Key Arguments

• Ricoeur connects the ‘weakness of attestation’ to earlier features of hermeneutics: the fragmentary character produced by the polysemy of the ‘who?’ question, the contingency of questioning derived from the history of philosophical systems and from natural language grammar and usage, and the frequently aporetic nature of analyses still to come.
• This fragmentation and contingency give attestation ‘its own special fragility,’ compounded by the ‘vulnerability of a discourse aware of its own lack of foundation,’ i.e., a reflexive awareness that it does not rest on an ultimate episteme.
• He defines suspicion as ‘the specific contrary of attestation,’ thereby establishing a structural polarity: wherever there is attestation, there is also the permanent threat of suspicious unmasking of illusion, ideology, or self‑deception.
• The kinship between attestation and testimony shows that there is ‘no “true” testimony without “false” testimony’; epistemically, this means that there is never a position of unassailable, unchallenged testimony.
• Because there is no higher court of appeal than testimony itself, ‘there is no recourse against false testimony than another that is more credible; and there is no recourse against suspicion but a more reliable attestation,’ which indicates a regress that can only be addressed by comparative assessments of credibility rather than by absolute proof.

Source Quotes

In this respect, attestation lacks both this guarantee and the hypercertainty belonging to it. The other features of hermeneutics, mentioned earlier, confirm the weakness of attestation with regard to any radical foundational claim: the fragmentation that follows from the poly semy of the question "who?" (the contingency of the questioning itself resulting, let us repeat, from the history of philosophical systems as well as from the grammar of natural languages and ordinary language usage, to say nothing of the frequently aporetic nature of so many analyses yet to come) gives to attestation its own special fragility, to which is added the vulnerability of a discourse aware of its own lack of foundation. This vul nerability will be expressed in the permanent threat of suspicion, if we allow that suspicion is the specific contrary of attestation.

The other features of hermeneutics, mentioned earlier, confirm the weakness of attestation with regard to any radical foundational claim: the fragmentation that follows from the poly semy of the question "who?" (the contingency of the questioning itself resulting, let us repeat, from the history of philosophical systems as well as from the grammar of natural languages and ordinary language usage, to say nothing of the frequently aporetic nature of so many analyses yet to come) gives to attestation its own special fragility, to which is added the vulnerability of a discourse aware of its own lack of foundation. This vul nerability will be expressed in the permanent threat of suspicion, if we allow that suspicion is the specific contrary of attestation. The kinship between attestation and testimony is verified here: there is no "true" tes timony without "false" testimony.

This vul nerability will be expressed in the permanent threat of suspicion, if we allow that suspicion is the specific contrary of attestation. The kinship between attestation and testimony is verified here: there is no "true" tes timony without "false" testimony. But there is no recourse against false testimony than another that is more credible; and there is no recourse against suspicion but a more reliable attestation.

The kinship between attestation and testimony is verified here: there is no "true" tes timony without "false" testimony. But there is no recourse against false testimony than another that is more credible; and there is no recourse against suspicion but a more reliable attestation. On the other hand—and now attestation is confronting the opposite side, that of the humiliated cogito—credence is also (and, we should say, nevertheless) a kind of trust, as the expression "reliable attestation" has just suggested.

Key Concepts

• the fragmentation that follows from the poly semy of the question "who?" (the contingency of the questioning itself resulting, let us repeat, from the history of philosophical systems as well as from the grammar of natural languages and ordinary language usage, to say nothing of the frequently aporetic nature of so many analyses yet to come) gives to attestation its own special fragility, to which is added the vulnerability of a discourse aware of its own lack of foundation.
• This vul nerability will be expressed in the permanent threat of suspicion, if we allow that suspicion is the specific contrary of attestation.
• The kinship between attestation and testimony is verified here: there is no "true" tes timony without "false" testimony.
• But there is no recourse against false testimony than another that is more credible; and there is no recourse against suspicion but a more reliable attestation.

Context

Middle of the passage, where Ricoeur deepens the epistemological profile of attestation by stressing its fragmentary, non-foundational character and the structural role played by suspicion and the possibility of false testimony.