Testimony: knowledge and garbage

We aim to contribute to the solution to the “garbage problem”, namely, how to distinguish knowledge from garbage, and why, despite the fact that most of the time people are agile at the distinction, they fail in high-stakes cases. We discuss this problem in the context of jurisprudential discussions over the concept of testimony. In Section 2 we focus on traditional solutions in the law: burdens of proof and expert testimony. Section 3 focuses on the distinction between knowing-how and knowingthat; Section 4 addresses the role of biases in decision-making and connects this to the garbage problem; Section 5 concludes by analysing the relation between knowledge and the types of thinking that can generate biases. In a nutshell, our claim is that identifying the relevant biases and types of knowledge helps identify garbage transmission.