Bearing Witness, Understanding, Knowledge and the Right to be Known

I will present three accounts of bearing witness vis-à-vis epistemic reparation of subjects’ violation of their right to be known. I will argue that the Understanding Account of bearing witness more fully captures bearing witness’ epistemically reparative features than the Knowledge Account and the Belief Account. To this end, I will present three conditions that compose the epistemically reparative features of bearing witness. These conditions are the Recognition Condition, the Relational Information Condition and the Modal Condition. This argument will put into view not only the kind of epistemic state into which truth and reconciliation commissions should aim to put their audiences, but also a way of judging more and less epistemically reparative instances of audience uptake of the testimony of those who have suffered injustice and grave moral wrongs.