Testimony is a source of knowledge. On many occasions, the explanation of one’s knowing that p is that a speaker, S, told one that p. Our testimonial sources – the referents of ‘S’ – can be other individuals, and they can be collectives; that is, in addition to learning from individuals, we learn things from committees, commissions, councils, clubs, teams, research groups, departments, administrations, churches, states and other social groups. North Korea might make a declaration about its missile programme, the church about the ordination of women priests, the council about its deficit, the research group about its findings and so on. We will look at a few examples in detail shortly, but the starting point is that social groups can be a source of testimony, and we can learn things from such collective testimony. The question this paper pursues is: what explains our learning that p from collective testimony to p?

中文翻译：

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集体见证和集体知识

证词是知识的来源。在很多情况下，一个人知道p的解释是说话人S告诉一个人p。我们的推荐来源（“ S”的指代）可以是其他个人，也可以是集体。也就是说，除了向个人学习之外，我们还从委员会，委员会，理事会，俱乐部，团队，研究小组，部门，行政部门，教会，州和其他社会团体中学习东西。朝鲜可能会宣布有关其导弹计划的声明，有关女祭司任命的教堂，有关其赤字的理事会，有关其调查结果的研究小组等的声明。我们将在短期内详细查看一些示例，但是起点是社会群体可以成为证词的来源，并且我们可以从这种集体证词中学到一些东西。本文追求的问题是：