Abstract

The paper addresses Regina Rini’s view that partisanship in social media testimony reception is compatible with epistemic virtue. According to the author, online content sharing is a form of “bent testimonyµ, a speech act that is not governed by the rules for holding people responsible for what they testimony if they are incompetent or insincere. Whenever this kind of communication takes place, it is rational to suspend the default entitlement to believe testifiers unless they are our co-partisans. In fact – says Rini – co-partisanship is an indicator of shared values and a proxy for epistemic peerhood. However, this reconstruction is unconvincing. The text has three parts: §1 is devoted to a general analysis of testimonial practice; §2 presents a criticism of the very notion of bent testimony and an alternative account of online content sharing according to which it acquires a full sense only when combined with other explicit and/or implicit speech acts; §3 deals with epistemic partisanship, arguing that it is unreasonable from both an evidential and an instrumentalist point of view.