Communicating your point of view

What is it like to give birth? Or have your first child? Or see red for the first time? Arguably, knowing how to answer these questions requires having certain experiences. Arguably you cannot get to know what it is like to give birth, for instance, by simply reading someone's birth story. If this is so, then there are certain limits on testimony as a source of knowledge. This claim is familiar: it has been argued that we cannot, or should not, rely on testimony when it comes to moral matters. And argued that we cannot, or should not, rely on testimony when it comes to aesthetic judgement. This paper aims to build an explanation of our pessimism about testimony as to what experiences are like that also covers moral and aesthetic testimony, about which we can be similarly pessimistic. And the explanation given is such that it can make good sense of the optimism we can demonstrate with respect to each of these domains.