Indian Philosophy

Classical Indian philosophy developed detailed theories of knowledge that rarely appear in contemporary debates about artificial intelligence. The Nyāya school counted testimony (śabda) as a means of knowledge (pramāṇa) in its own right, alongside perception, inference and comparison, and defined it as the instruction of a reliable person (āptopadeśa). Where much modern Western epistemology asks what licenses the hearer’s belief, the Nyāya account asks what the speaker must be.

That is close to the question my work on testimony asks of language models: not whether a hearer is entitled to believe what a source says, but what must be true of the source for knowledge to pass through it. I read the classical tradition as an interlocutor on that question rather than as history.