

Here she discusses the distinctions between summative and non-summative accounts of social epistemology; this is basically an epistemology regarding the individual grains of sand and the collective pile of sand. She also discusses her views on the epistemology of testimony and whether it is justified or not (this is ultimately a normative account of whether one is justified in accepting or not justified in accepting another's testimony). She later transitions into a descriptive account of knowledge and its generativity via testimony and memory. Good stuff here, though she somewhat seemingly binds herself to a linguistic dogma of knowledge and testimony...while she wants to incorporate the reductionist views of accepting testimony based on one's own prior 'knowledge'...

Seems worth reading more of her work:

• Learning from Words: Testimony as a Source of Knowledge (2008), Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• The Epistemology of Testimony (2006), co-edited with Ernest Sosa. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Volume of all new articles in the epistemology of testimony. This collection includes papers by Robert Audi, C.A.J. Coady, Elizabeth Fricker, Richard Fumerton, Sanford Goldberg, Peter Graham, Jennifer Lackey, Keith Lehrer, Richard Moran, Frederick Schmitt, Ernest Sosa, and James Van Cleve. 

From the interview in 3AM, she recommends:

"The book that ignited my interest in testimony is C.A.J. Coady’s Testimony: A Philosophical Study (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992). While I disagree with much of what Coady argues in this book, it was the first book-length treatment of the topic of testimony, and it is really a fabulous introduction to the key issues in this area.

Alvin Goldman is arguably the father of social epistemology, and his Knowledge in a Social World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999) contains articles addressing many of the central topics in this area of philosophy, showing both the breadth and depth of social epistemology.

Sanford Goldberg’s Relying on Others: An Essay in Epistemology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010) develops the extent to which we are epistemically dependent on others, further cementing the importance of testimony in epistemology.

My current work in collective epistemology has benefited enormously from Margaret Gilbert’s On Social Facts (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), which is impressively comprehensive in its consideration of issues in this area. It is an absolute must-read for anyone interested in groups and related phenomena.

The collection of essays edited by Richard Feldman and Ted A. Warfield, Disagreement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010) inspired much of the recent interest in the epistemology of disagreement, including my own, and contains many of the articles at the center of the debates in this area."