Tall Tales and Testimony to the Miraculous

In the debate over testimony to miracles, a common Humean move is to emphasize the prior improbability of miracles as the most important epistemic factor. Robert Fogelin uses the example of Henry, who tells multiple tall tales about meeting celebrities, to argue that low prior probabilities alone can render testimony unbelievable, with obvious implications for testimony to miracles. A detailed Bayesian analysis of Henry’s stories shows instead that the fact that Henry tells multiple stories about events that occurred independently if they occurred at all is crucial to his loss of credibility. The epistemic structure is similar to that of a case of multiple lottery wins by the same person. Each of Henry’s stories can confirm only one event, but all the stories confi rm the hypothesis that Henry is a liar. Th is structure does not apply to testimony to just one event, however antecedently improbable. Such examples therefore do nothing to undermine a standard Bayesian analysis involving both priors and likelihoods in evaluating testimony to an improbable event