tellingasinvitingtotrust ppr

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Phi losophy and Phenomenological ResearchVol. L X X , No. 3, May 2005

Telling as Inviting to Trust*E D W A R D S . HI N C HM A NUniversity of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

How can I give you a reason to believe what I tell you? I can influence the evidenceavailable to you. Or I can simply invite your trust. These two ways of giving reasonswork very differently. When a speaker tells her hearer that p. I argue, she intends thathe gain access to a prima facie reason to believe that p that derives not from evidencebut from his mere understanding of her act. Unlike mere assertions, acts of telling givereasons directly. They give reasons by inviting the hearer’s trust.

This yields a novel form of anti-reductionism in the epistemology of testimony. Thestatus of testimony as a sui generis sour ce of epistem ic warrant is entailed by the natureof the act of telling. We can discover the nature of this illmution, and its epistemic role,by exam ining how it function s in the real world of human relations.

In “Other Mind s” J. L. Austin co mp ares testifying w ith promising:If someone has promised me to do A, then I am entitled to rely on it, and can myself makepromises on the stren gth of it: and so, where someone has said to me ‘I know,’ I am entitled tosay know too, at second hand. The right to say ‘I know’ is transmissible, in the sort of waythat other authority is transmissible. Hence, if I say it lightly, I may be responsible for gettingyou into trouble.’It is a characteristically Austinian remark. As a description of what we ordi-narily take for granted, it’s beyond question. If I’m not careful in what I tellyou I know, you will hold me responsible if taking m y w ord brings trouble.Yet as a description of what we should say upon reflection, the remarkcouldn’t seem mo re complacently wrongheaded.* This paper had an extreme ly long gestation and benefited from com mentary a t several

stages. In the mid-1990s-when the philosophical literature on testimony was muchsma ller than it is now +onversations with Krista Law lor and Ian Rumftt helped keepproto -drafts evolving. A few years later, when it was a c hapte r of my dissertation (U ni-versity of Michigan, 2000), Steve Darwall, Steven Everson, David Hills, Jim Joyce, PeterRailto n, Nishi Shah, David Velleman and Andrea Westlund gav e helpful correc tives. Anaudience at the Central APA in 2001 (with David Eng commenting), along with somepainfully frank anonymous referees, helped me at last turn the chapter into a pa pe r.Thanks to all. (A companion paper on practical reason, ‘Advising as Inviting to Trust,’ isforthcoming in Canadian Journal of Philosophy; and a companion paper on doxasticjudgm ent, ‘Judging as Inviting Self-Trust,’ is in preparation.)J. L. Austin, ‘Other Minds’ (1946), in his Philosophical Papers, third edition (Oxford:Oxford University Press, 1979). 100.

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Ho w could my telling you that know som ething eo ips0 entitle you tosay that y o u know it? How could your entitlement to believe somethingderive from my entitlement t o believe it? Yo u may have no idea what entitlesme to believe what I tell you I know. Moreover, the basis of my belief maybe utterly unlike your putative testimonial basis. So it’s hard to see how myentitlem ent to believe could sim ply becom e your e ntitlemen t to believe. Per-haps you derive a distinctive entitlement of your ow n from my knowledgeclaim. Yet this entitlement must, it seems, also include such a thesis as thatwhen I claim to know that p, o r when someone claims to know that p in thiscontext, it is reliably the case that p. Your entitlement to that thesis, shouldyou ha ve it, mu st not itself depen d on my testim ony, or the sam e question ofentitlement will arise and take you in a circle.2 Bu t if you take my word onthe basis of accepting a thesis f or which you don’t simp ly ta ke my word, itwould seem I’m off the the sense in which I may get you into troubleis merely causal, not epistemic. Why should I take responsibility for yourbelief that I am reliable?

In this paper I will defen d Austin against the forc e of thes e reflections. 1’11focus not specifically on knowledge claims but more generally on acts oftelling, whether o r not the speaker claims to know what she tells her hearer.4Austin is right that a speaker can be responsible, not merely causally butepistem ically, for getting her hearer into trouble. M y thesis is that a speakertakes on this burden by addressing her hearer in the way distinctive of tellin g.I argue by articulating a key distinction between the act of telling someonethat p and the act of merely asserting that p in his presence.

How can I entitle you to believe what I tell you? One way is by influenc-ing the evidence available to you, perhaps by making an assertion or other-wise manifesting a belief, which still ma kes you e pist em ically responsiblefor the belief I want you to form.s Another is by inviting you to trust me,

Se t aside for now the likelihood that your en titlement to the thesis will rest on the testi-mony of others.Unless, of course, the thesis in question is Austin’s thesis. But this p aragra ph is pre sentinga series of objections to that thesis.Som e philosophers hold that any assertion is an implicit claim to know . If this is right, thenmy argument will entail the truth of that Austin actually said. For this view, see PeterUnger, Ignorance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 250-65; and Michael Slote,‘Assertion and Belief,’ in Tom Baldwin and Jonathan D ancy (eds.), Papers on Languageand Logic (Keele: Keele University Library, 1980). For a account of the relationbetween assertion and knowledge from which this thesis follows, see Timothy William-son, ‘Knowing and Asserting,’ Philosophical Review 105 (1996). revised as Chapter 11of his Knowledge and ifs Limifs (Oxford Oxford University Press, 2000).)Philosophers have often argued that belief cannot be , forced in the way that action can(see, for example, Locke’s L e f f e rConcerning Toleration . For a plausible suggestion whythey have been wrong, see Gerald Dworkin, ‘What Can We Be Forced to Do?,’ Journalof Social Philosophy 22 (1991), esp. 45-6. But even if we cannot be forced to believe, w ecan surely be forced to confront evidence, which is all 1 have in mind here.

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thereby taking part of that responsibility onto my own shoulders. These twoways of giving an epistemic entitlement work very differently. When aspeaker tells her hearer that p, I’ll argue, she acts on an intention to give himan entitlemen t to believe that p that derives not from evidence of the truth of‘p’ but from h is mere understanding of the a ct she thereby perform s. Theobjection two paragraphs back is wrong because, unlike acts of mere asser-tion, acts of telling give epistemic warrant directly. A hearer may co m e to beentitled by accepting a speaker’s word without accepting any general thesisabout when h e is so entitled, sin ce a speake r gives her w ord that p by eo ips0giving her hearer a prima facie entitlement to believe that P . ~ nce we under-stand the nature of the acts, w e cannot even notionally separate the speaker’sact of giving her word by telling her hearer that p from the act of givin g himan en titlem ent to believe that p.

I do not claim that Austin could hav e foreseen this defens e of his p osi tion .But I’ll argue for it from two starting poin ts that are recognizably Austinianin spirit. I follow the followers of Austin who argue that a speaker performsan illocutionary act just if the appropriate hearer recognizes the intention onwh ich s he acts in perform ing i t.7 In standard cases of sincere telling, I’llargue, the speaker acts on an intention to make an epistemic entitlementavaila ble to her interlocutor. Sh e intends to ma ke this entitlem ent available,moreover, simply through his recognition that that’s what she intends. It isthus possible, I’ll argue, for a hearer to come to have an entitlement simplyby recognizing his interlocutor’s intention to make an entitlement availableto him.

I am also Austinian on a methodological point, that what reveals thenature of an illocutionary act is an inquiry into the phenomenon Austintermed ‘infelicity.’ If an illocutionary act amounts to an interpersonal transac-tion, we can understand the nature of a given kind of illocutionary act byinquiring into what’s at stake for interlocutors as they attempt to bring thetransaction off. By looking at the risks they run of infelicity, we come tounderstand the nature of the join t performance. We can no t understand thenature of telling without understanding how it functions in the real world ofhuman relations.

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I use the terms ‘warrant’ and ‘entitlement’ interchangeably. The formulations in thisparagraph will be refined.This was not quite Austin’s own view. For explicit subscriptions to it, se e John Searle,Speech ActJ Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 47; and Jennifer Hornsby,‘Illocution and I t s Significance,’ in S. L. Tsohatzidis ed.), Foundarions of Speech A c tTheory London: Routledge, 1994), 193-4. Both argue that Austin ought to have adoptedthis view , given his aims.

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IWhat’s at stake for S and A when S tells A that p? There is, it seems, some-thing mo re and importantly different at stake for S and A than there would behad A merely heard S tell someone else that p. What’s at stake for S whenshe tells A that p is A’s recognition of her status as worthy of his trust.*

Con trast two scenarios. First, imagin e that when S tells A that p, A doesnot regard himself as having thereby acquired any entitlement to believe thatp. Imagine A manifestly looks as if he needs to learn the time, so S tells himit’s noon, but A doesn’t regard himself as having thereby acquired any enti-tlement to believe it’s noon. Imagine not that A regards himself as havingacquired an entitlement to believe it’s noon that gets defeated by such back-ground kno wled ge as that s’s watch tends to run fast, but that A regards him-self as not having acquired any entitlement, not even a (now defeated) primafacie entitlement, to believe it’s Second, imag ine that A hears S tellsomeoneelse i t’s noon, but A does not regard what he hears as giving himany entitlem ent to believe it’s noon. Finally, assume that in each scenario Scomes to know that A does not regard S’s act of telling as giving him anyentitlement.

Now there is, I thin k, this intu itive difference between th e scenarios: inthe first A is failing to acknowledge S-he is, as we say , ‘slighting’ S’O-whereas in the second A is not necessarily slighting S. In the second sce-nario, after all, S doe s not tell A it’s noon; she doesn’t address A at all. Wecan explain the difference if we view telling as an invitation to trust. In thefirst scenario S invites A to trust her that it’s noon. In the second scenario Amerely hears, or overh ears, S invite someone else to trust her that it’s noon.In the first scenario, if A doesn’t regard himself as having an entitlement tobelieve that it’s noon on the basis of S’s invitation he quite explicitly (how-ever silently) turns the invitation down: he refuses to trust her. And that isthe explanation of S’s sen se of having been slighted: she has tendered a n invi-tation to A to trust her and exp licitly been rebuffed.”

In my schematic examples, S the speaker) will always be female and A the addressee)always male. In the non-schematic example I’ll use in section 11, I’ll redress the genderimbalance by making the speaker ‘Stephen’) male and the addressee ‘Anna’) female.Of course, if the entitlement is defeated it isn’t really an entitlement. I’m imagining that Adoes not believe that S’s telling him the time would give him a reason even i it were notdefeated by say) his knowledge of the condition of her watch.By ‘slighting’ here I do not mean insulfing. Not all failures of recognition are insulting.Sometimes a failure of recognition is merely disorienting.The idea that telling is inviting to trust figures implicitly in David Simpson, ‘Lying, Liars,and Language,’ Philosopfry nd Plrenomenological Research 52 1 992). Simpson arguesthat lying involves more than the intention to deceive; it also involves the intention toexploit a trust relation with one’s interlocutor and therefore a species of betrayal. But onSimpson’s account the reason a liar intends to convey is a reason concerning what theliar intends the interlocutor to believe, against a mutual expectation of the liar’s truthful-ness, not directly a reason to form that belief. So his account of the trust relation in ques-

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W e can, of course, imagine a case along these lines in which S would notbe entitled to feel slighted: perhaps A doubts not S’s word but merely theaccuracy of S’s watch-in a way that does not reveal an y mis trust of S her-self. (Perhaps A has seen S unwittingly bang her watch against a lamp-post,and A doubts whether it now runs accurately.) Or perhaps S’s belief that it’snoon itself derives f rom the say -so of som eone else, S*, and A does not trustS* despite thinking that it was reasonable for S to trust her.” W e can imag-ine numerous cases in which S would not be entitled to feel slighted by A’srefusal to treat her telling as a source of epistem ic warrant. But in each suchcas e we are implicitly assuming that A’s refusal to take S’s word for it mani-fests mistrust in something or some one other than S herself. Without thatassumption, S is entitled to feel slighted by A’s refusal.

W ithou t that assum ption , in declining S’s invitation A treats S’s tellingas a telling he merely hears, or overhears, and not as a telling addressed tohim . In other words, h e treats S’s tel ling as a mere a~ se r t io n . ’~e recognizesS’s intention to tell him that it’s noon and in recognizing that intention sat-isfies it: S thereby succeeds in telling him that it’s noon. But he then fails tolive up to his end of the transaction. If he had failed to recognize the intentionon which S acts when she tells him that it’s noon, S’s attempted tellingwould, in Austin’s term, have ‘misfired.’ But while the act does come off,there is nonetheless an infelicity: Austin terms this sort of infelicity, whichpresupposes that the act has com e off, an ‘abuse.’14 It’s an abuse of his sta tusas addressee if he treats S’s telling as o ne h e has merely heard or overheard,that is, if he treats it as a mere assertion. Equivalently, it’s an abuse of therelation that now exists between them if A fails to regard himself as having,in virtue of S’s act, a prima fac ie entitlement to believ e that it’s noon.

When S tells an untrusting A that p, we naturally tend to hedge the claimthat she told him. Yet when we say, ‘She tried to tell him but he wouldn’t

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tion lacks the epistemic dimension that I emphasize. (Unfortunately I was not aware ofSimpson ’s paper when I wrote the present paper.)A can think this only if he assumes an internalist view of the reasonability of trust, how-ever. l discus s the differen ce between internalist and externalist app roach es to this issuein sections VI through VIII.By ‘mere assertion’ I don’t mean an act that is nothing but an assertion; I mean an actthat may be a telling but is not a telling addressed to the addre ssee in question. Here, S’sact is a mere assertion from A ’ s perspective.Spea kers seldo m merely assert that p. A speak er wh o asserts that p typically m eansto tell someone-the person whose eye she has caug ht, the readers of a particular jour-nal, perhaps merely herself. If all S is doing is asserting that p. if she does not meanthereby to tell anyone (even herself) that p, then her act does not, I believe, fall into thekind that Austin meant to pick out with the term ‘illocutionary.’ But to describ e an act asan assertion is typically to underdescribe its illocutionary nature.J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (1962). second edition (Cambridge: HarvardUniversity Press, 1975 . 16. Austin continues: “do not stress the normal connotations ofthese names ”

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listen,’ we don’t mean that she tried to tell him but he didn’t hear. If Adoesn’t hear, or doesn’t understand what she’s trying to do, then S’s attemptto tell him misfires: there is no telling. If A does understand what she’s try-ing to d o but simply doesn’t trust her, S succee ds in telling him in on e sensebut not in fully impleme nting or co nsum mating the act.” If telling is invit-ing to trust, the act is performed when S extends her invitation but not con-sum mate d until A accepts it. It is a point of Austinian wisdom about speechacts that not all illocutionary unions are consu mm ated.

A consummates S’s act by accepting her invitation only when he regardshimself as having an entitlemen t to believe what she told him based in trust.When S tells A that it’s noon, she intends that A have an entitlement tobelieve that it’s noon not by virtue of whatever evidence A may possess ofher reliability but simply through his recognition of her intention that hethereby acquire an entitlement to believe that it’s noon. Since S counts astelling when A recognizes the intention on which she acts in telling, thissugge sts the follow ing quasi-Gricean analysis:

T) S tells A that p (sincerely) iff A recognizes that S, in asserting thatp, intends A to gain access to a prima facie entitlement to believethat p through this very recognition.I6

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These are Austin’s terms. When the act does come off but there’s an abuse, it is “notimplemented or not consummated, rather than void or without effect” (ibid.).More fully: S tells A that p iff A recognizes that S is making an utterance to the effectthat p intending thereby to represe nt herself as intending A to gain acces s to a primafacie entitlement to believe that p through A’s recognition of S’s intention that A gainaccess to a prima fac ie entitlement to believe that p. That’s a mouthful. For simplicity wecan take it for granted that S is asserting that p. And we can assume that S is sincere. Italso helps to formulate A’s recognition as se lf-r efe ren tial- or to formulate S’s intentionas self-referential “... through recognition of this very intention”) or as having a self-referential content “ ... through recognition that that’s what sh e intends” ), as I do below.For appeals to self-referen ce in emendation of Grice , see Gilbert Harm an, ‘Review ofSchiffer’s M eaning,’ Journ al of Philosophy, 71 (1974); Simon Blackburn, Spreading rheWord (Ox for d Oxford University Press, 1984), 114-118; and Francois Recanati, Mean-ing and Force: The Pragmatics of Perfortnative Utterances (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-versity Press, 1987), Ch. 7. For a formulation r la Grice, see section IX below. I useself-reference merely to ease formulation; I do not consider any philosophical rationalefor it.) I call this a qu asi-Gricean account because on Grice’s analysis of speake r’smeaning (see the canonical papers, especially ‘Meaning’ I 957), in Paul Grice, Srudiesin the Way of Words (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989)) the speaker aims topro duce a response in the speaker-to get him to believe someth ing, or to do some-thing-not merely to give him an entitlement to believe or do it. Moreover, I do not aim toanalyze speaker’s meaning but instead the nature of an illocutionary act.

Some Griceans e.g.P. F. Strawson, ‘Meaning and Truth’ (1969) in his Logiro-Lin-guistic Pa pe rs (London: Methuen, 1971)) would view S as intending to get A to believethat she, S, believes that p. (Grice himself accepts the modification of his 1957 view in‘Utterer’s Meaning, S entence-Mean ing, and W ord-Mean ing’ (1968). Srudies in the Wayof Words, 123.) But here I sympathize with McDowell’s complaint (‘Meaning, Communi-

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We can now account for the nature of A’s abuse when he fails to regardhimself as coming to have an entitlement to believe that it’s noon-when hefails, in effect, to tak e S’s word for it. A recognizes that S is telling him thatit’s noon. By T), A recognizes that S intends that he gain access to an enti-tlement to believe that it’s noon through this very recognition. But then Arefuses to acknowledge the entitlement. In telling A that p, S offers himsomething, an entitlement to believe that p, which she conceives as his forthe taking. In recognizing her intention to tell him that p, A satisfies thatintention, and S thereby counts as telling him that p. But in refusing toacknowledge the entitlem ent, he refuses the offer she ma kes in telling himthat p. The telling co m es off, but S’s aim in telling is thwarted.

I1T he quasi-Gricean analysis ex pla ins nicely part of what’s constitutively atstake for S when S doesn’t merely assert that p in A’s presence-perhapstelling someone else tha t p-but tells A that p. If what’s at stake for S whenshe tells A that p is his recognition of her as worthy of his trust, what’s atstake for A? Qu ite simply: his status as reasonable in trusting her. W hile Acan abu se the illocution by failing to regard S as worthy of his trust, S canabu se it by failin g to live up to that trust, should A accept her invitation andgive it.

If you’ve told someone that p, that person is now under certain conditions-for exam ple, if he’s challenged whether p - e n ti tl e d to hold you accountablefor producing a reason to believe that p. If you can’t do so, you are subject tocriticism not only as an asserter that is, as o ne wh o has represented herselfas believing tha t p yet when pressed cannot produce a reason t o believe thatp, but as a teller that is, as one who has culpably misled your addTeSsee.’’Inability or refusal to produce a reason would amount to an abuse of yourstatus as teller. What shows that you do take on this additional burden bytelling as opp osed to asserting? On e thing that show s it is that you can pre-

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cation, and Knowledge,’ in Z. van Straaten (ed.), PhilosophicalSubjects (Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 1980), 127) that “the primary po int of making assertions [I would say: intelling people things] is not to instil into others beliefs about one’s own beliefs, but toinfo rm others-to let them know-about the sub ject matter of one’s assertions (whichneed not be, though of c ourse it may be, the asserter’s beliefs).” How else can sh e do thisif not by giving him an entitlement to believe w hat she tells him?Cf. Robert Brandom, Making r Explicit (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994),171: “In assertin g a claim , one not only autho rizes further assertions (for oneself and forothers ) but undertakes a responsibility, for one comm its oneself to being able to v indica tethe original claim by show ing that one is entitled to make it.” If ‘telling som eone that p’ issubstituted for ‘asserting a claim’ this is similar to the thesis I’m en dorsin g here. But theone to whom one is responsible is jus t the one told, that is, the one entitled to complain thatone has misled him if one cannot vindicate the claim. (It is a separate question whatcounts as vindication sufficient to render complaint unreasonable. in everyday contexts,the standards are not very high. Cf. note 51 below.)

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vent your address ee from holding you acco unta ble by asserting w hat you wantto tell him while preventing him from construing your assertion as an effortto tell him that. It is toward this end that you might avail yourself of a spe-cies of conversational indirection.

Consider two protagonists, Stephen and Anna, returning from a visit toAnna’s parents. Stephen wants to tell Anna that she has been cruel to hermother, but he knows that if he does she’ll simply accuse him of accusingher and they’ll be off on on e of their rows. Stephe n is in a not uncommonbind. He wants to convince Anna that she was cruel to her mother. And heknows that she is not likely to infer that she has been cruel from anythingshort of an explicit declaration from him. But he also knows that if he tellsher that she wa s cruel to her mother, she will resent the a ct and he w ill notsucceed in convincing her. So he searches for his most unconfrontational, hismost inner-rumina tive tone of voice. “Didn’t Martha look sad as we left?’ hebegins. “S om e of those remarks did seem a bit cruel.. .”It may not prove easy, but assume he pulls the indirection off. Howwould this look from Anna’s perspective? From her perspective it will lookas if Step hen intends to tell someone that Anna was cruel to her mother butperhaps not A nna herself. S ince there is no on e else present, it will look as ifStephen intends to tell at most only himself that Anna was cruel, that is, asif she has overheard an inner reflection of his that he did not intend for herears.I8 To put it neutrally, it will look to her as if Stephen is merely assert-ing that Anna was cruel to her mother. But one who merely hears, or over-hear s, a speaker asse rt that p is not thereby entitled to hold t he speakeraccountab le for prov iding a reason to b elieve that p.19

There a re thus two distinct kinds of act that Stephen might be performingin acting on an intention to make available to Anna an entitlement to believeshe was cruel through her recognition of that intention. O n the on e hand, hemight be telling her that she was cruel. On the other hand, he might beasserting that she was cruel, intending to give her evidence for the proposi-

Of course if there is someone else there the indirection will be in this one respect easierto pull off (though perhaps not in others) .On ‘mere’ assertion, see again note 13. One might counter that there is a norm governingour practices of (mere) assertion that entitles anyone to challenge anyone who assertsthat p to produce a reason to believe that p. (Perhaps Brandom believes this: see the quo-tation in note 17 above.) I doubt that there is any such norm, but even if there were itwould be a different norm from the one governing the practice of telling that I amdescribing. If S tells A that p but cannot when challenged produce a reason to believethat p, she counts as misleading A-an abuse of the illocution of telling. If, on the otherhand, S merely asserts that p, then if she cannot produce a reason to believe that p she isnot culpable for misleading anyone. If you say she has ‘abused’ the illocution of assert-ing, that’s a different abuse.

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tion that she was cruel.” In refraining fro m telling her that she w as cru el, herefrains from granting her the special right to challenge him to justify hisassertion that he would have granted her had he told her.” By appearing notto address her, he mak es available to her the entitlem ent h e intends her tohave with out undertaking the justificatory burden he would have undertakenhad he ma de the entitlement available by telling her. It may make a real dif-ference to th e quality of their conversation whether she views him as under-taking that burden. It may make a real difference whether she views him asoffering her anything a s intimate as an invitation to trust him.”2o What evidence might he thereby give her? Simply the evidence that he believes she wascruel. If she has good evidence that his beliefs on this subject tend to be reliable, sheacquires an entitlement to believe what h e asserts.

Th e literature on Grice’s analysis of speaker’s meaning has bee n vitiated by failu reto mark this distinction. See, for example, Strawson’s counterexample to the sufficiencyof Grice’s analysis in section I11 of ‘Intention and Convention in Speech Acts’ 1964) inLogico-Linguistic Pap ers. The counterexample satisfies Grice’s conditions on S’s mean-ing that p but involves a kind of indirection that is not com patible with s’s meaning any-thing at all by her act. Wh at gives this result is that, as Strawson describes her, S is solelyconcerned to influence her audience’s beliefs through the production of evidence.Strawson doesn’t conceive G rice as aiming to characterize inherently comm unicativeacts such as telling. And indeed that was not Grice’s aim. But if w e take not asserting buttelling and other inherently communicative acts as the explananda of a neo-Gricean pro-g r a m - o n e that simply abandons the aim of analyzing speaker’s meaning-we need nolonger fear a counterexample such as Strawson’s.One might doubt that Stephen is even asserting that Anna was cruel in this scenario. Isn’the merely, as we say, wondering aloud whether she was cruel? One might view his strat-egy as that of getting Anna to believe that she was cruel through a kind of conversationalimplicature. First, Stephen gets Anna to understand h m as wondering aloud whether shewas cruel. He then relies on her to infer that he believes that she was cruel from thethought that unless he intends her to draw ths inference he violates a conversationalmaxim, perhaps that requiring ‘relevance.’ (One might thus extend Grice’s logic of con-versation from its intended dom ain to the domain of illocutionary force.) Stephen thereb yproduces a linguistic manifestation of his belief that Anna was cruel without even havingto assert that she was cruel. (We might conceive this as an indirection within an indirec-tion.) N o matter. The case, even so conc eived, illustrates the co ntrast I am drawing withthe case in which Stephen tells Anna that she was cruel.We might say that Stephen invokes or even exploits his trust relation with Anna withoutinviting Anna to trust him on this issue. Th e contrast would then be between the case inwhich Stephen merely relies on the fact that Anna considers him trustworthy and the casein which he invites her to consider him trustworthy. 1 owe this formulation to DavidHills.)

We might place here the interesting psychological datum that overhearing a remarkcan be more epistemically compelling than having the remark addressed to you. Stephenmight trade on this psychological fact. Or Anna might fear Stephen’s trading on it andcall him to accounts. How can we account for the datum itself? One explanation wouldnote that the ground for believing a mere assertion is conceptually simpler than theground for believing w hat a speaker tells you: in the former case you need merely dra wupon eviden ce of trustworthiness, wh ereas in the latter you mus t ackn ow ledge your pl ac ein a trust relation. Related to this is the equally interesting datum that it is often easier tobelieve that a spe aker is lying to you than to a complete stranger. We usually imagine ourow n interpersonal relations to be more difficult-hence more interesting -than those of

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Speakers can, of course, perform such backings-off explicitly. Imagineyour interlocutor manifests a belief that the Liar Paradox derives from a pas-sage in St. Paul’s Epistle to Titus. Contrast the following two backings-off.If alert, you say: a) “In fact the Liar Paradox was discussed much earlier. Butdon’t take my word for it; look under the entries for Eubulides of Miletus andTheophrastus in Diogenes Laertius’s Lives of the Philosophers.” If groggy,you say: b) “In fact the Liar Paradox was discussed much earlier. Wait, letme think. No, I’m not sure. Perhaps I’m getting it confused with discussionof one of the Heraclitean paradoxes.” If you say b) you tell your interlocutorthat the Liar Paradox was discussed earlier, and then retract the telling. Youdon’t do quite the same if you say a). Does this conflict with my account?No. The difference between a) and b) is not that you retract your telling inthe latter but not in the former. You retract your telling i n each case. Thedifference is that in a) you retract only your act of telling your interlocutorthat the Liar Paradox was discussed earlier but not your act of asserting it. Inb) you retract both your telling and your asserting. At the end of b) youdon’t count as even asserting that the Liar Paradox was discussed earlier. Atthe end of a) you do.

Now one might hold that in a) you do not retract the telling but reinforceit with your allusion the Diogenes Laertiu~.~~ow could we resolve thatdispute? I concede that you might have said, “The Liar Paradox was discussedmuch earlier, I tell you, but don’t take my word for it.. ” Does that show thatyour act must be a telling, even after you instruct your interlocutor not totake your word for it? Hardly. ‘I tell you’ has roughly the same meaning as‘I’ll have you know’ or ‘by God’): it’s a kind a exclamation. It is revealingthat when you say a) your body language will naturally convey the retractionof a kind of intimacy: you’ll hold up your hands as if to push your interlocu-tor away from you, or as if to show him that you bear no concealed assump-tions about your relationship. You do reinforce your act when you go on torefer him to Diogenes Laertius. You reinforce the assertion you just made,having backed off of your act of telling.

I do not, however, insist that it is wrong to call your speech act a telling.I insist merely that it is not a telling in the sense analyzed by (T). Of course,that will disappoint anyone who thought my principal aim was to explainwhat unifies our usage of the verb ‘to tell.’ But that is not my aim. My aimis to analyze an important sense of ‘tell’ and then on the basis of that analy-sis to explain how such acts create a distinctive species of epistemic warrant.Philosophers have not learned to distinguish telling A that p from asserting

people we do not know . Thanks to an anonymous referee for reminding me o f the firstdatum.)This was the thesis put forth by an anonymous referee, who framed the example as acounterexample to my account of telling.

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that p in A’s presence. But I think they thereby overlook an important dis-tinction. It is important that you can take responsibility for your interlocu-tor’s entitlem ent to believe that p ont o yo ur o wn shou lders, rather than step-ping back from that intimacy and referring him to others.

T he pos sibi lity of such backings-off c onf irm s the quasi-Gricean analysisof telling. It reveals that a speak er who tells her addressee that p intends thathe thereby gain access to an entitlement to believe that p that, by contrast,doesn’t rest on whatever evidence he may have either of her reliability or ofthe reliability of her sources. For his part, S tephen wouldn’t be in the picklehe’s in if an entitleme nt made available by telling rested on evidence of reli-ability. In that case, there would be no relevant difference between tellingAnna that she was cruel and merely asserting that she was cruel. Whicheverhe did, her belief that she was cruel, should she form it, would derive fromthat evidence, and his role in the transaction would be merely to speak hismind. But there is a relevant difference between asserting that Anna was crueland telling Anna that she was cruel. If he tells her that she was cruel, heoffers her access to an entitlement to believe so that rests not on evidence butsolely on his intention to make that entitlement available. In telling her, hewould intend to ma ke available to her an entitlem ent to believe th at she w ascruel simply through her recognition that that is what he intends.

111It is important to distinguish Stephen’s predicament from other com mon pre-dicaments. Stephen believes he must adopt alternative means of convincingAnna that she was cruel because of the consequences that will ensue if sheviews him as telling her this. We’d have an importantly different case if Ste-phen’s ob stacle lay in his belief that Anna w ill not trust him and so will notprovide the uptake required for an act of telling to be consummated. We’dhave a third case if Steph en believed that, thoug h A nna will trust h im bygiving his word due weight in forming a belief about her conduct, she willnot come to believe that she has been cruel. In each case, Stephen can adoptthe strategy of mere ly asserting what he wishes he co uld tell Anna.

Let me draw these distinctions schematically and provide some labels. Insinc erel y telling A that p, S intends to bring a bout two distinc t things: sheintends (a) that an entitlement become available to A through the quasi-Gricean mechanism, and she intends (b) that A acquire that entitlement bytrusting her. W e mu st accordingly distinguish tw o form s of uptake that Amigh t contribute in bringing off the transaction. (i) If A re cogniz es S’s inten-tion to make an entitlement available to him, he satisfies her (a)-intentionand the entitlem ent is thereby made available to him . (ii) If A also trus ts S ,he satisfies her (b)-intention and thereby com es to acquire the entitlem ent. Itis worth emphasizing that A might trust S on the question whether p without

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actually coming to believe that p.24 S will, of course, typically also intend(c) that A actually co m e to believe that p.

We can help ourselves to Austin’s distinction and say that only S ’ S (a)-intention is an intention to perform an illocutionary act. Her (c)-intention isan intention to perform a perlocutionary act. Her (b)-intention I’ve describedas the intention that her illocutionary act of telling A that p be consummated.When S’s illocutionary act comes off, A thereby gains access to an entitle-ment to believe that p. When A consummates s’s act by trusting her, hega ins the entitlement. Her perlocutionary act comes off, by contrast, on lywhen he forms the belief that p.

You can tell som eone what you’re sure you’ll prove unable to get him tobelieve. And you can tell som eon e certain not to trust you on the m atter.You ca n put the invitation directly. ‘You’re a fool, take my word for it,’ youca n say. It sometimes makes good sense to issue an invitation certain to berefused.2s Th e interlocutor you’ll prove unable t o tell is the interlocutor whowill not recognize the complex intention informing your act. You can try totell him, of course , but your telling will misfire a s long as h e fails to recog-nize your intention thereby to make available an entitlement to take yourword.26

24 He might, for example, trust her to tell him the weather accurately but know that the‘window’ into which she gazes as she tells him it’s sunny is in fac t a hyp errealistic paint-ing. Here he com es to acquire a prima facie entitlement to believe that it’s sunny that hisancillary knowledge defeats.Mj ccount thus avoids the fatal flaw of Grice’s accounts of asserting/telling. (Gricedidn’t distinguish telling from asserting.) On Grice’s acco unts see note 16 above), S tellsA that p by intending that A believe that p, or-in the later version-that A believe that Sbelieves that p. Grice combined this with the principle that “one cann ot have intentions toachieve results which one sees no chance of achieving” (‘Utterer’s Meaning an d Inten-tions,’ 98). Th is yields the result that if you see no chance of getting your interlocutor tobelieve that p or, to believe that you believe that p) then you cannot tell him that p. Forsom e examples that bring out the absurdity of this result, see Ian Rumfin, ‘TruthCondi-tions and Com munication,’ Mind 104 (1995), 833-34. Even if the principle is too strong(for discussion, see J . David Velleman, Practical Reflection (Princeton: Princeton Uni-versity Press, 1989 . Ch. 4), it is intuitively implausible that success in telling should beti e d -e v e n weakly-to succe ss in convincing (even of the proposition that you believethat p). The two forms of succe ss seem entirely unrelated.I lack space to give this last claim the full defense it needs, in tight especially of its bea r-ing on deba te over the idea that a violation of free speec h could o ccur by virtue of anintended audience’s inability to recognize the illocutionary intention. (Say, a woman triesto refuse sex, but the man cannot recognize what she’s doing as manifesting an intentionto get him to stop.) For objections to the claim, see Daniel Jacobson, ‘Free dom of Sp eec hActs? A Response to Langton,’ Philosophy and Public Affairs 24 (1995), 72-78. For areply, see Jennife r Hornsby and Rae Langton, ‘Free Speech and Illocution,’ Legal The-ory 4 (1998), 28-31; then se e Jacobs on’s rejoinder, ‘Speech and Action: Replies toHornsby and Langton,’ Legal Theory 7 (2001), 179-201.

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IVHow could there be such an entitlement? How could you come to have an

entitlement to believe that p simply by recognizing someone’s intention togive you an entitlement to believe that p? How could you acquire this statusmerely by accepting an invitation to trust?

When I speak of an ‘entitlement’ (or ‘warrant’) I do not necessarily mean aproposition playing the role of premise in any process of reasoning in thesubject. Some of a subject’s epistemic entitlements are internally accessible-at whatever level of cognition-and some may not be. It may thus be pos-sible for a subject to have an entitlement to an inferential transition withouthaving a corresponding justification. As I’ll use the terms, a ‘justification’ issomething you could cite in order to justify an inferential transition. Anentitlement is merely something you rely on, in relying on which you countas warranted. I mean to use the term ‘entitlement’ very broadly to cover bothaccessible and inaccessible species of warrant should there be any of the lat-ter). 7

When an addressee satisfies a speaker’s intention to tell him that p, according to T), he gains access to a prima facie entitlement to believe that p.Since his recognition of S’s intention to tell him that p suffices for his beingtold that p, A gains access to an entitlement to believe that p directly, notfrom evidence of the truth of ‘p’ but from his mere understanding of what Sis doing.28 t is hardly a novel claim nowadays that the transmission of epis-temic entitlements through testimony is thus direct. Tyler Burge, for exam-ple, argues for the following principle:A person is entitled to accept as true somethin g that is presen ted as true and that is intelligibleto him, unless there are strong er reasons not to doAnd Robert Brandom argues for the following account of assertion:

My usage of ‘warrant,’ ‘entitlement,’ and ‘justification’ follows that of Tyler Burge‘Computer Proof, Apriori Knowledge, and Other Minds,’ Philosophical Perspec tives 121998), 3. (Note that I’m for present purposes trying not to choose sides in the debatebetween intemalists and extem alists. I discuss an externalist interpretation of my view insections VII and W I I .Of course, in order to understand what S is doing here, on my quasi-Gricean view, A hasto have a belief about S’s intentions. The re is thus a sense in w hich w hatev er warrant Aderives from that state of understanding must derive in part from whatever warrant A hasfor that belief. But this would not render the form er warrant indirect, in any sen se re le -vant to the current discussion, since, if my qua si-Grice an view is right, the belief aboutS’s intentions jus t is the state of understanding.In the context of the present argument, I do not claim that the entitlement is apriori,merely that it is direct. I consider the question of apriority in ‘Judging as Inviting Self-Trus t,’ in preparation. See also note 45.Burge ‘Content Preservation,’ Philosophical Review 102 1993). 67; cf. the fuller state-ment of this principle in Burge, ‘Interloc ution, Perception, a nd Memory,’ Philosophicaltudies 86 1997),n.4. For a fuller treatment of the issue, see Burge, ‘Computer Proof,Apriori Knowledge, and Other Minds.’

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What is done in asserting __ onsists in the way in which ... asserters alter the scoreinterlocutors keep of the deontic statuses (commitments and entitlements) of their fellowprac t i t i~ners .~’Both Burge and Brandom thus claim that the mere act of asserting that psuffices to give any understanding hearer prima facie warrant or entitlement tobelieve that p?’ But this is stronger than the thesis I’m defending. I believe itis too strong.

In light of my argument so far, we can see that the stronger thesis is toostrong in two respects. First, it is too strong to claim that any speech act ofcommittedly putt ing i t forth that p w h e t h e r tel ling or asserting+ould(interestingly) eo ips0 give a hearer an entitlement to believe that P . ~ * uch aspeech act can at most make an entitlement available to a hearer, therebycausing that hearer not to acquire but to gain acc ess to the entitlement. Asindicated in section 111, if A doesn’t in fact trust S then he fails to acquire anentitlement to believe what she tells him. This is the difference between theuptake necessary and sufficient for an illocutionary act to transpire and theuptake necessary and sufficient for an illocutionary act to be consummated.Otherw ise put, it is the difference between acknowledging an invitation totrust and actually entering into a trust relation. My thesis is that telling isinviting your interlocutor to enter into a species of relation that provides himwith warrant. I do no t claim that telling by itself provides him with war-rant.33

Second, and more fundamentally, these philosophers fail to distinguishwithin the cla ss of hearers those to whom the speaker has addressed her

3031 Brandom Making It Explicit, 171; cf. his ‘Asserting,’ Noris 17 1983).Burge and Brandom take very different routes, however, to these conclusions. For stillother routes to similar conclusions, none of which involves distinguishing telling from

asserting, see George Myro, ‘Aspects of Acceptability,’ Pacific Philosophical Quarterly62 1981); Michael Welbourne, The Conimunify of Knowledge (Aberdeen: AberdeenUniversity Press, 1986) and ‘Testimony, Knowledge and Belief,’ in Bimal K. M atilal, andArdinam Chakrabarti (eds.), Knowing from Words (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Pub-lishers, 1994);C. A. J Coady, Testimony (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992) and‘Testimony, Observation and “Autonomous Knowledge,’” in Matilal and Chakrabarti, op.c i t . ;Michael Dummett, ‘Testimony and M emory,’ in ibid.; P. F. Strawson, ‘Knowing fromWords,’ in ibid John McDow ell, ‘Meaning, Comm unication, and Knowledge,’ op. cit,and ‘Kn ow ledge by Hearsay,’ in Matilal and Chakra barti, op. cir. (McDowell focuses onthe speech act of letting know, not the same as asserting but not w hat I mean by telling);and, more recently, Peter J. Graham, ‘Transferring Knowledge,’ Noris 34 2000); Rich-ard Foley, Intellectual T m t n Oneself and Others (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 2001 , Ch. 4; and Gary Ebbs, ‘Learning from Others,’ N o h 36 2002).Th e uninteresting case: S puts it forth that she is putting something forth, thereby givingany observer an entitlement to believe that she is putting something forth. (By ‘commit-tedly’ putting it forth, I mean putting it forth with the commitment to truth characteristic ofasserting or telling.)’ further explain the basis of this claim in section V.

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speech act-i.e. the hearers who coun t as told by the ~peaker .3~s I’veargued, only these hearers eo ips0 gain access to an entitlement to believewhat the speaker tel ls them ; othe r hearers-verhearers-gain access to thesam e kind of warrant to believe what she asserts as they would if she’d mani-fested her belief in som e other way.35

Call the thesis that we can reduce testimony entitlements to more basicentitlements (such as those derived from perception and memory) reduction-ism about testimony.36Th e challenge for an anti-reductionist about testim onyis not only to argue against reductionism but to explain how testimony is asui generis source of epistemic warrant. The anti-reductionist must explainwhat it is about testimony that makes it so. One contribution of the presentpaper lies in its detailed explanation of how the status of testimony as anirreducible sou rce of warrant is entailed by the nature of the illocutionary actof telling, an act whose nature in turn derives, like that of any illocutionaryact, from the nature of the intentions that the speaker gets her addressee torecognize in performing it.

VI’ll now elaborate that explanation. Say S tells A that p. A thereby gainsaccess to an entitlement to believe that p directly, claim we anti-reductionists.34 See the useful diagram in Herbert H. Clark, Using Language (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 19 96), 14. For my purposes, what Clark calls a ‘side participant’ w eshould conceive as potentially an addressee. Side participants are participants in the co n-versation w ho are not being addressed at the moment. It seem s that in the testimonial ca sea speaker needn’t be distributing his attention evenly among all participants in the con-versation in order to count as addressing them all in the way characteristic of telling.Unless there is som e reason to think otherw ise (e.g. the speak er winks a t one participa ntwhile add ressing another), the only hearers to whom the speaker is merely asser ting ar ethe ones Clark calls ‘bystanders’ and ‘eavesdroppers’4n other words, those who arenot participating in the conversationFor the case of merely h earing a speaker assert that p (without being told that p onese lf),I agree with the reduction ist account defend ed in Elizabeth Fricker, ‘Against Gullibility,’in Matilal and Chakrabarti, op c i t . :one’s entitlement must derive fro m sourc es oth er thanthe testimony itself. But Fricker, like the anti-reductionists she criticizes, fails to distin-guish ass erting from telling.The reductionist tradition in the epistemology of testimony derives from Hume. (See A nEnquiry C oncerning Human Understanding, edited by L. A . Selby-Bigge and P. H. Nid-ditch (Oxford Oxford University Press, 1975 , 113: “The reason why we place anycredit in witnesses and historians, is not derived from any connexion, which we perceiveapr ior i , between testimony and reality, but because we are accustomed to find a con-formity between them.”) The anti-reductionist tradition, dormant until recently, derivesfrom Reid. (See An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense, inInquiry and Essays, edited by R. E. Beanblossom and K. Lehrer (Indianapolis: Hackett,1983). 95: “It is evide nt that, in the matter of testimony, the balance of human judgm ent isby nature inclined to the side of belief; and turns to that side of itself, wh en there is noth-ing put into the opposite s cale. If this was not so, no proposition that is uttered in dis coursewould be believed, until it was examined and tried by reason; and most men would beunable to find reasons f or believing the thousandth part of what is told them.”)

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But exactly w hat entitlem ent? W e can clarify the entitlemen t by clarify ing theanalogy between testimony and other basic sources of epistemic warrant suchas perception a nd m emory.

Other anti-reductionists claim that A’s entitlem ent to believe that pderives from the fact that S asserted that p. T his fails to distinguish assertingfrom telling. But say they amended it to: the fact that S told A that p. Thiswould still be wrong. If this is the usual case, S doesn’t intend that A shouldbe entitled to believe whatever she tells him, merely because she told him.S he intends that he gain access to an e ntitleme nt to believe that p on thebasis of her telling him that p, but she doesn’t intend that his entitlementderivemerely from the fact that she told him that p. She intends that he beentitled not merely on the basis of being told but also on the basis of trust inher. She doesn’t think that he would gain this entitlement should he fail totrust her. Should he fail to trust her, he would at best have whatever entitle-men t he may gain from the fact that she merely asserted that p. Sh e intendsthat his entitlement to believe that p derive not merely from the fact that shespok e but from the fact that she addressed him in such a way as to engender atrust relation-that is, from the conju nctive fact that she told him that p andhe trusts her.

Of course, all she can d o to give him this entitlement is tell him that p;whether he trusts her is not up to her. She can attempt to ‘inspire’ his trustin her, but in the usual case she is not in the business of forc ing him to trusther.37 S he makes her contribu tion to his gaining an entitlem ent to believethat p by telling him that p. But the entitlement she intends that he therebyco m e to have derive s also from his trust in her, which is a contributio n of hisow n. The entitlement derives, in other words, from the fact th at they stand i na trust relation.

It is here that we may draw a useful analogy between testimony and mem-ory. Say A forms the belief that he ate cereal for breakfast this morning byrem emb ering that he did. It is an impo rtant point, mu ch emphasized by anti-reductionists, that the epistemic basis of A’s belief need not include evidencederived from mem ory.38 H is warrant for believing that he ate cereal derivesfrom the fact that he remembers having done so, as long as his memory isreliable on such a matter. His memory must b e reliable, but he needn’t pos-ses s evidence of its reliability. He would need evidence of its reliability if thereliability of his memory figured as a premise from which he reasoned inform ing his m emory belief. But h e needn’t reason from any such premise. Heneedn’t reason, ‘My memory is reliable, and it tells me that I ate cereal, so I

W e c a n I think, brainwash, frighten or flatter interlocutors into trusting us, but to viewthe usual case in these terms amounts to a skepticism about trust that 1’11 for present pur-poses set aside.See Burge, ‘Content Preservation,’ 462-5;and Dummett, ‘Testimony and Memory,’ 419.

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must hav e eaten cereal.’ In fact he needn’t reason from prem ises at all in thiscase: he can be warranted in his mem ory belief simp ly by trusting his mem-ory-as lon g as his me mo ry is reliable on such a matter.39 His warrant forbelieving that he ate cereal can derive from the conjun ctive fact that heremembers having done so and h e trusts his mem ory. H is mem ory proposes,but he himself determines the warrant-generating self-trust relation. Ofcourse, self-trust will typically b e habitual. Even gripped by habit, however,the subject takes responsibility for his m emo ry beliefs by rema ining answer-ab le for the reasonability of the self-trust they manifest.

Th e sa me point app lies to other basic sources of epistemic warrant such asperception and inference. If your eyes or your inferential reasoning were notgenerally reliable guides to the truth, your trust in them wouldn’t be reason-able and so wouldn’t provide you with any warrant. But given that they aregenerally reliable, you are warranted when guided by the disposition tobelieve wha t they tell you.Trust gives rise to epistemic warrant, I claim, but it is importantly notthe case that trust does so o the basis of epistemic warrant. Trust is notbelief, although it may give rise to belief. Trust, we can say generally, is aspecies of willed dependence, where the dependence is under appropriate guid-ance of a counterfactual sensitivity to evidence of untrustworthiness in thetrusted. ‘Appropriate guidance’ means: yo u would not trus t if yo u had evi-denc e that the trusted is not worthy of your trust. Tru st need therefore invo lveno active assessing at all, if the trusted is trustworthy ; it is enoug h merely t obe (and, counterfactually, have been) disposed to not ice and respond appropri-ately to evidence of untrustworthiness should there b e or have been any.Thou gh you may have practical reasons fo r or against trusting, I don’t thinkthe epistemic reasonability of trust derives from your posse ssion of epistem icreasons or warran tfor the trust.

Better, I think, to put it this way. Trust is a source of epistemic warrantjust when it is epistemically reasonable. Trust is epistemically reasonablewh en the thing trusted is worthy of the trust-as long as there is no evidenceavailab le that it is untrustworthy. Assu ming satisfaction of this negative evi-39 His memory may of course be reliable on some matters but not on others. When I speak

of the reliability of an epistemic faculty, I’ll alw ays m ean: its reliability on the subjectmatter at hand. Th is does raise the question how broadly to construe the ‘subject m atter.’Is the subject matter of the present case whut had fo r breukfust thi-v morning or whatdid within the pa rt hvenfy-four hours to mention two possibilities among many)? I don’tsee how we could settle this apart from the full context of justification, or why it shouldmatter if we cannot. The fact that you are poor at remembering names doesn’t impugnthe reasonability of trusting your mem ory that you ate cereal this morning. Your myopiadoesn’t impugn the credentials of your visual beliefs about what’s right under your nose.In Goldm an’s terms, am appealing to more-or-less local rather than globa l) re liability .

See Alvin Goldman, Epistemology and Cognition Cambridge: Harvard University Press1986), 44-45.)

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dential condition (which I’ll discuss in the next section), when an epistemicfaculty is trustworthy by serving as a reliable guide to the truth, it makesavailable an entitlement to believe what it tells you whose basis lies simplyin the fact that you trust it.

Memory, perception and inferential reason do not of course tell US thingsin the sense of ‘tell’ that I’m analyzing in this paper. Our epistemic facultiesdo not perform illocutionary acts; they merely deliver to us propositionswhich we then believe or not on the basis of trust. wish to argue not thatthese faculties are like speakers in telling us things but that speakers’ acts oftelling us things are like these faculties in generating entitlements for us tobelieve on the basis of trust. A speaker’s telling you that p will often deliverto you a proposition which your trust in her disposes you to believe. Ofcourse, the mechanism of delivery is not the sam e as in the other cases : thereit was simply a process, here she invites your trust.

Such acts of telling a re nonetheless a source of warrant on a par with thedeliverances of those other epistemic faculties. You can have an entitlementto believe that p derived directly from being told that p in a contex t of reason-able trus t. This is true regardless of the kind of ‘teller’-whether mem ory,perception, inference, or other people.40

VIThis approach preserves what is worth preserving in reductionist and anti-reductionist accounts. The reductionist is right that it is reasonable to trustonly those who are worthy of your trust. And the anti-reduction ist is rightthat reasonable trust does not rest on an assessm ent of your interlocu tor asworthy of it.“’

On e may be tempted to say that A’s trust in S creates a context in which A’s belief that Shas told him that p is what entitles him to believe that p. The temptation derives in partfrom the fact that only in the testimonial case does the fact that you were told that p com eapart from the fact that you believe you were told that p. You don’t misremember whatyou had for breakfast by being mistaken about w hat your memory tells you you had fo rbreakfast, in a way that doesn’t reduce to your memory’s being mistaken about what youhad for breakfast. You don’t misperceive the length s of the lines in the Miiller-Lyer illu-sion by being mistaken about what your eyes tell you about those lengths, in a way thatdoesn’t reduce to your eyes being mistaken abo ut the lengths. B ut you do sometimes mis-takenly believe that it’s noon by mistakenly believing that your interlocutor told you thatit’s noon, in a way that doesn’t reduce to your interlocutor’s being mistaken that it’s noon.(What sh e said was ‘Pass me a spoon.’) This does yield a disanalogy between testimonyand the other cases. Bu t the disanalogy fails to yield a difference in the nature of entitle-ments derived from trust. A mere belief, even a warranted belief, that S has told him thatp would not give A an entitlement to believe that p, even if trust in S is reasonable. If thebelief is false, after all, there is no word of S’s for A to take. (Of course, we could citethe false belief to explain why A r/zought h e had an entitlement t believe that p.)Remember, by ‘trustworthy’ or ‘reliable’ I always mean: trustworthy or reliable on thesubje ct matter at hand. S ee note 39 above.

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Reductionist accoun ts suffer from the prob lem that they would mak e tak-ing a speaker at her word reasonable o nly when you don’t need to. When youhave evidence of a speaker’s reliability you don ’t need to trust her: you cantreat her speech act as a me re assertion and believe what sh e says on the basisof the evidence you have of its truth. You can ignore the fact that she’saddressing you, inviting you. You can treat her as a truth-gauge. Anti-reduc-tionist accounts, on the other hand, have suffered from the problem that theywould mak e taking a speake r at her w ord reasonable when w e think you’d beout of your mind to. If your interlocutor is utterly untrustworthy, you’ve noepistemic right, not even a prima facie right, to take her at her word. Myacc oun t threads a path between thes e difficulties. Tr us t in a speak er can be asource of warrant for believing what sh e tells you even if you have no evi-dence of her reliability. But not, we must add, if you have positive evidenceof her unreliability.

That yields two defeating conditions on the presumption that A’s trust inS is reason able and thereby a sourc e of epistemic warrant. W e might say thatA’s trust in S is ot reasonable if either (i) S is untrustworthy on this sub-ject, or (ii) A has good evidence of s’s untrustworthiness on this subject.This suggests that A’s trust in S would be reasonable in the case in w hich Sis trustworthy but there is good evidence that she is untrustworthy, althoughA happens, fro m epistem ic sloth, not to posses s that eviden ce. He re A’s trustin S would not be reasonable, we think, because it would be undermined byeviden ce which A oug ht to possess, where the ‘ought’ is epistemic. W e mu sttherefore reformulate the second defeating condition to read: (ii) there i s goodevidence of S’s untrustworthiness on this subject, evidence moreover whichA ought to possess, whether A is awa re of that eviden ce or not.42

Why not drop the first defeating condition, we might wonder, and let thereformulated second condition take up the slack? When externalists aboutepistem ic warrant make the move I’ve just m ade in response to counterexam-ples, it se em s to amo unt to a conce ssion that is difficult to square with thespirit of externalism. For the view now seem s to be that the subject’s warrantin trusting derives entirely from the existence or nonexistence of evidence.Give n that warrant is undermined by evide nce of untrustw orthines s, shouldn’twarrant be sustained by evidence of trustworthiness? T h e putatively external-ist accoun t seem s poised to qualify itself in to a form of internalist account.43

Th e distinction I have defended between asserting and telling mo tivates aninsistence that the accou nt not be so qualified. When A merely hears S assert

~ ~~ ~ ~~ ~ ~~ ~~~ ~~ ~~

42 The ‘ought’-clause leaves open the possibility that in a given case where there is evi-dence of S’s untrustworthiness we nonetheless don’t think A ought to possess that evi-dence-since an agent is not responsible for all his evidentiary failures. Thanks to ananonymo us referee for making me fe el the need for this qualification.)For this objection, see Laurence BonJour, The Structure of Empirical Knowledge Cam-bridge: Harvard Un iversity Press, 1985). Chapter 3.

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that p, his warrant for.believing that p does indeed rest on whatever evidencehe might gather of S’s trustworthiness. But when S tells A that p, the statusof A’s trust in S as a source of warrant does not rest in any way on positiveevidence of S’s trustworthiness. If A came to believe that p on the sole basisof positive evidence of S’s trustworthiness, he would not be treating S’s actas a telling addressed to him. Her act would thus go unconsummated.

Still, my account leaves it open that the negative defeating conditionsshould be understood along internalist lines in terms of the availability ofevidence. As long as this stops short of smuggling in a positive evidentialcondition-that there must be evidence of trustworthiness in order for trust tobe reasonable-I see no reason, in light of anything I’ve argued thus far, toexclude this interpretation. It is not inconsistent to hold that reasonable trustboth requires that there not be evidence of untrustworthiness and does notrequire evidence of trustworthiness. An internalist reading of the defeatingconditions on which the first condition, that S is untrustworthy, collapsesinto the second, that there is evidence of her untrustworthiness, need not vio-late my thesis of the presumptive reasonability of trust.

We create space for the internalist reading by formulating the defeatingconditions in terms of a generic notion of trustworthiness, rather than themore specific notion of reliability. We can thus say that S is untrustworthyto the extent that there is evidence that she is untrustworthy. ‘X is worthy ofY’s trust’ says that Y is pro tanto) entitled to trust X. We can leave it openthat what disentitles you to trust is the existence of relevant evidence, with-out thereby holding the same of what entitles you to trust. An internalistreading of the first defeating condition would not amount to an internalistview of the positive reasonability of trust, since this reading is compatiblewith trust’s being reasonable in the absence of evidence that the trusted isworthy of it. In the next section I’ll consider an externalist reading.

Whichever way we read the first defeating condition, my argument yieldsthe following view of how telling and asserting can give warrant. When Sasserts that p in A’s presence, but does not tell A that p, A cannot derive anentitlement to believe that p unless he reasons as follows: S is trustworthyon the question whether p, S has manifested her belief that p, so it must bethe case that p. Here, A’s belief that p, should he form it, would be based onevidence of whether p is likely to be true. When S tells A that p, by contrast,A may derive an entitlement to believe that p without any such reasoning. Inthe case of telling, but not of mere asserting, A may derive an entitlement tobelieve that p simply from recognizing S ’ s intention that he trust her.44A’s

There will be cases in which it is unclear whether a hearer should count as part of aspeaker’s audience-that is, one of those whom the speaker is inviting to bust her-because it is unclear whom the speaker intends to be addre ssing. There will be othercases in which, though her intentions are def inite, the speaker is nonetheless not entitledto assume that her audience can recognize these intentions. In such a case, she shouldn’t

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belief that p, should h e form it as S in telling intends him to form it, wouldbe based not on reasoning from evidence of p ’ s truth but simply on his trustin her.45

VIIIt is a problem for an internalist reading of the defeating conditions on reasonable trust that trust can be reasonable even if there is no evidence of thespeaker’s trustworthiness. Indeed, even when there is evidence of the speaker’strustworthiness available to the addressee, it would, as I’ve argued, constitutean illocutionary ‘abuse’ to form your belief self-consciously on the basis ofthat evidence. One who tells offers an invitation to trust, not an invitation toconsider evidence of her worthiness of trust.

The problem, specifically, is that it’s hard to see how the mere fact thatthere is no evidence of a speaker’s untrustworthiness could ground a hearer’sentitlement to believe what the speaker tells him. On an externalist reading ofthe first defeating condition, the speaker must be in fact reliable, and theexternalist could appeal to this fact to ground the hearer’s entitlement. Theinternalist will in turn complain that it can be reasonable to trust a speaker

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be surprised if some of her hearers take on trust what she ha dn’t invited them to take ontrust. We can view these cases as similar to a sloppily tendered invitation: you mean toinvite only people on your block to your party, but you misjudge who will see invitationsposted on your block and lots of vagabonds from adjacent blocks com e to be lieve they’reinvited. Are they? You could reasonably say that they weren’t, though you’d have to takerespo nsibility for leading them to believe they were.

This mirrors a debate within spee ch act theory about the na ture of A ustinian‘uptake,’ an application of which informs the debate mentioned in note 26 above.One might codify this contrast by claiming that while in the former case A’s entitlementto believe that p w ould, in deriving fr om ev idenc e, be em pirical, A’s entitlement in thelatter case would be apriori. While I am not unsympathetic with this claim, the issue iscomplicated. I cannot give a full treatment of the question, but let me briefly defend theclaim of apriority against an objection suggested by my defense of the thesis that epis-temic warrant could be grounded directly in trust.

I defended that thesis by comparing testimony with other sources of epistemic war-rant such as perception and memory, and the comparison with other epistemic facultiesmay m ake it look dubious that testimony could give us apriori warrant. Perception do esn ’tgive us apriori warrant. Why should testimony? If S looks out the window, sees that it’ssunn y, then tells A, how could A’s entitlement to believe that it’s sunny count as apriori,given that S’s does not? We must formulate the entitlements more carefully, how ever.A’ s entitlement to believe that S told him it’s sunny is not apriori; he believes that on thebasis of perception and memory. But we can ask: given that S told A it’s sunny, whatentitlem ent does he have to believe that it’s sunny? His entitlement to believe that she toldhim it’s sunny is not apriori, but one might claim that his entitlement to believe what shetold him nonetheless is apriori. S and A are in different epistemic predicaments, and wemust mark these differen ces in how we form ulate their epistem ic entitlements. That w ecan formulate S’s and A’s entitlements as ‘an entitlement to believe what S told A’ doesnot show that S and A must have the same entitlement to believe what S told A , or eventhe sam e kind of entitlement. S derive s her entitlement from trust in her perception wh enshe looked out the window and trust in her memory as she remembers the incident. Aderive s his entitlement from trust in S when sh e tells him what sh e saw.

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who is not in fact reliable-provided there is evidence that she is reliable. Idon’t want to try to resolve the debate here.46 nstead I’ll simply mention thisrationale for treating my argument in this paper as the first step of a largerargument for externalism, and move on to sketch some features of the exter-nalist view of testimonial warrant that this larger argument, if successful,would vindicate.

If we interpret the first defeating condition in externalist fashion, we get aform of externalism strikingly different from reliabilism. A reliabilist view oftestimony would view it as giving rise to warrant by virtue of the fact thatthe process by which subjects base their beliefs on testimony is a reliableprocess, that is, one likely to produce true beliefs. This leads immediately tothe problem that there are as many different processes potentially in play asthere are principles on whose basis we might view our subject A as forminghis belief. Does his belief rest on the principle ‘Believe S when she tells yousomething,’ or the principle ‘Believe someone in the circumstances that S isin when that person tells you something,’ or the principle ‘Believe anyonewho tells you something’? These principles pick out different processes ofbelief formation, yet the question which process governs A’s belief formationseems viciously ~nderdetermined.~’ he question is underdetermined, on areliabilist view, because the strong form of externalism entailed by reli-abilism holds that we need not settle the question of a subject’s epistemicentitlement to his belief by appeal to the subjective standpoint manifested byhis belief formation.Now I agree that the question of the subject’s epistemic entitlement to hisbeliefs need not be settled by appeal to the j u s t i f i c a t i o n he has for them: i tneed not depend on anything he is in position to cite. I join the strong exter-nalist in denying this not only in the case of testimony but in the cases ofmemory, perception and inference I considered earlier. But my emphasis ontrust amounts to a denial of the reliabilist’s strong externalism. The subjec-tive standpoint manifested in belief formation includes the subject’s exerciseof his capacity for reasonable trust. And in all the cases I considered the sub-ject’s warrant derives from his exercise of that capacity.

The reliabilist poses the question of warrant in terms of the reliability of aprocess of belief formation, I in terms of the reliability of the thing trusted. Ifthe reliability of a process of belief formation determined warrant, then if S is46 I discuss the internalism/externalismdebate at length in ‘Trust and Reasons,’ in prepara-

tion.4’ This looks like an instance of the ‘Problem of Generality’ for reliabilism mentioned inAlvin Goldman, ‘What is Justified Belief?’ in George Pappas ed.), Justijicution andKnowledge: New tudies in Epistemology Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1979). 12, and devel-oped in Richard Feldman, ‘R eliability and Justification,’ Monist 68 I 985). For a reply toFeldman, see W illiam P. A lston, ‘How to Think about Reliability,’ Philosophical Topics 231995). Then see Earl Conee and Richard Feldman, ‘The Generality Problem for Reli-

abilism,’ Philosophical Sfudies 89 1998).



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reliable A will thereby acquire an entitlement to believe what she tells him,since forming beliefs on that basis is reliable. I agree with internalists thatthere can be no such entitlement, because there can be no entitlement externalto a subject’s capacity for cognitive self-governance. Yet it does not followthat all entitlements must be internally accessible to the subject. Trust is nota mere disposition to believe. Trust is not a ‘mechanism’ of belief formation;it does not merely cause beliefs but manifests the subject’s cognitive self-governance. On an externalist view, the way a trusting subject governs him-self is by letting himself be governed by the word of a reliable other. This isnot internalist cognitive self-governance; it specifically abandons the projectof apportioning belief to positive evidence, even to evidence of reliability.Still, one can hold this view without subscribing to the strong externalismentailed by reliabilist views, which treat the question of warrant in substantialindependence from the subject’s personal responsiveness to epistemicnorms.48The externalist element would codify a dimension in which a subject c nactively take responsibility and thereby become accountable for the course ofhis cognitive life even when passively acquiescing in the word of another. Hetakes responsibility by remaining answerable for the reasonability of histrust.

VIIIThe externalism would mark a principal risk in trusting. It is difficult, attimes, to know if trust is reasonable. A platitude has it that bestowing trustcan itself make a person reliable. Perhaps your trust in a speaker, in makingher reliable, will causally determine its own status as reasonable. Or perhapsyou’ll hope for this outcome in vain. Determining whether someone is reli-

48 My point is not that reliabilist theories are incomparible with viewing subjects as respon-sive to epistemic norms. My point is that this responsiveness as such is not centra l to thetheory. On a reliabilist theory, the subject’s responsiveness to norms is manifested by areliable process to which th e subject is party by b eing disposed in a specified way. Thereis no question of his taking responsibility for himself or for his attitudes IS responsive tothese norms.

Although I cannot pursue the issue here, I find plausible the generalization of theseremarks to the other forms of trust-in memory, in perception, in infer en ce- dis cu sse d insection V. Th e trust is perhaps more habitual there than in the testimonial case or doesthat underestimate the depths of our testimonial habits?), but in each case the subject canbe viewed as taking responsibility for h i s t r u s t by remaining answ erable for its reason -ability. I would argue that the cogency of sceptical challenges reveals an epistemicrequire men t that subje cts take a kind of responsibility for their belief incompatible withforming it through the exercise of a mere disposition. (I explore this further in ‘Judging asInviting Self-Trust,’ in preparation.)

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able , in the relevant sense, is no easier than determining whether you can orcould count on her. Som etim es on ly retrospection will tell

Th e risk you som etime s run in trusting has the effect of m aking it diffi-cult, at those times, to know whether the entitlement you take yourself tohav e to beli eve what your interlocutor tells you is really an entitlement-thatis, whether it really warrants your belief. In many ordinary cases, on the otherhand , there is no such uncertainty. When you ask the fan walking back fromthe stadium who won th e gam e, or a colleague what went on in the meeting,or your lover what he or she did on that trip to Paris, you trust your inter-locutor, your trust is reas ona ble, and you kn ow that your trust is reasonable.Give n that most peo ple are reliable mo st of the time, your trust in others isin ano ther respect like your trus t in endogenous sources of warrant. Whetherit is your memory testifying to the contents of your breakfast or your uncletestifying to the contents of his stam p collection, unless you have positivereason to d o otherwise it makes se nse to trust first and ask que stions later.On e might object that while trust may be presumptively reasonable withrespect to some subject matters (the time, the weather, what happened when),it is not presumptively reasonable with respect to others. If a colleaguewalked up to you in the hall and simply told you what consciousness is, forexa mp le, you would not be reasonable if y ou took her word for it-whereasyou would be if she’d told you it has started to rain. I can accommodate thisdifference, however, without altering my account. By ‘reliable’ I have allalong meant reliable on the given subject m atter. And there are som e subjectmatters on which simply telling someone what’s so immediately gives himevidence of your unreliability. S im ply telling som eon e what consciousnessis, instead of telling him that you have a theory of con scio usn ess that goesthus-and-so, imm ediately gives him evidence that you have no idea how hardit is to come up with an adequate theory of consciousness and therefore thatyou are an unreliable philosopher of mind. Trust is presumptively reasonablewith respect to all subject matters, but there are some subject matters onwhich an unhedged telling would immediately trigger the evidential defeatingcondition on the reasonability of trust.”49 Th e notion of reliability in question is, it seem s, a chara cter conc ept. T he c once pt of aperson’s character functions in part to codify where it makes sense a nd where it does n’tmake sense to count on her. What makes trust in someone reasonable is not that person’shistory of truth-telling but her charac ter here and now. When we say that a re form ed liar

must earn her interlocutors’ trust, we don’t mean that she must tell as many truths as sheformerly told falsehoods before anyone is entitled to believe her. Perhaps you look her inthe eye and see she has changed.Thanks to Steven Everson and David Velleman for help in formulating this objection andreply. We could complicate matters further, within the confines of my account, if welinked the triggering of the defeating condition with the way the telling is hedged. Whenyou tell som eone what consciousness is, there may b e no amou nt of hedging that wouldsuffice to avoid the defea ting condition-since there is no such thing as ‘e xpertise ’ onthat subject. But there may be subjec t matters on which giving an impression that you



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Admitting there’s no guarantee she’s reliable, what would tend to showthat you can count on your interlocutor? One thing that would show her reli-able is her ability and willingness to cite good reasons to believe what shetells you. Her citation of reasons is not what entitles you to believe what shetells you: your reasonable) trust in her does that. But an ability and willing-ness to cite good reasons in support of what she says attests to her reliabilityas a testifier, which on an externalist view is what grounds the reasonabilityof your trust in her. Here at last we have an explanation of the phenomenon Idescribed in section 11. It constitutes illocutionary ‘abuse’ if you tell someonethat p without being able or willing to cite reasons to believe that p. As Iargued in section I, your addressee equally abuses the illocution if he fails totake your word for i t that p, and challenging you to produce reasons tobelieve that p is incompatible with taking your word for it. So you probablywon’t have to cite those reasons. But if someone challenges your addressee tojustify his belief that p, and he formed the belief on your word, then he isentitled to turn to you to satisfy his challenger. Your inability or unwilling-ness t produce the justification tends to undermine the thought that hisbelief is warranted by tending to undermine the assumption that trusting youon the matter was rea~onable.~’

Speakers who undertake such commitments are frequently unable to dis-charge them. But that doesn’t vitiate my account of telling-not, at least, onthe externalist reading. It merely shows that a speaker may succeed in makingavailable to her interlocutor an entitlement for him to believe what she tellshim without herself having a justification for believing it. Indeed, her beliefmay be entirely unwarranted. The externalist reading yields the interestingresult that a speaker who is not herself entitled to the belief that p may, if sheis reliable, make that very entitlement available to her interlocutor. The resultis interesting but not odd.52The interlocutor relies, after all, on the speaker’sword-that is, on her status as trustworthy in testifying-not on whateverentitlement she may have to believe what she tells him, an entitlement thathe needn’t ever come to know.

IXI have defended this analysis of testimonial telling now expressed in tradi-tional Gricean form):

appreciate how hard it is to discover the truth counteracts the evidence of unreliabilityyou would otherwise give by simply inviting someone to trust you.How much must you be able to say? As much as you would have to say to justify yourown belief that p. In many cases, that may be pointedly little. If what you’ve told youraddressee i s that it ’s raining out, it usually suffices to answer his request for a reason with‘ just looked.’I investigate the result further in ‘Judging in C onte xt,’ in preparation.

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T) S tells A that p (sincerely) iff A recognizes that S , in asserting thatp, intends:(i) that A gain access to a prima facie entitlem ent to believe that p,(ii) that A recognize S’s (i)-intention, and(iii) that A gain access to the entitlement to believe that p as a direct

result of A’s recognition of S’s (i)-intention.I’ve argued for this ana lysis by appeal to cases tha t reveal w hat’s at stak e forinterlocutors when one sets out to tell another something. What’s at stake,I’ve argued, is the establishm ent and maintenance-however b ri e fl y -o f atrust relation.

I began with Austin’s thought that epistemic warrant is transmissible andthus that if I tell you som ething I may be epistemically respon sible for get-ting you into trouble. We’ve seen that this need nor mean that my entitle-ment to believe what I tell you can thereby become your entitlement tbelieve it. It can mean that in telling you I make available to you a newentitlement. I can be responsible for your belief because in telling you Iinvite you to trust me, and in inviting you to trust me I take a degree ofresponsibility for your trust by ce rtifyi ng its status as reasonable.

I have not argued against scepticism abou t the possibility of telling any-one anything. I have argued merely that telling, where if occurs, constitu-tively aim s to crea te a trust-based species of warrant.

Tho ugh one m ay be sceptical of either act, Austin turns ou t t o be right:telling is indeed like promising . W hen I sincerely pro mise you I’ll c p I intendto make available to you an entitlement to perform acts that rely on takingme at my word. When I sincerely tell you that p, I intend to make availableto you an entitlem ent to believe that p. If each case goe s as I intend, in giv-ing you my word I entitle you to take it.

tellingasinvitingtotrust ppr

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