Philosophers’ volume 14, no. 17 t seems undeniable that such second-personal speech acts as june 2014 promising A to φ1 and telling A that p serve at least in part to give Imprint I an assurance to the addressee. Whatever your other aims, part of what you’re doing when you promise or tell A is inviting A, whether sincerely or insincerely, to take you at your word.2 Though you may despair of getting A to accept it, since you may know that A does not regard you as worthy of his trust, the invitation seems to include an assurance that he can rely on you in some respect — or, hypothetically, Assurance and that he could, if only he’d get over his mistrust.3 Promisings and tell- ings differ, of course, in the content of the assurance. When you prom- ise A to φ, you give A the assurance that you’ll φ and thereby that he has a reason to rely on you to φ in, for example, his planning in the Warrant meantime. But what is the content of your assurance when you tell A that p? Exactly how do you suppose he might rely on you? And how, if at all, is the reliance epistemic as opposed to merely practical?4

1. An addressed promise is sometimes more naturally expressed with a propo- sition rather than with a verb phrase (‘I promised her that I’d grade her pa- per tomorrow’ rather than ‘I promised her to grade her paper tomorrow’). But sometimes the verb-phrase version is more natural (‘I promised her to go’ rather than ‘I promised her that I’d go’). For simplicity I’ll treat the verb- phrase version as canonical. 2. Or at least: representing yourself as inviting A to take you at your word. See the next note. 3. As I’ll argue in section II, to say that you’re giving A an assurance that p does not entail that you’re aiming to convince A that p. So you can assure A even if Edward S. Hinchman you don’t care whether A believes you, and even if you do care but know that A will never believe you. And as I’ll begin to argue in section I, your ‘despair’ University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee of convincing him can be just as insincere as the assurance itself. When I say that these speech acts ‘serve to give’ an assurance, I mean that they represent the speaker as giving an assurance, not that the speaker must perform them with any particular attitude. As we’ll see, the assurances in question tran- spire at the level of illocutionary norms, not necessarily within the speaker’s psychology. 4. Two obvious proposals don’t take us very far. It’s natural to say that you as- sure A that p and thus that he can ‘rely on you that p.’ And this does make sense when the proposition in question concerns something you’re going © 2014 Edward S. Hinchman to do. Thus, if you’re planning to be in California next week, you can as- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons sure A that you’ll be there, inviting him to rely on your being there. Yet what would it be to invite A to rely on you that California was the 31st state or that Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License. Californium is the 98th element? The formula, assuming it’s even grammati- cal, suggests that you’re inviting A to rely on you to produce a justification

edward s. hinchman Assurance and Warrant

Here is the proposal I’ll pursue. If an assurance could create epistemic The proposal won’t help with my question, however, because it leaves warrant, then in telling A that p you could assure A by providing A out the act of assurance. Assuring A that p isn’t asserting that p with with warrant for believing that p. That would preserve a parallel with the thought that you thereby give A evidence for p, since you’re such promising, since in promising A to φ, you assure A by providing A with a reliable asserter (or believer). That formula omits the most basic a reason to perform (or not to avoid performing) acts that depend on respect in which you address people, converse with people — inviting your φing. Though the parallel would not itself explain anything about them to believe you, not merely what you say. I’ve defended that claim either promising or testifying,5 we can put it like this: each assurance in another paper, and Angus Ross, Gary Watson, Richard Moran, Paul provides its distinctive kind of reason: promising provides a practical Faulkner, and Benjamin McMyler have given other defenses.6 My aim reason, telling an epistemic reason (i. e. warrant). in this paper is to fill a crucial gap in what Moran calls the ‘assurance The proposal provokes an immediate objection, however, which view’ of testimony: to specify exactly how a testifier’s mere assurance I’ll devote the bulk of my argument to addressing. Though the details can create genuine epistemic warrant.7 The challenge for the assurance are tricky, it isn’t hard to see in broad outline how your promising view is to explain how it is specifically your assurance that p that helps can provide a practical reason, since whether there exists this reason A to know that p.8 depends on the state of your will, and the state of your will is something you — somewhat, somehow — control. But how could you control — at 6. My earlier paper is “Telling as Inviting to Trust,” Philosophy and Phenomeno- all — whether there exists the corresponding epistemic reason? And if logical Research 70 (2005), 562–587. Other versions of the assurance view are developed in Angus Ross, “Why Do We Believe What We Are Told?,” Ratio you cannot control this, how could you presume to provide the reason? 28 (1986), 69–88; Watson, “Asserting and Promising,” op. cit.; Richard Mo- One way you could provide it is by presenting yourself to A as a ran, “Getting Told and Being Believed,” Philosophers’ Imprint 5 (2005); Paul Faulkner, Knowledge on Trust (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); and reliable gauge of the truth. If you reliably speak the truth when you Benjamin McMyler, Testimony, Trust, and Authority (Oxford: Oxford University come out with elementary propositions of US history or of chemistry, Press, 2011). you could provide A with a warrant for believing on that basis that 7. As I’ll explain, I do not believe any other version satisfactorily meets the California was the 31st state or that Californium is the 98th element. challenges that I’ll address. My own earlier treatment needs the supplemen- tation that I here provide. I criticize McMyler’s and Faulkner’s treatments in my review of McMyler’s book in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, March of the proposition. But this further proposal confronts two immediate prob- 2012, and in “Can Trust Itself Ground a Reason to Believe the Trusted?,” Ab- lems: you may know you cannot produce the justification, say because you’re stracta, Special Issue VI: A Symposium on Paul Faulkner’s Knowledge on Trust, not very articulate, or you may know you simply won’t, say because you’re December 2012. about to die. Since the inarticulate and the dying can tell people things just 8. Insofar as one can, one should pursue the epistemology of testimony without as well as the rest of us, the assurance at the core of telling cannot be — in the assuming a position on any of the Big Debates in epistemology. My talk of first instance — an assurance that you’ll do anything. (For this point, see Gary ‘warrant’ should therefore be understood as neutral between internalist and Watson, “Asserting and Promising,” Philosophical Studies 117 (2004), 68–9.) externalist approaches to epistemic issues. We can put the core challenge to Perhaps, then, we’ll want to say that the assurance is simply an assurance the assurance view neutrally as follows: how could the mere fact that some- of epistemic warrant. We cannot assume this means an assurance that there is one has assured you that p improve your epistemic position vis-à-vis p? The warrant, since what we’re trying to understand is how assurance can take a mere fact that S has given A an assurance — ‘her word’ — that p cannot help A propositional object. We’ll need to explicate a more fundamental sense in to know that p unless S thereby either (à la internalism) offers A a new epis- which telling A that p gives A an ‘assurance of p’s warrant.’ And that’s what I’ll temic-justificatory status, or (à la externalism) puts A in a new knowledge- try to do in this paper. conducive state. (My argument will not in the end remain neutral between 5. Not only do I place no explanatory weight on the parallel, but (as I explain in internalism and externalism: see section VI below. My point here is that I am sections VII through IX) I regard it as revealingly imperfect. not assuming either position at the outset of my argument.) philosophers’ imprint – 2 – vol. 14, no. 17 (june 2014) edward s. hinchman Assurance and Warrant

In what follows, I’ll develop and defend a view of how you might when but only when A has sufficient warrant for p — sufficient, that help your addressee to know that highlights the assurance at the core is, for epistemically reasonable belief, that p. (I’ll sometimes say for of your testimonial speech act. My account will emphasize an aspect ‘knowledge’. For my purposes in this paper, the distinction between of assurance that other proponents of the assurance view have failed epistemically reasonable belief and knowledge will not matter.) to conceptualize: that a testimonial assurance manifests not only what Assuming that S’s assertion that p manifests truth-conducive reliability, the speaker knows but how she conceives of her addressee’s context- S’s assurance specifically to A, when she addresses her assertion to sensitive epistemic needs — beyond the context-insensitive need that A, can create warrant specifically for A by creating a sufficient reason every addressee has to believe the truth. Testimony gives its distinctive for A to believe that p on S’s say-so. I’ll argue that this entitlement warrant specifically to the addressee, and not to unaddressed is not merely psychological or ‘ethical’ but authentically epistemic. overhearers, because this distinctive warrant is tailored by the speaker If S is both truth-conducively and closure-conducively reliable, she to the context-sensitive epistemic needs of that addressee. What these makes available to A a species of warrant that is not similarly available epistemic needs are will be a major theme of the paper. I’ll argue to overhearers, a species of warrant that is partly grounded in her that testimonial reliability comes in two forms. A speaker’s truth- assurance specifically to A. conducive reliability serves context-insensitive needs of addressees I begin by developing some examples (§I) that reveal how an and overhearers alike to believe the truth and avoid falsehood. Insofar addressee’s context-sensitive epistemic needs can directly shape a as she is truth-conducively reliable, S can help hearers to know quite testimonial exchange (§II). The examples help motivate my treatment apart from any assurance that she gives. But the speaker’s closure- of testimonial telling and my account of how the assurance therein can conducive reliability serves specifically the context-sensitive epistemic provide the addressee with epistemic warrant (§III). I argue that the needs of her addressees — of those to whom she offers a testimonial basis of distinctively testimonial warrant lies not only in the speaker’s assurance — and not those of overhearers. In presenting herself truth-conducive reliability but also crucially in her closure-conducive to an addressee as not only truth-conducively but also as closure- reliability, which I argue specifically informs her act of assurance (§IV). conducively reliable, S represents her assurance that p as providing I then elaborate my version of the assurance view through a broader the addressee with sufficient warrant for him to believe that p — that polemic, explaining how the illocutionary norm governing the speech is, with warrant that would suffice, in his context, to close a doxastic act proscribes not lies but a species of bullshit, in an extension of Harry deliberation whether p. I’ll sometimes call this ‘conclusive’ warrant, Frankfurt’s sense (§V); how such bullshit-prohibition, codified by the meaning by the term only conclusive in context. In thus engaging A’s norm, informs the warrant-generating capacity of closure-conducive context-sensitive epistemic needs, S’s assurance figures ineliminably reliability (§VI); how this epistemic norm differs from comparable in how she might — in living up to the representation that informs her practical norms (§VII) despite being fully second-personal, in Stephen act of telling A that p — help A to know that p. Darwall’s sense, or bipolar, in Michael Thompson’s sense (§VIII); and One might put the difference between the two forms of reliability how that epistemic species of second-personality or bipolarity is more as follows: S’s truth-conducive reliability serves A’s need to believe fundamental than the practical species that Darwall and Thompson the truth, whereas S’s closure-conducive reliability serves A’s need discuss (§IX).9 I conclude with the suggestion that Darwall and

to believe the truth. More exactly, S’s closure-conducive reliability 9. Harry Frankfurt, “On Bullshit,” in his The Importance of What We Care About serves A’s need to believe the truth responsibly: to believe that p (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Stephen Darwall, The

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Thompson misconstrue the normativity of testimony (and of epistemic I. Some cases norms more broadly) because they view norms as, in general, grounded Here then are some cases designed to motivate my claim that part in the species of thinking wherein we hold each other accountable, of what’s constitutively at stake when S tells A that p is S’s reliability via Strawsonian reactive attitudes, rather than in the species wherein in interpreting and being appropriately responsive to A’s context- we find each more fundamentally intelligible – a species that I follow sensitive epistemic needs.13 10 Gary Watson in calling aretaic. In the first six sections, I rebut the Let me be clear up front how the concept of a context will figure in 11 objection that an assurance cannot make an epistemic contribution ; my discussion of the examples and then later in the argument I’ll make in the remaining three, I rebut the objection that, even if it does make from them. In discussions of contextualism and its rivals (sensitive an epistemic contribution, the norm whereby it makes an epistemic invariantism, assessment-sensitive ‘relativism’), the question of 12 contribution is not genuinely second-personal or bipolar. context-sensitivity arises on the issue of what it takes for A to know Second-Person Standpoint (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006); Mi- that p. I won’t be discussing that issue at all — at least, not directly. chael Thompson, “What is it to Wrong Someone? A Puzzle About Justice,” in R. Jay Wallace, Philip Pettit, Samuel Scheffler, and Michael Smith (eds), Rea- My question is what it takes for A to be entitled to conclude doxastic son and Value: Themes from the Moral Philosophy of Joseph Raz (Oxford: Oxford deliberation by forming the belief that p, and the examples will show University Press, 2004). that this entitlement is sensitive to context. The examples will also 10. Gary Watson, “Two Faces of Responsibility,” in his Agency and Answerability show that this context-sensitivity is at least similar to the context- (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 264ff. sensitivity at issue in discussions of contextualism and its rivals. I 11. For this line of argument, see Matthew Weiner, “On the Assurance View of Testimony,” unpublished draft of 2007; Jennifer Lackey, Learning from Words do not assume that doxastic deliberation aims at knowledge — and (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), Chapter 8; Frederick F. Schmitt, thus that A is entitled to conclude deliberation whether p only when “The Assurance View of Testimony,” in Adrian Haddock, Alan Millar, and 14 Duncan Pritchard (eds), Social Epistemology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, A knows that p. It may be that the context of epistemic needs that 2010); and Sanford C. Goldberg, “Putting the Norm of Assertion to Work: The entitles you to conclude that p is identical to the context of epistemic Case of Testimony,” in Jessica Brown and Herman Cappelen (eds), Assertion: needs sensitivity to which figures in your knowing that p, but I’ll New Philosophical Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). The princi- pal objection begins by observing that, as far as the assurance view argues, S The mutual recognition that this requires occurs at a level that our status as can give her assurance while being radically unreliable as a testifier. Imagine accountable to each other presupposes but does not explain. One attraction that S does know that p when she tells A that p in this instance, but that S of the assurance view of testimony is that, properly developed, it allows us to has a history of shooting her mouth off unknowingly and mistakenly. Can reconceptualize the natures of normativity and responsibility more generally, her assurance provide A with testimonial warrant? If not, that would seem to viewing the assurance as implicating us in normative relations of recognition, indicate that what does the epistemic work when testimony succeeds in pass- and therefore of justice, that are not yet moralized with reactive attitudes. ing on knowledge is not any assurance that the speaker might give but only Understanding this dimension of bipolar normative relation thus provides us her status as a truth-conducively reliable testifier. This motivates the more with a principled basis for resisting broader moralizations of normativity and general charge that proponents of the assurance view have changed the topic responsibility. For two strands of this broader project, see my “Receptivity from epistemology to reflection on another set of norms — the ethics or eti- and the Will,” Noûs 43 (September 2009), 395–427, and “Conspiracy, Commit- quette of illocutions — that bear at best only an indirect relation to genuinely ment and the Self,” Ethics 120 (April 2010), 526–556. epistemic norms. 13. When discussing S(peaker) and A(ddressee) with schematic letters, I’ll make 12. My polemic entails a broader moral that generalizes well beyond the epis- S female and A male. In my examples, the speaker’s name will always begin temology of testimony. As we’ll see, the most fundamental norm governing with ‘S’ and the addressee’s with ‘A.’ testimonial telling requires a species of agency that is not active but passive: from the speaker, appropriate receptivity to the addressee’s epistemic needs; 14. I do argue for a version of this thesis in “Assertion, Sincerity, and Knowledge,” from the addressee, appropriate receptivity to the speaker’s doxastic guidance. Noûs 47 (December 2013), and “Judging as Inviting Self-Trust,” in preparation. philosophers’ imprint – 4 – vol. 14, no. 17 (june 2014) edward s. hinchman Assurance and Warrant not assume that it is. Hence, I’ll speak of A’s ‘doxastic,’ rather than The simplest way to illustrate the importance of a speaker’s his ‘epistemic’ context. I’ll continue to speak of his ‘epistemic needs,’ responsiveness to her addressee’s context-sensitive epistemic needs however, since ‘doxastic needs’ would be misleading, suggesting what is to describe cases in which her assurance counters his anxiety that I regard as the false thesis that A may weigh practical considerations in he hasn’t a right to judge. In these cases, the assurance in effect says: doxastic deliberation.15 What the examples show, I’ll argue, is twofold: don’t worry, your doxastic context is not as demanding as you think; first, that A’s entitlement to conclude doxastic deliberation by forming you already have enough evidence to render a verdict. Consider, the belief that p is sensitive to his context of epistemic needs; second, for example, a new kind of ‘lottery case’. Imagine Alex has won the that S’s assurance when she tells him that p is responsive to just this lottery, and has lots of good evidence that he has won the lottery. But sensitivity. (I’ll say a bit more about the concept of epistemic needs he doesn’t believe that he has won, because he takes the doxastic presently, and much more in sections VII and VIII.)16 standard in play to be very high — for example, he thinks he has to 15. As we’ll see presently, I’m an evidentialist about doxastic norms: no practical rule out an elaborate and thus improbable hoax. ‘Surely I’ve not really consideration gives (as such) any support to a doxastic conclusion. It will be- won,’ he sincerely asserts. ‘But you have,’ his friend Sheryl replies, come clear that, though I am an evidentialist, I am in effect applying Michael Bratman’s framework for theorizing practical commitment (see e. g. “Plan- continuing: ‘Face it, Alex, you’ve won the lottery.’ Here, Sheryl has ning and Temptation” and “Toxin, Temptation, and the Stability of Intention,” no evidential advantage over Alex, nor does she believe that he’s both in his Faces of Intention [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999]) misweighing the evidence. Imagine they both know both facts about to the issue of doxastic commitment. We have to make up our minds — i. e. form beliefs — because we don’t have infinite time and infinite deliberative Sheryl. The telling nonetheless makes perfect sense. Her principal aim resources. How does our finitude in these dimensions manifest itself? By the in making it may be to assure Alex that the doxastic standard is not as fact that we confront a trade-off between the quality of our lives (construed very broadly) and the accuracy of our doxastic commitments. If doxastic de- high as he is assuming. The assurance she gives him thus concerns not liberation had no bearing on the quality of your life — that is, on your ability to fulfill other obligations and generally do what is best — then you could understand the nature of the shift across contexts, sometimes speaking as if keep deliberating until your evidence ruled out nearly all alternatives to the it’s the standard that shifts and sometimes as if it’s the range of relevant alter- proposition at hand, and be very confident that the conclusion you reached natives. (For a discussion of this issue with whose conclusion I’m inclined to would be accurate. But gathering and weighing evidence takes energy, and agree, see Jonathan Schaffer, “What Shifts? Thresholds, Standards, or Alterna- the process takes time. And both the energy and the time can often be put tives?,” in Gerhard Preyer and Georg Peter (eds), Contextualism in Philosophy to more productive uses. Among the respects in which the quality of your (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 115–130. Like Schaffer (see also his life is at stake here is this: you sometimes wish to help others form doxastic “Contrastive Knowledge,” in Tamar Szabo Gendler and John Hawthorne (eds), commitments in a sensible way. This is the doxastic analogue of Bratman’s Oxford Studies in Epistemology, Volume 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, emphasis on interpersonal coordination in the practical case. The important 2005), 235–271) and like Edward Craig (whose Knowledge and the State of Na- difference is that in the doxastic case these practical considerations must fig- ture [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990] Schaffer cites), I view delibera- ure in the background of deliberation, as structuring principles rather than tive questions as paramount [Schaffer calls them questions of inquiry].) And as premises. While any principle structuring a practical deliberation can be I’ll frame my discussion in a way that’s neutral among the doxastic analogues made explicit within that very deliberation, such explicitation in doxastic de- of classic contextualism, sensitive invariantism, and ‘relativism’ — though in liberation imposes a deliberative shift: you were wondering whether it will section VII, I’ll argue that the bipolarity of epistemic norms is best captured rain (a doxastic question), assuming you had to decide within the minute, by a ‘relativist’ account. (For the pertinent parallel, see the ‘relativist’ view of but now that you realize you have longer (because you remember there’s an knowledge ascriptions propounded by John MacFarlane in “The Assessment umbrella in the car) the question now is whether to stand there at the door Sensitivity of Knowledge Attributions,” in Gendler and Hawthorne, op. cit., trying to remember the forecast or to try to jog your memory en route (a di- 197–233.) My principal aim is not to stake a position in this debate, but to rectly practical question). reveal how a testifier’s responsiveness to her addressee’s doxastic context fig- 16. My use of terminology from the contextualism debate will naturally raise ures among her core illocutionary commitments — those defining the nature questions that I’ll lack space to discuss. I’ll remain neutral on how we should of testimonial telling. philosophers’ imprint – 5 – vol. 14, no. 17 (june 2014) edward s. hinchman Assurance and Warrant

the question whether p but the question whether he knows that p. Since not provide evidence within the deliberation, but instead manifest the he knows that she has no evidence that he hasn’t already considered, subject’s responsiveness to his context of epistemic needs. Epistemic Alex does not rely on Sheryl’s status as truth-conducively reliable. So needs are therefore practical considerations that are not functioning if he relies on her testimony in coming to believe that he has won the as practical considerations, since they are not functioning as premises. lottery, he must be relying on her possession of a status as knowledge- Because they do not function here as premises — because the subject conducively reliable that does not reduce to truth-conducive reliability. is not treating them as reasons to believe the proposition — there is One might reply that Alex’s initial assumption that the standard no violation of evidentialist scruples. It’s for this reason that I hesitate is high does function as a piece of evidence in his context, and that to rest with calling these assumptions ‘beliefs’ (without, however, Sheryl’s failure to make that assumption gives her an evidential denying that they’re beliefs). Though the subject acts as if practical advantage over him. It is true that there is this psychological difference exigencies are such that the standard is thus and so — rather low when between them, and that the difference explains why Sheryl does, but he ‘has to’ make up his mind in a hurry, for example, but higher when Alex initially does not, feel entitled to conclude that he has won the he has the ‘luxury’ of more time or there’s more ‘at stake’ — it can be lottery. Moreover, it is uncontroversial that a psychological state misleading to treat this assumption as a belief, since that will tend to such as Alex’s assumption can provide evidence just as such — that imply that he is reasoning from it. I take it as obvious that ‘I have little is, regardless of its truth. The problem is that Alex’s assumption that time to make up my mind’ can never, functioning in this way, provide the standard is high does not function as evidence on the deliberative any support for a doxastic-deliberative conclusion, which is to say, question at hand, which is whether he has won the lottery. It is not, as again, that it cannot thereby function as evidence. I refine and defend I’ve been putting it, truth-conducively relevant to that question. That these claims in other work.17 In the present argumentative context, I’m Alex assumes that the doxastic standard is high does not make it more or less likely that he has won the lottery. Nor does he believe that his 17. See my “Assertion, Sincerity, and Knowledge” and “Judging as Inviting Self- Trust.” To a significant extent, I’m following the path blazed by David Ow- assumption makes this more or less likely. His assumption bears not on ens, who, in Reason Without Freedom (London: Routledge, 2000), argues that whether he has won the lottery but on whether he is entitled to conclude doxastic-deliberative closure must be motivated in part by a non-reflective that he has won the lottery. The latter sort of bearing is not necessarily ‘impression’ that you have a conclusive warrant or ground for the proposition in question. Owens argues from two key premises: (a) only the impression an evidential bearing. His assumption does not provide evidence, nor that you have a conclusive ground could close your deliberation, and (b) a does he believe that it provides evidence, that he is not entitled to reflective appreciation of how pragmatic factors create a context in which the ground counts as conclusive could not figure in doxastic deliberation. As I conclude that he has won the lottery (unless he rules out hoaxes, etc.). explain in “Judging as Inviting Self-Trust,” I accept the spirit of Owens’s (a), We can see this by noting that the assumption does not function as a though I prefer to speak of ‘the disposition to treat yourself as knowing’ in- premise within his deliberation whether he has won the lottery. Rather, stead of ‘the impression of a conclusive ground.’ I do not, however, accept even the spirit of Owens’s (b), his claim that the impression of a conclusive it structures that deliberation, articulating his sense of when — that is, ground (or, as I would say, the disposition to treat yourself as knowing) must with what evidential support — he is entitled to conclude it. be non-reflective. I accommodate the principal motivation for (b) by empha- sizing how judgment is shaped by reliance on a non-judgmental appreciation With my gloss on this example, I’m beginning to articulate the of the contextually appropriate epistemic standard — non-judgmental, but conception of how epistemic needs structure doxastic deliberation that not necessarily non-reflective. One central aim of “Judging as Inviting Self- Trust” is to explain how there could be a non-judgmental species of self-re- will inform my account of how assurance can provide a warrant. The flection. I view this self-relation as posing a question of self-trust, resolving crucial point is that such assumptions about the doxastic standard do which manifests reflection not through positive deliberation or judgment but

philosophers’ imprint – 6 – vol. 14, no. 17 (june 2014) edward s. hinchman Assurance and Warrant hoping that my glosses on cases will suffice to clarify my entitlement in his own. By his own admission — as we imagined him spell out to this framework.18 the content of his assurance — the standard for believing that Ann’s Such cases are easy to concoct along natural lines and needn’t spouse is having an affair is higher in Ann’s context than it is in his involve the assumption that interlocutors are operating in a shared own narrowly described. In general, the standard for believing that p doxastic context, with a single standard for closing deliberation. in a context of pure gossip is quite a bit lower than it would be in the Imagine that Ann has lots of good evidence that her spouse is having context of confronting one of the gossip’s targets.19 So the assurance an affair, but she nonetheless doesn’t believe it, feeling a need to wouldn’t be quite sincere if Siegfried intended to be speaking from rule out far-fetched alternatives. Her friend Siegfried has access to his own context and not from Ann’s.20 That he is speaking merely no evidence beyond what’s already vividly before her, but he feels from his own context would in fact provide a basis for Ann to mistrust an obligation to tell her, ‘Ann, he’s having an affair.’ Does Siegfried him. So he must take care to avoid giving her that impression. This thereby simply instruct her to reweigh the evidence? Quite conceivably not; perhaps he knows she has been weighing and reweighing the 19. Some may question this claim because they find it plausible to assume that the presence of the gossip’s target must lower the standard — since an erro- evidence, by his lights properly, for weeks. Imagine he views Ann as neous belief may now at least be challenged by the person it concerns. That possessing all easily available evidence, rational in how she weighs it, strikes me as an odd view; I find myself inclined to believe much of the gossip but nonetheless mistaken in her failure to draw a conclusion. He thus that I read about distant celebrities, but much less of the gossip that I hear about acquaintances with whom I interact and about whom I feel a corre- assures her that the doxastic standard isn’t as high as she seems to sponding obligation to keep an open mind. Still, nothing turns on the ques- assume it is. He may even spell it out: ‘Look, this isn’t a question of life tion. Readers who disagree may simply alter the example to yield the low- stakes-to-high-stakes speaker-addressee dynamic that I’m assuming. or death. It’s not as if you’re wondering whether you have sufficient 20. We may imagine that apart from the present conversation — say, in contexts evidence to believe that your husband has an incurable illness. There, of mere gossip with others — Siegfried may take it to be clear enough that the standard really is extremely high. While the standard is high in Ann’s husband is having an affair. But in addressing Ann he judges, as it were, in her context — with its higher standard — not in that other sort of context. the present case — higher than it would be if we were talking about We can imagine a variant on this case in which Siegfried does not feel entitled someone else’s marriage — you have a superstitious view of what’s at to tell Ann flat-out that her husband is having an affair, though he continues stake. If he’s having an affair, as it’s clear enough he is, the two of you to regard the affair as gossip-worthy. Here then is one species of counter- example to the idea that sincerity is merely asserting what you also believe. will deal with it.’ A friend making this sort of intervention typically Siegfried may take himself to believe that Ann’s husband is having an affair, won’t say all this, of course. And the point is that he needn’t. The force and the self-ascription may seem unproblematic right up to the moment at which he addresses her. But then he hesitates as he realizes that his belief of some such elaboration is already contained in the assurance that is rooted in that context of gossip. Of course, the hesitation may involve a Siegfried gives in the initial act of telling. thought that the gossip has been unfair to her predicament, or other thoughts Notice how the intervention presupposes that Siegfried is, or that articulate a moral dimension of his relation to her. But it may also involve a more fundamental recognition that he is not entitled to conclude that her at least represents himself as, judging in Ann’s context, not merely husband is having an affair in her context, with its standard of evidence com- mensurate with how much is at stake for her in the question. Does he thereby simply insofar as the resolution manifests a counterfactual sensitivity to evi- count as changing his mind and unforming the belief that leads him to gos- dence of your own untrustworthiness on the matter. sip? I don’t see why he must. Though we’d expect him to be a bit chastened 18. One way to put my core thesis in this paper is that it helps us understand in his disposition to gossip the subject, now that he has confronted the victim what it is to draw a doxastic-deliberative conclusion to reflect on how anoth- and found that he doesn’t feel entitled to tell her, he may without akratic ten- er’s word can provide grounds for doing so. In “Judging as Inviting Self-Trust,” sion regard himself as having settled the matter for his purposes. (For more I argue the other way round. on this issue, see notes 27 and 31 below.) philosophers’ imprint – 7 – vol. 14, no. 17 (june 2014) edward s. hinchman Assurance and Warrant

dynamic was also present in the previous example, though there it asserting instead that, while she’s inclined to believe so, the winters was easier to assume that the interlocutors simply shared a context. where she lives are difficult to predict.22 Here, Siegfried and Ann may or may not share a context — that is, it From an epistemic point of view, Sarah performs very different may or may not be relative to the same doxastic standard that each speech acts in these two cases. Telling A that p is very different from would count as knowing that Ann’s husband is having an affair. telling A that, while you’re inclined to believe that p, you can’t be What’s clear is only that Siegfried must represent himself as helping certain. Pointedly refraining from telling A that p makes an epistemic Ann to know relative to her context, not merely relative to his own. as well as a practical difference. Practically speaking, it can show (Again, I’ll provide an elaboration and fuller defense of this position respect for A — and thereby have broader practical effects — to invite on context sensitivity in section VII. I elsewhere fend off the Moore- him to deliberate the matter on his own, not simply relying on your paradoxical implications of the speech act. ‘P though I don’t believe word. But this practical dimension has an epistemic basis: you show it’ could make Siegfried’s situation explicit, though that would be an this respect by refraining from offering him testimonial assurance. (I’ll inherently misleading way to make it explicit and would need to be return to this epistemic basis of respect in sections VIII and IX.) elaborated.21) If you do believe that p, is it insincere to refrain from assuring A Testimonial assurances needn’t merely counter anxiety that the that p? I don’t think so. In many everyday contexts in which you might doxastic standard is extremely high. Imagine that Sarah lives in the believe that p, it can be appropriate to express your belief by saying, cold north and Adam lives in the warm south but plans to visit at ‘P, but I can’t be certain.’23 That can be a way of saying simply that the Sarah’s university for the coming winter term. Consider the following doxastic standard in your context doesn’t require certainty, where by pair of crucially different contexts in which Adam needs an assurance ‘certainty’ I mean evidence that rules out all — or most, or at any rate whether p. Say it’s late fall and Sarah believes, based on lots of evidence, more — alternatives to your knowing.24 Siegfried could accordingly that the winter where she lives will be mild. Now Adam asks her 22. Someone might insist, I suppose, that future weather is too uncertain a topic directly whether winter will be cold there. Context one: He’s asking for us ever to be entitled to form beliefs rather than mere hypotheses (or to because he sees a down jacket he likes on sale for $50 off. If Sarah is make flat-out rather than hedged assertions). That would be odd, I think: mistaken in telling him the winter will be mild, then, if he believes don’t I believe (and can’t I assert) that it’s going to rain this afternoon when I walk several blocks back to the house to fetch my umbrella? You may of her, Adam loses $50 since he’ll have to buy the jacket at full price in course say that I believe merely that it is likely to rain. Fine: then let Sarah’s a few weeks. Since she knows that losing out on a chance to save $50 propositions be (in case one) that the winter is likely to be mild and (in the hedged case two) that she is inclined to believe so. All the same issues arise. will not be a great financial harm to Adam, she tells him what she also 23. It can be appropriate to say flat-out ‘I believe that p, but I don’t know that believes. Context two: Adam is wondering whether he really should p.’ As I explain in “Assertion, Sincerity, and Knowledge,” that doesn’t show spend the winter at Sarah’s university — imagine he could harmlessly that doxastic deliberation doesn’t aim at knowledge; it merely shows that if it change plans — and he needs to know whether it’ll be cold because, if does aim at knowledge, that must be knowledge in a given context, such that one can fail to know in others. so, he’ll be miserable and therefore shouldn’t go. Weighing his needs, 24. This is just the Austinian observation that a doxastic standard requires what she refrains from flat-out telling him that the winter will be mild, it requires and no more. ‘Certain’ thus marks a relative increase in the alter- natives that your evidence rules out: to say ‘I’m not certain’ isn’t to note that you cannot refute the Cartesian skeptic, and to say ‘I’m certain’ isn’t to claim 21. I treat Moore’s paradox at length in “Assertion, Sincerity, and Knowledge,” that you can. (For more on this ‘contrastive’ approach, see Schaffer, “Con- section V. trastive Knowledge,” op. cit.) While my formulations assume that what shifts

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express the assurance that he gives Ann like this: ‘Of course I can’t be possible to imagine not. But she does tell Aaron that the winter will certain that your husband is having an affair, but take my word for it: be mild — is she therefore insincere? Again, it seems we can imagine he is.’25 More interestingly for our purposes, this has the implication not. Thus imagined, her assertion does not express any belief that that you shouldn’t tell A that p if the doxastic standard in A’s context she has, but it would be odd to accuse her of lying, or of any other requires an evidential status that you lack. In such a case, you cannot species of insincerity.26 When she asserts that the winter will be mild, say, ‘P, but I can’t be certain,’ since that implies that you regard his she’s telling Aaron, after all, and if with the same evidence she were context as one in which you don’t need this evidential status. Nor can in his context — if she were, most crucially, cheimaphilic rather than you say ‘I believe that p, but I can’t be certain.’ Though that’s a true cheimaphobic — she would believe that the winter will be mild. She description of your state of mind, it still leaves your relation to A’s thus assures him of what she would believe if she were in his context different context out of account. You have to say something along the (as far as she can determine, and without putting it in those terms). lines of ‘I’m inclined to believe that p, though I can’t be certain.’ This, in She is not in that context herself; her doxastic context determines a effect, says the following to A: ‘If I were in your context I wouldn’t be higher standard for knowing that the winter will be mild and thus for able to close deliberation whether p, since I wouldn’t be able to rule closing the deliberation whether it will be mild. So we may imagine out relevant alternatives, so I can’t assure you that p and you shouldn’t she has not yet closed that deliberation: doxastically speaking, she rely on the belief that p that I’ve formed in my different context.’ has not yet made up her mind. True, she is inclined to hypothesize Though Sarah could spell out her meaning explicitly in this way, there that the winter will be mild, and what she tells Aaron expresses this need be no insincerity in her failing to do so. hypothesis. But the hypothesis is not a belief. She simply has not An even more interesting case emerges when we imagine closed that deliberation; with so much at stake, she is still actively Sarah’s and Adam’s geographical locations reversed. Let’s give these wondering whether the winter up north will be mild. Lack of belief characters new names. Say Sharon is in the south, Aaron is in the seems not, however, to render her insincere when she tells Aaron, flat- north, and the question for Sharon is whether the winter up north, out, that the winter will be mild. (Imagine she reasonably decides that where she’s planning to visit, will be mild. As in the first of the Sarah- she should not explain this background to him.) The case confirms my Adam cases, Aaron is wondering whether to buy a new down jacket suggestion that the epistemic norm governing assertion operates from for $50 off, and Sharon tells him, based on the excellent evidence at your addressee’s perspective, and not necessarily from your own.27 hand, that the winter where he lives will be mild. But Sharon is in 26. I’ll distinguish a species of insincerity other than lying in section V. the position that Adam occupied in the second of the previous cases: 27. Again, I argue for this thesis more fully in “Assertion, Sincerity, and Knowl- it’s she who is contemplating a visit north and who — cheimaphobe edge,” situating it in the debate over the knowledge account of assertion. that she is — will be miserable if the northern winter is cold. Does she Note that this relativity to the addressee’s perspective does not appear to force open Sarah’s deliberation when she refrains from telling Adam that the believe, in this context, that the northern winter will be mild? It is quite winter will be mild in the second of my initial cases. As I characterized her there, Sarah believes that the winter will be mild but does not feel entitled to tell Adam that it will be mild because she does not regard her evidence as across contexts is relevant alternatives, I could reformulate to dispense with meeting the doxastic standard in Adam’s context. Since she cannot assure that assumption. him, she refrains from telling him — while nonetheless herself continuing to 25. Sometimes you have to say ‘absolutely certain’ to make the point. Thus Sheryl believe that the winter will be mild. How can she continue to believe this? to Alex: ‘I can’t be absolutely certain you’ve won the lottery — since, like you, I For one thing, she would tell anyone who unlike Adam shared her doxastic can’t rule out a hoax — but trust me: you’ve won.’ context that the winter will be mild. And that’s precisely what fails to be true

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Before generalizing a moral from these cases, let’s pause to note accepting the opportunity to visit), then she’ll seize the opportunity an interesting complexity in how practical exigencies make a doxastic at the smaller cost of having to undergo the cold. One may have a standard rise or fall. Compare the case just given — cheimaphobic general intuition that an ‘increase’ in one’s practical exigencies can Sharon in the south, cheimaphilic Aaron in the north — with this only raise the doxastic standard for believing a given proposition, but variant: cheimaphobic Sarai in the south tells cheimaphilic Aiden in our new case reveals that whether they raise or lower the standard the north that the winter in the north will be mild, but the issue for depends on how the exigencies have ‘increased.’ As we’ve now seen, Sarai is not only her cheimaphobia but the very welcome invitation to having one’s practical exigencies ‘increase’ in the way just described visit given her by the chair of Aiden’s department. If she fails to draw makes the doxastic standard fall.28 the conclusion that she thinks Aiden entitled to draw — since, unlike her, he doesn’t worry much about cold — she runs a risk of losing this II. What the cases reveal about testimonial assurance opportunity with no other to replace it. As described, the case depicts These case studies suggest that the assurance that figures in testimony Sarai confronting more complex and urgent practical exigencies than is an assurance as much of doxastic conclusiveness as of truth. the previous case depicted Sharon confronting. Does this ‘increase’ in More precisely, they suggest that, even when S draws on evidential the subject’s exigencies entail a higher doxastic standard? It seems resources that A does not possess, her testimony most fundamentally not. In fact, this ‘increase’ in exigencies appears to make the subject’s embodies an assurance not merely that A thereby has warrant but that doxastic standard go not up but down. It seems that she now has A thereby has warrant sufficient to close doxastic deliberation. When an incentive to deliberate against roughly the same relatively low S tells A that p, she does, of course, give A an assurance that it is true standard as the previous addressee, Aaron, confronts. The difference that p. But the way she gives this assurance is by assuring A that the between Sarai’s context and Sharon’s erases the asymmetry between evidence for p meets the doxastic standard in A’s context. The force of speaker and addressee that we found in the previous case. the assurance is thus: you may rely on me for your sense of whether Why should there be this reversal? Note that the exigencies that you meet this standard and thus may treat the doxastic-deliberative define Sarai’s doxastic context impose higher costs on her mistakenly question as settled. failing to believe that the winter will be mild than on her mistakenly If correct, this gloss would explain how an assurance can take a believing that the winter will be mild. If she mistakenly fails to have propositional object, since what S is assuring A of is something that that belief (that is, keeps her mind open, though it is true that the she — somewhat, somehow — controls, namely her responsiveness winter will be mild) and acts accordingly (by failing to accept the to A’s epistemic needs. And it would mark a key difference between invitation to visit), then she runs a serious risk of losing an opportunity believing the speaker and believing merely what she says: in the to visit next year at an excellent university — a great cost to her. But former case but not the latter, you close doxastic deliberation in part if she mistakenly has that belief (that is, concludes that the winter through reliance on the speaker’s word for when you may do so. When will be mild, when in fact it won’t be mild) and acts accordingly (by you step back and treat her speech act as a source of evidence, there is no prospect of your relying on the speaker’s word in this way. You treat in the new case. In the new case, Sarah would not feel entitled to tell anyone who shared her doxastic context that the winter will be mild. She does tell 28. I further pursue this question of how the epistemic standard rises and falls, Adam, but only because the standard in his context is less strict, in her estima- with reference to different cases (including variants of the standard lottery tion, than the standard in her own context. case), in “Assertion, Sincerity, and Knowledge,” section II.

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the fact that the speaker has assured someone — perhaps you, perhaps testifier engages her addressee at a deeper level than previous versions someone else — that p as evidence for p, but how much evidence of the assurance view have developed the resources to imagine. would suffice for you to be entitled to close deliberation and believe We can view the problem as deriving from a misapplication of what that p is something you’ll have to determine on your own. Moran calls the Transparency Condition on doxastic deliberation: But how can an assurance of sufficient warrant create warrant? deliberation whether to believe that p is simply deliberation whether How, that is, can it create an entitlement to believe that p that might p.29 Thus stated, this thesis is true. But one would misapply the somehow figure in your status as knowing that p? I’ll give my full thesis to testimony if one inferred that the assurance at the heart of answer in sections III through VI, but we can approach the question telling A that p must involve presenting yourself to A as one who has by reflecting on the examples sketched in section I. Say you believe concluded that p. My examples make clear that you can tell A that that you’ve won the lottery on S’s say-so — despite not lacking any p, and thereby assure A that p, not only without having concluded evidence that S has. How has S provided you with warrant? S has not that p but without even presenting yourself as having concluded given you any new evidence, or any basis for your belief more truth- that p. Of course, you typically abuse the illocution, in the Austinian conducively reliable than bases you already possess (your memory, sense that I’ll discuss in section V, if without explanation you tell A your inferential reason, etc.). But S has given you a new sense of when that you have not yourself concluded that p.30 We can frame the point you’re epistemically entitled to draw this conclusion — and you do rely by distinguishing two ways in which perspective figures in doxastic on S for this sense. So S has provided you with something that can deliberation. The deliberation whether to believe that p is simply the figure in your status as knower. Moreover, this assurance-based sense deliberation whether p, performed in the normal way from your own of when you’re epistemically entitled to draw the conclusion is a crucial perspective. But the deliberation whether you epistemically may tell aspect of your epistemic self-governance. In a narrow sense, you are A that p is not a deliberation whether p but whether p-if-I-were-in- not epistemically self-governed; rather, you are governed partly by S’s A’s-context. You are still deliberating from your own perspective; you assurance. It is in this respect that an assurance can provide warrant: aren’t, for example, trying to mimic or predict how A would deliberate by providing a key part of the normatively regulated process whereby whether p. But your deliberation aims to do justice to the exigencies you come to know. that define A’s doxastic context, which (as we’ve seen) may differ Previous versions of the assurance view (including my own) have significantly from your own. We might say that you deliberate — from overlooked this important, and importantly epistemic, dimension of your own perspective — whether your actual evidence would suffice testimony: that testimonial telling includes an assurance that accepting to close deliberation in the counterfactual case in which you’re in the this — the conclusion that the speaker presents — is all that’s required for her addressee to be epistemically entitled to close deliberation. 29. See Moran’s Authority and Estrangement (Princeton: Princeton University They fail to note a key aspect of the relationship between speaker and Press, 2001), especially Chapter 4. I am not claiming that the Transparency Condition plays a role specifically in Moran’s view of testimony. (In “Judging addressee: her assurance is not merely that it is true that p but that as Inviting Self-Trust,” I argue that even in the intrapersonal case, the Trans- this assurance entitles the hearer — given his epistemic needs — to parency Condition needs to be supplemented with a Responsiveness Condi- tion — an intrapersonal analogue of the distinction between the truth-condu- close deliberation and believe that p. They therefore cannot make full cive and the closure-conducive that I’m exploring in the present paper.) sense of something that they otherwise emphasize, the interpersonal 30. Again, I discuss the problems with that Moorean assertion elsewhere. See dynamics of doxastic deliberation and of epistemic entitlement. A note 21.

philosophers’ imprint – 11 – vol. 14, no. 17 (june 2014) edward s. hinchman Assurance and Warrant doxastic context that A is actually in. The Transparency Condition is, at convincing your interlocutor of what you tell him.32 There are all applies, we might say, but from your addressee’s perspective rather sorts of intelligible purposes for which you may want or even need than from your own.31 to give your testimonial assurance in the epistemic equivalent of On the approach I’ll take, this shift from your perspective as Groucho glasses: presenting your good testimonial reason alongside speaker to the addressee’s perspective marks your invitation that an equally good evidential reason for your audience not to accept (or the addressee enter into a distinctive kind of relation with you. We acknowledge or generally believe that there exists) that testimonial can begin to grasp the nature of this relation by seeing why it is not reason. At the extreme, it may serve an intelligible purpose to become simply a relation of doxastic influence. In a not uncommon species of an unreliable testifier in order to sincerely and knowingly assure your indirection, you intend, while telling someone that p, to undermine interlocutor that p while being confident that he won’t believe you. your own status as giving your addressee a reason to believe that p. We Perhaps, in a simple case, your overriding aim is to be able to tell him therefore cannot hold that telling as such aims at being believed — that gloatingly later, ‘See, I told you so.’ Or perhaps you’re pursuing a more complex strategy of indirection: You want your interlocutor to believe what you tell him but not to believe you when you tell him, since you 31. Let me emphasize one point to forestall a possible misunderstanding of this claim. In saying that you deliberate from your addressee’s point of view, I’m don’t want him to hold you responsible for his belief. So you put the not claiming that you deliberate from your interlocutor’s evidence. I’m claim- proposition to him, expecting that he won’t believe it on the basis of ing that you deliberate from your evidence in your addressee’s context of epis- your assertion, but that this prompting will lead him to find convincing temic needs. That is, most crucially, if there is something at stake for your 33 addressee that would require extra deliberative caution, then you should ad- evidence for it on his own. dress him accordingly, even if there is nothing comparably at stake for you. If Telling aims not at being believed but at a relation of trust that can in this still isn’t clear, try another example (an example that I’ll revisit in section IV). Say you’re both wondering if the snacks being served contain nuts — he context be outweighed by evidence of unreliability. When S uses such because he’s allergic to nuts, you merely because you dislike their taste — and an indirect strategy in telling A that p, intending that he not believe he asks you, ‘Nut-free?’ Imagine you know about his allergy (but believe you shouldn’t mention it). It seems obvious that you should be much more careful her, she doesn’t want him to treat her speech act as if it didn’t on its in how you answer than you’d need to be if you were merely answering ‘for own give him a reason to believe that p. She wants him to treat her yourself’, or for someone who, like you, merely dislikes the taste of nuts. So assurance as giving him a reason that the evidence of her unreliability you might feel entitled to the conclusion that the snacks are nut-free, but not feel thereby entitled to tell him that they are. Now reverse the ailments and that she also gives him outweighs. She wants the acknowledgement imagine that you’re the one with the allergy (though, again, you believe you 32. For the claim that telling aims at being believed, see Moran, “Getting Told shouldn’t mention it). Known not to be allergic and manifestly hungry, he and Being Believed,” 25. Moran makes the claim again on page 26, and on asks you, ‘Nut-free?’ It seems wrong to answer as if the standard for him were page 27 he seconds Anscombe’s claim that there’s an insult and injury in not as high as it is for you. As I’ll argue later (and argue more fully in “Assertion, being believed — a claim that I’ll later argue is false. In each instance, there’s Sincerity, and Knowledge”), we thereby get the possibility of your informa- a conflation between the illocutionary and the perlocutionary: whether the tively (and, it seems, not insincerely) telling him that p while not believing addressee is convinced by the speaker is a perlocutionary issue. I’ll discuss this that p yourself (and while not believing that you should avow your lack of distinction in section V. belief). That you hold yourself to the standard determined by his epistemic needs explains how your assertion is informative (and, it seems, not insin- 33. Imagine you’re telling him and want him to believe that you’re telling him. In cere), even when your own epistemic needs require that you refrain from “Telling as Inviting to Trust,” I considered a more radical form of indirection, drawing this conclusion for yourself or for another who shares your needs. in which you want your addressee to believe that you’re merely asserting the And we get the possibility of an epistemic basis for your sense, with the ail- proposition, not telling him (since the presumption of the latter act would ments reversed back, that the illocutionary norm requires more of you than insult him). There is no need to include that additional complexity in an ex- simply telling your addressee what you also believe. ample illustrating the present point. philosophers’ imprint – 12 – vol. 14, no. 17 (june 2014) edward s. hinchman Assurance and Warrant

that recognition of the first reason would provide her, and thereby about the speaker’s obligation to meet her addressee’s epistemic needs the uptake that would consummate her speech act, without the in sections VIII and IX.) responsibility entailed by his actually believing her. I’ll say much It emerges that testimony is both more interpersonal than more about this distinction between illocutionary and perlocutionary other proponents of the assurance view have envisioned and not intentions in sections III through VI, distinguishing both from the interpersonal in quite the way they have envisioned. Proponents of intention recognition of which establishes the testimonial relation. We the assurance view have tended to follow the standard approach to cannot understand the epistemic role of testimonial assurance without testimony in modeling the confrontation between a speaker and her these distinctions.34 addressee on a lecturer’s confrontation with her audience in the lecture Let me emphasize that I am not assuming that speakers will hall (or on a witness’s confrontation with a jury). Perhaps that’s why often know the context-sensitive epistemic needs of their addressees. they tend to accede to standard usage in the epistemology of testimony In many cases, the speaker may have little to go by in gauging the in saying ‘audience’ where I prefer to say ‘addressee.’35 ‘Audience’ is not needs of her addressee and will naturally assume that the addressee’s the right term in contexts of telling because the speaker directs her needs do not differ from her own. The point is this: as speakers we telling not only linguistically but epistemically. In a typical lecture-hall understand that, where needs differ, it is the addressee’s that govern scenario, the lecturer addresses everyone in the hall in exactly the same how the Transparency Condition applies — that is, how it ought to way. But who counts as addressee outside such a regimented setting is apply, even if ignorance understandably prevents us from so applying less clear cut. ‘Is that bit meant for me?’ A asks himself, wondering if it. In telling A that p, S is not, of course, making an assertion about his role has suddenly shifted from addressee to overhearer. A speaker A’s epistemic needs on the question whether p. So ignorance of A’s need not spread her testimonial mode of address evenly across her epistemic needs will not prevent S from telling A that p. (I’ll say more audience. Though life would be simpler for theorists if it weren’t so, ‘But I wasn’t addressing you — couldn’t you tell?’ sometimes is an apt

34. I view many of Schmitt’s criticisms of Moran’s view, op. cit., as merely reveal- rejoinder to an auditor’s challenge. He may be someone S thought ing how desperately an assurance view needs these distinctions. For example, she could count on to detect the indirection, but he lets S down. Is S Schmitt argues that the proposed analogy between telling and promising suc- required to capitulate to this failure, conceding that since they both cumbs to the problem that, in order to yield the reason in question, promising requires a kind of agreement that telling does not require. But then every- knew he was in the room no illocutionary complexity of this sort was thing depends on what species of agreement this is. Schmitt argues that a permitted? S does sometimes — perhaps frequently with this very promissory reason depends on A’s ‘accepting’ the promise, whereas a testi- monial reason does not depend on A’s ‘accepting’ the testimony. But the lat- auditor — pull it off. ter is ambiguous as between accepting that testimony has been given and On the other hand, ‘But we both knew I was right there listening’ trusting the testimony. Schmitt clearly means trust by ‘accept’ here, but I’ll can force from S the concession that she was addressing this auditor argue that such trust is required neither for the testimonial relation to exist nor for that relation to make available to A a good testimonial reason. But I’ll after all. As I’m about to explain at length, though a speaker addresses also argue that ‘accepting’ that testimony has been given — glossed in terms her telling by intending her addressee to recognize the intention of recognizing the intentions that define S’s act as a telling — is a necessary condition on the reason’s being available to A. So in that sense, testimonial re- whereby she does so, the telling counts as addressed — that is, the lations do depend on an agreement. So Schmitt’s talk of ‘agreement’ obscures the analogy between promising and telling. (Let me reemphasize that I do not claim that this analogy explains anything about testimony. And in sections 35. Of the papers listed in note 6, all but the first characterize the one to whom VII through IX, I’ll give my own account of its imperfections.) the assurance is given as the ‘audience’ or ‘hearer’ as opposed to ‘addressee,’

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act counts as performed — only when that recognition transpires.36 III. How an assurance makes warrant available to the addressee Each party therefore gets a say in who counts as told. S can complain I’ll now begin my detailed explanation of how an assurance can that she didn’t intend to address A, but A can counter that it wasn’t generate testimonial warrant. In this section, I’ll offer an account of reasonable for her to expect him not to attribute to her an intention testimonial telling designed to explain how the assurance at the core that he make that attribution, to which A can in turn reply that it was of telling A that p can itself make available an epistemic reason for A 37 indeed reasonable — both parties spelling out their reasons. The to believe that p. The explanation appeals to the testifier’s reliability in invited trust relation is, like any normative human relation, subject to telling A that p, and the next section will explain how such an appeal dispute and negotiation. One thing that is at stake in such an exchange, to reliability is compatible with my claim that the warrant derives in I’m arguing, is the extent of S’s epistemic obligations: is S under an part from the assurance itself. epistemic obligation to manifest doxastic-deliberative sensitivity to As I emphasized in the previous section, the speaker assures A A’s context of epistemic needs? In the next four sections, I’ll give an not merely that it is true that p but that this very assurance entitles account of testimonial telling that emphasizes this dynamic, and in A to close deliberation and believe that p. There is thus a reflexivity the rest of the paper, I’ll explain how the norm to which it gives rise is in testimonial assurance, which we may codify in a quasi-Gricean therefore irreducibly bipolar. analysis of the speech act:

(T) S tells A that p (sincerely) iff A recognizes that S, in putting it forth that p, intends A to gain access, through this very 36. As I’ve already emphasized and as I’ll explain further in the next section, it recognition, to a prima facie but conclusive entitlement to can sometimes makes good sense to issue an invitation certain to be refused. 38 (My account thus avoids the fatal flaw of Grice’s accounts of asserting/telling; believe that p. for discussion, see “Telling as Inviting to Trust,” n. 25.) The interlocutor you’ll 38. More fully: S tells A that p iff A recognizes that S is putting it forth that p (i. e. prove unable to tell is the interlocutor who will not recognize the complex making an utterance to the effect that p), intending thereby to represent her- intention informing your act. You can try to tell him, of course, but your tell- self as intending A to gain access to a prima facie but conclusive entitlement ing will misfire as long as he fails to recognize your intention thereby to make to believe that p through A’s recognition of S’s intention that A gain access available an entitlement to take you at your word. to a prima facie but conclusive entitlement to believe that p. That’s really a 37. What then of ‘secret’ diaries and the like? David Owens claims that secret mouthful. It helps to assume that S is sincere, thus avoiding the hedge that diaries are clear counterexamples to the assurance view, arguing that the she ‘represents herself’ as having these intentions. It also helps to formulate reader can thereby acquire straightforward testimonial knowledge but with- A’s recognition as self-referential (as I’ve done in (T)) — or alternately to for- out having been given an assurance, since he wasn’t addressed — this being mulate S’s intention as self-referential (“… through recognition of this very an illustration of the fact that “some assertors have no audience in mind when intention”) or as having a self-referential content (“… through recognition they make their assertion.” (See David Owens, “Testimony and Assertion,” that that’s what she intends”). I defend this analysis at length in “Telling as Philosophical Studies 130 (2006), section 5.) That strikes me as a naive read- Inviting to Trust.” (Though the ‘conclusive’ is new here, the idea that S in- ing of such a case. Those who keep ‘secret’ diaries often have audiences very tends the warrant to be conclusive is implicit in that earlier treatment. I view elaborately in mind, the profession of secrecy merely marking a refusal to the present account as an elaboration rather than a correction of the position admit this fact. If the diary ‘speaks’ to you, that may be because it was indeed defended there.) (T) assumes that S is presenting A with the proposition in addressed to you (perhaps alongside a rendition of ‘posterity’) — whatever question; it does not explain what it is to present that proposition — that’s the diarist may insist. But say you really are not an addressee. Then I think why it’s only quasi-Gricean. (T) analyzes the speech act of telling A that p. it’s clear that you have no basis for believing the diarist as opposed to merely With regard to the speech act of asserting that p, (T) leaves two options: (i) believing what she says. Since, by hypothesis, she manifests no responsive- assume that a telling is an asserting plus the assurance analyzed by (T), or ness to your epistemic needs, I’m afraid you’re on your own. (Of course, that (ii) argue that an asserting is a telling with the addressee left generalized or doesn’t mean you can’t learn lots of interesting stuff!) imaginary. Option (i) would require a different analysis of mere asserting; (ii)

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Let me unpack this bit by bit. On a merely terminological note, I’m is a warrant that suffices for him to be entitled to believe that p. That is, still trying not to take sides in the internalism/externalism debate and it suffices — in context — to close doxastic deliberation.39 therefore use ‘warrant’ and ‘entitlement’ interchangeably as well as My claim that S aims to make available conclusive warrant may ‘reason’ – when it’s clear that I’m talking about epistemic rather than appear incompatible with my earlier argument that S may not aim at practical reasons: ‘entitlement to believe that p’ = ‘reason to believe being believed by A. But my formulation of (T) in terms of A’s ‘gaining that p’ = ‘warrant for p.’ (T) therefore specifies how telling A that p access’ to the warrant, and correlatively of S’s ‘making available’ this constitutively aims at giving A warrant for p. Properly understood, that warrant, creates space for this complexity. (T) does not say that S gives is, it explains how telling can include a warranting assurance. or that A gets the warrant. The warrant as it were ‘reaches’ A only if A Let me begin my substantive gloss with ‘prima facie but conclusive,’ trusts S. And S may quite intelligibly intend not to be trusted. If that since that may sound like a contradiction. The warrant in question intention is realized, S makes available a conclusive warrant that A’s is prima facie because it — that is, the presumption that it exists — is mistrust prevents him from receiving. I’ll return to that possibility subject to defeating conditions. As I’ll explain at length presently, if S presently, and, in section V, I’ll codify the point in terms of a broader is not trustworthy in relevant respects, then, although she can intend theory of Austinian ‘consummation.’ Do also note that (T) treats only to give a warrant, there is no warrant for her to give. She can tell A the case in which S is sincere. See the appended note for the more that p, and A can believe that p on her say-so, but A cannot thereby cumbersome formulation required to cover insincere tellings. (I’ll count as entitled to that belief. But the warrant that S intends to give have more to say about insincere tellings in section V.) is nonetheless conclusive. Though (as I explained in section II) she (T) gives an analysis of telling in terms of an assurance that may not intend that A actually believe that p on her say-so (or at transpires at two levels. At one level, S intends to give A a prima facie all), S must intend that the warrant she thereby gives him count as but conclusive warrant for p. At another level, S intends to give A this conclusive. By ‘conclusive’ I mean that if A believed S, he would not warrant simply through A’s recognition that that is what she intends. need any further deliberative basis to count, in context, as warranted The warrant that S intends to give A derives from her assurance that in that belief. (Again, by ‘conclusive’ I always mean conclusive in the it is indeed true that p. At this level, S assures A of p’s truth, and her relevant doxastic context.) In this respect, S presumes a kind of executive assurance generates warrant only if she is relevantly reliable — that is, authority over A’s doxastic deliberations. Of course, this presumption as a gauge of the truth. At this level, the assurance of warrant amounts of authority would be undermined if S’s presumption to offer warrant 39. What then of ‘hedged tellings’? What if S says something like this to A: ‘I don’t were defeated — that’s what makes the warrant prima facie. But the point know, perhaps p’? Here we have two choices. We can view S as suggesting or of appealing to defeating conditions is that one’s status as warranted hypothesizing that p, rather than telling A (by asserting) that p. That would does not require that one ratify that the conditions are not satisfied. If make sense of cases in which S would naturally continue, ‘I’m not telling you that p…’ or ‘don’t quote me…’ (Of course, ‘Don’t quote me’ (et al.) can mark a they are not satisfied here, and there thus really is warrant in play, then telling via indirection. But sometimes it’s a way of showing that you are not in the warrant that S intends to make available to A in telling him that p the business of telling.) Or we can view S as telling A something other than p, such as possibly p or probably p (or some more definite assessment of prob- ability). That would make sense of cases in which S hedges not the assurance itself but its content: ‘Take my word for it, there’s a good chance that p.’ So the latter sort of ‘hedging’ nonetheless fits my account. Generally, not every would require an argument that I won’t pursue in this paper. For part of this speech act that looks like a telling really is one, and not every telling has its argument, see “Judging as Inviting Self-Trust.” content written on its sleeve.

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to an assurance of reliability — including reliability at assessing when as truth-conducively reliable, or perhaps one grounded not in her you’re not historically reliable and thus must be especially on your reliability at all but merely in evidence available to A that what she guard against error — that is undermined by de facto unreliability. I’ll asserts is likely to be true. If A recognizes S’s (T)-intention, then, as discuss the relevant dimensions of reliability presently; for now, note Austin puts it, there’s no ‘misfire,’ and the speech act is performed with merely that this core dimension of the speech act is alethic: S assures whatever epistemic warrant her status as reliable in both dimensions A that she is a source of truth on the question whether p. How does gives it.42 I’ll argue that the assurance is what makes available this S intend to make this warrant available to A? Simply through his warrant, since the assurance is governed by illocutionary norms that recognition that she intends to make it available to him.40 But how require this responsiveness, a responsiveness that serves to manifest could A obtain a warrant merely by virtue of his recognition that his a distinctively testimonial species of reliability. As we’ll see, the interlocutor intends him to obtain that warrant? As I just said, this norms codify our understanding of the rights and responsibilities warrant is truth-conducive. S’s intentions here have no direct bearing that define the personal relation wherein the warrant is made on whether she is a good guide to the truth.41 available. The testimonial relation can exist even with rights violated S’s intentions do have a direct bearing on whether she is or responsibilities unmet. But the provision of epistemic warrant appropriately responsive to A’s context-sensitive epistemic needs. requires that the speaker live up to her responsibility. Of course, if the I’m claiming that it’s this fact about a speaker that enables her to norms are violated too egregiously, we’ll suspect that the violating make testimonial warrant available to her addressee. What then of party is not really entering into the testimonial relation: that S isn’t an unresponsive testifier? Does her unresponsiveness prevent her really acting on a (T)-intention, or that A doesn’t really believe that from making the warrant available? To answer this question, I need S is so acting. This is just to say that though each party enters into to sketch an aspect of my view that I’ll spell out at length in sections the relation by virtue of a psychological act or attitude, what it is that IV through VI. S’s unresponsiveness to A’s epistemic needs amounts, they’ve entered into is defined normatively, not psychologically.43 I’ll argue, to an Austinian abuse of the illocution of testimonial In sum, testimonial warrant does require truth-conducive reliability, telling. That prevents her, as an unresponsive testifier, from making but an assurance manifesting such reliability has an irreducibly a testimonial warrant available to A. In section IV, I’ll argue that this interpersonal dimension insofar as it includes the invitation to species of responsiveness amounts to a species of reliability that believe on the basis of trust codified by (T). In the latter dimension, serves as a necessary condition on the speaker’s provision of warrant, the question for A is not simply whether S is speaking truly when she alongside truth-conducive reliability. An unresponsive testifier cannot, tells him that p but whether, if he believed her, he’d have fulfilled the I’ll argue, make available the warrant that her speech represents her as aiming to make available, though she may be able to make 42. For the distinction between misfires and abuses — two distinct forms of ‘un- available a different warrant — perhaps one grounded in her status happiness’ — see J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, second edition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975), 13–17. 43. Though the parallel is inexact (and the rendition I’m about to give quite 40. Again, I say ‘make available’ rather than ‘give’ because, as we saw, S may not crude), compare friendship relations: once parties feel a certain way about intend that A actually trust her. For ease of formulation, however, I’ll some- each other, they’re in; but when the relation is established, feelings incom- times (as in the next sentence) assume that S does intend to give the warrant. patible with those friendly feelings count as violations but not necessarily 41. We’re assuming, of course, that the proposition in question is not about S or cancellations of the friendship (unless, of course, they grow too great or last anything over which S has any control. too long).

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doxastic-deliberative requirements defined by his context of epistemic My rationale is merely that it’s too simple to say that no one can needs. We’ll explore the role of reliability in this dimension that goes reasonably trust you if you have a track-record of error. After all, you beyond truth-conducive reliability at length in the rest of the paper. For have to trust yourself if you’re ever going to reform. In such a case, we now, note that to fulfill the doxastic-deliberative requirements at issue, can explain your self-trust at the lower level by appeal to your self-trust A needn’t assess S for reliability in either dimension. I’ll likewise defend on the higher-order question whether you’re adequately on your guard this claim at length. At its core is the observation that assessing S for against lower-level error. That is, you don’t simply trust your judgment reliability is a way of refusing S’s invitation to trust, since S is inviting A that p; you trust your judgment that p only insofar as you trust your to trust her, not whatever evidence she thereby gives of her reliability. judgment that you’ve adequately guarded against the dangers of A can fulfill his doxastic-deliberative requirements by exercising the trusting your judgment that p. So if you go on to believe that p — that counterfactual sensitivity informing his capacity for reasonable trust. is, to act as if p in a way that manifests trust in your judgment — that If S is (or were) unreliable, or there is (or were) evidence that she is, won’t be like a belief you’d form simply by trusting your judgment. If then A will (or would) not reasonably trust. But if she is reliable, and you’re in fact on your guard in this way, I don’t see why an addressee there is no evidence that she is not, then A is entitled to believe that p cannot reasonably trust you — as long as his capacity for reasonable by simply taking her word for it, without assessing evidence at all. Of trust is sensitive to evidence that you’re not on your guard in this way. course, saying that presupposes that by ‘evidence’ we mean significant The qualification elaborates how your addressee’s counterfactual evidence. If we treat as evidence of the speaker’s untrustworthiness sensitivity must function in order for his trust to count as reasonable. the general consideration that speakers sometimes assert falsely, for The qualification also allows me to draw a larger moral. It is natural example, then there will always be evidence of untrustworthiness, to worry that you couldn’t go someplace where you’re a complete and it will be impossible reasonably to trust a speaker. But we would stranger and succeed in assuring anyone of anything, because, insofar not usually treat such a general consideration as evidence that a as these people don’t know you, they have no basis for trusting you. given speaker is here-and-now untrustworthy. Part of what it is to But if you couldn’t succeed in assuring these people, then you couldn’t be ‘appropriately’ responsive to evidence of untrustworthiness in reasonably intend to assure them — so it seems that you couldn’t, on the speaker is to abandon trust when but only when the evidence of my account, coherently perform acts of testimonial telling — which of untrustworthiness is significant.44 course is absurd.45 But the appearance is misleading. As I argued in Let me say more about the notion of truth-conducive reliability section II and will elaborate in section V, telling does not aim at being before introducing an important further complexity. I’ve suggested believed but at making available a reason to believe. The problem you that the species of reliability in play here is not historical or statistical face as a stranger is that you know there’s little evidence available to reliability — how likely is it, given your track record, that you are potential addressees that you’re reliable. Let’s imagine, making the case speaking the truth? — but an aretaic species of reliability that codifies more dramatic in this dimension, that there’s a lot of positive evidence your addressee’s entitlement to rely on you regardless of that history. available to them that you’re unreliable. Imagine, for greatest drama, that what you know about this evidence prevents you from believing 44. For fuller treatments of the nature of trust as a counterfactual sensitivity to that any of these potential addressees will do anything but impatiently evidence of untrustworthiness, see my “Telling as Inviting to Trust,” op. cit., and “Advising as Inviting to Trust” (Canadian Journal of Philosophy 35 (2005), 355–386). 45. Thanks to Fred Schmitt for pressing me to elaborate my reply to this objection.

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dismiss your offer of warrant, not trusting you in the slightest. Even no fiction of purity. It requires no more than the truism that — even so, it doesn’t follow that you cannot perform the act of telling them if no actual case is purely one or the other — there is a difference that p, intending thereby to make available to them a distinctively between believing the speaker, on the basis of her assurance, and testimonial entitlement to believe that p. You merely believe that believing what the speaker says, on the basis of whatever evidence they will not acknowledge this entitlement. You can assure them one can find of her reliability. The fact that there is this difference because you believe you can thereby make available a reason — that itself structures testimonial relations, I’m claiming, since what the is, to believe you, not merely what you say. After all, you believe you’re speaker intends, in inviting the relation, is that her addressee believe reliable on the question whether p — or you wouldn’t feel entitled to her and not merely what she says. (I’ll elaborate and defend this claim at tell them that p. Or if your assertion is insincere, and you don’t care length, beginning in section V.) That addressees often have both sorts about your status as thus reliable, then you’re trading on the possibility of warrant available is part of what gives testimonial relations their of believing yourself reliable even in the face of this evidence against distinctive nature. you. In either case, you can find what you’re doing intelligible because One will worry that there is no conceptual space for my analysis you can imagine yourself appearing reliable in the way described in if one assumes that trust cannot be reasonable unless it rests on the previous paragraph — even in the face of this evidence against you. a justified belief that the trusted is worthy of it. If the reasonability You can therefore present yourself as intending to make this reason of trust depends on the justifiability of this belief, then it must available, even if you believe that no one will acknowledge the reason. depend on whether the addressee has evidence that the speaker is You can thus coherently invite an addressee to believe you, and not trustworthy — and we lose the contrast between taking the speaker’s merely what you say, even when everyone around you has grounds to word and believing what she says on the basis of evidence.46 A central be skeptical of your claim to be relevantly reliable. contribution of my account is the principled basis it gives for rejecting To be precise, however, I need to frame more complexly this key that assumption. Though it can give rise to this belief (among others), distinction between believing the speaker and believing merely what testimonial trust is not, nor does it rest on, belief that the trusted is she asserts. Since the speaker must be relevantly reliable for there to be worthy of it. I’m arguing that it rests merely on the recognition — that a testimonial warrant in play, whenever there is a testimonial warrant is, the true belief — that the speaker is acting from the quasi-Gricean in play there is a non-testimonial warrant potentially in play as well, intention (T), which falls far short of an ascription of trustworthiness. since it will be possible to ‘step outside’ the testimonial relation and True, a trusting addressee treats his interlocutor as worthy of his trust. believe what the speaker says merely on the basis of whatever evidence That is, he acts as if this is this case. But more in general is required for one can find of her reliability (and there will almost always be some believing that p than acting as if p. And we have a positive reason to such evidence). Since one can always thus ‘step outside’ a testimonial hold that in the present case that extra cannot be playing a role. If A relation, it will often be unclear to what extent an addressee believes on accepts S’s testimony because he believes that she is trustworthy — that this basis as opposed to the purely testimonial basis made available by is, if this belief explains the acceptance — then A is adopting an the relation itself. I don’t want to traffic in the fiction that our personal relations are pure in this respect. We are almost always partly thus 46. In “What Is Wrong with Lying?” (Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 75 [2007], 535–557), Paul Faulkner presses this worry against my earlier account disengaged from each other, or at least partly motivated to become in “Telling as Inviting to Trust,” overlooking my warning against this reading thus disengaged should circumstances require. And my view requires (via a rejection of the assumption at issue) on p. 578.

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attitude towards her that is incompatible with simply taking her at her you are taking her trustworthiness ‘for granted.’ In this respect, a belief word. After all, A could convey the information that S is trustworthy in her trustworthiness may expressively derive from your trust: you to B, and B could likewise accept S’s testimony on the basis of this express your trust in S in a belief that S is trustworthy. The important belief — despite not, we can assume, having been addressed by S at all. point is that your trust need not itself derive from any belief in the If you’re unsympathetic to the assurance view, you’ll naturally seize speaker’s trustworthiness. As I’ll explain more fully in section V, you’re on this sort of case as proof that no assurance is involved in testimony, resisting rather than consummating a testimonial trust relation when perhaps articulating your opposition in terms of the assumption that your acceptance of the testimony is premised on your assessment of I’m rejecting. Everything will then depend on further argument about the speaker as trustworthy. the natures of trust and belief. One of my reasons for insisting that trust does not rest on a belief in trustworthiness is that I’ve argued elsewhere IV. How an assurance view of testimony can ground warrant in that belief itself in general rests on self-trust, and I think it’s plausible to reliability view trust as univocal across interpersonal and intrapersonal cases.47 There are two questions implicit in the schematic treatment that I have So my rejection of the assumption invokes a larger argument that I given thus far. First, can an assurance view explain how warrant is made cannot hope to treat in a paper primarily on testimony. available through testimony without attributing to the addressee a But that is not the only reason to be suspicious of the assumption. belief that the speaker is worthy of his trust? Second, can an assurance I’m arguing, and in succeeding sections will argue more fully, that the view explain what might be positively wrong with coming to believe speech act of testimonial telling most fundamentally expresses not a what a speaker tells you only because you have positively — that is, status about which the addressee then forms beliefs but an invitation actively or deliberatively — assessed her as worthy of your trust? As into a species of care-giving relation intended to ground epistemic we’ll see in this section and the next, my version of the assurance view warrant thereby made available to the addressee. Of course, the truth- differs from other versions in how it answers both questions. First, my conducive status is there (or not), and the addressee may, to this extent account grounds testimonial warrant in the de facto reliability of the ‘stepping outside’ the relation, believe accordingly. In section VI, I’ll speaker, not in the trust relation itself, or in the addressee’s beliefs argue that the closure-conducive status is not, by contrast, simply about that relation. Though I’ll argue in section VI that closure- ‘there’ outside of the invited trust relation. But one can ‘tap into’ truth- conducive reliability is not available to be relied on outside a trust conducive reliability with no regard for any trust relation. Moreover, the relation, it is the reliability, not the trust relation itself, that grounds addressee trusts (or not) in a way that is of course informed by beliefs. the warrant. Second, my account explains the testimonial relation I’m nonetheless arguing that, though it is informed by recognition of between speaker and addressee whereby warrant is made available in the speaker’s intentions, testimonial trust neither is itself a belief nor terms not of either party’s de facto assumption of responsibility toward rests on the belief that the speaker is trustworthy. Given that you trust, the other but in terms of the de jure norms that govern how each is we can say that you believe that the speaker is trustworthy insofar as responsible to the other. In section V, I’ll explain how the latter are illocutionary norms governing propositional assurances. In section VI, 47. See “Judging as Inviting Self-Trust.” Faulkner, op. cit., challenges precisely my I’ll return to the question of warrant, explaining how the illocutionary claim that trust is univocal across these cases, proposing an account of trust that could not be generalized to the intrapersonal. The issue cannot be re- norms governing testimonial assurances have epistemic content. solved, of course, without considering the intrapersonal case(s) in detail.

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In the present section I’ll answer the first question, explaining instances.) What distinguishes testimonial trust from other forms of in terms of the nature of testimonial trustworthiness itself how reliance is the fact that the latter do not include the second dimension an addressee can gain access to warrant without assessing the of reliance, reliance on the source of information to be appropriately speaker for trustworthiness. On my account, being testimonially responsive to your epistemic needs. trustworthy is merely a matter of being reliable in appropriate ways. What’s important on my approach is this distinction: you can form Other proponents of the assurance view argue for what they claim a belief merely by relying on a source of information to be reliable as is a crucial distinction between (a) testimonial trust and (b) mere a purveyor of truth, or you can form a belief by relying on a source reliance on a source of information.48 My account, by contrast, places of information to be both reliable as a purveyor of truth and reliably no special weight on any such distinction. While I wouldn’t argue that responsive to your context-sensitive epistemic needs. Again, I don’t there is no useful distinction between trust and reliance considered need to formulate my view with a concept specifically of trust, as as two species of attitude or relation, my account does not depend on distinct from ‘mere’ reliance. All I need is the idea that there are two such a distinction. As far as my account goes, we can think of trust as distinct dimensions in which you can rely on a speaker. The distinction reliance, and we can think of testimonial trustworthiness as nothing lies in what you’re relying on the speaker to do or be, not in any more than testimonial reliability. difference in the attitude or the relation as such. It is handy to use the Where other versions of the assurance view emphasize a distinction terms ‘trust’ and ‘trustworthiness’ to mark the case wherein you rely between trust and ‘mere’ reliance, my version emphasizes a distinction on the speaker in both dimensions, so I’ll now revert to that usage. But between the two dimensions of reliance that we’ve been investigating. it is important to understand that, just as (T) does not use the concept On the one hand, you can rely on a testifier to be speaking the truth. of trust in its explicans, so my entire account could dispense with On the other hand, you can rely on a testifier to be appropriately ‘trust’ and trustworthiness’ in favor of ‘reliance’ and ‘reliability.’ (I’ll responsive to your epistemic needs. Of course, you can, in the case offer a deeper characterization of the second dimension of reliance in of greatest interest, rely on the testifier to be both. But these forms of sections VII through IX.) reliance can also come apart. On my version of the assurance view, That difference between my version of the assurance view and other what distinguishes testimonial trust from ‘mere’ reliance on a source versions entails another methodological difference. I’m arguing for a of information isn’t any difference between the attitudes or relations connection between testimonial reasons and trust; in the metaphor as such: in each, you simply rely on a speaker — or, on the flip-side of that can serve as a useful shorthand for my full explanation, I’m the relation, are relied upon by an addressee — to be relevantly reliable. arguing that testimonial telling is an invitation to trust. But, unlike other (Please forgive the awkwardly redundant expression, ‘rely on S to be proponents of the assurance view, I have not claimed that a testimonial reliable.’ I’ll use it as shorthand for ‘rely on S to tell the truth’ or ‘rely on reason could be grounded in trust.49 In fact, I strongly believe that a S to be appropriately responsive to your epistemic needs,’ depending testimonial reason cannot be grounded in trust. Here too, the concept on whether we’re thinking of the truth-conducive or of the closure- of trust does not play an explanatory role in my account. When I say conducive instance. We’ll sometimes need to generalize over both that telling is inviting to trust, I do not mean that the concept of an

48. See, for example, McMyler, Testimony, Trust, and Authority, 92ff, and Faulkner, 49. Both McMyler (in Testimony, Trust, and Authority) and Faulkner (in Knowledge Knowledge on Trust, section 6.1 (on the distinction between and “affective trust” on Trust) defend this claim at length. I explain why I do not join them on this and [merely] “predictive trust”). path in the papers cited in note 7.

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invitation to trust figures either in my account of the speech act or possible.52 Trusting testimony no more generates a reason to believe in my account of how the speech act can provide epistemic warrant. what the speaker asserts than trusting a promise on its own generates Again, it’s merely a vivid metaphor and useful shorthand. a reason to plan on the assumption that the promisor will keep her There are two interrelated reasons why we should not view promise. In each case, the trust can at best cause the speaker to be testimonial reasons or warrant as grounded in trust: even when there reliable, where the reliability would in turn provide the reason.53 The is warrant, the trust does not explain what the warrant consists in, and only way an assurance view can avoid illicit bootstrapping is to appeal any attempt to ground warrant in trust would attempt to vindicate to the speaker’s status as relevantly reliable. what is in fact illicit bootstrapping. On the first point, an addressee’s That argument puts me in step with some opponents of the trust can of course figure in a causal explanation of why a speaker assurance view.54 Of course, if the testimonial reason rested entirely is reliable in either or both of the dimensions I’ve distinguished; it on the speaker’s status as truth-conducively reliable, the appeal that is a good observation that trust can make someone trustworthy who I’ve just made to reliability would bypass the second-personal relation would otherwise remain untrustworthy.50 But the trust itself doesn’t between speaker and addressee on which an assurance view focuses. directly explain why there is epistemic warrant in play — that is, it But, as we’ve seen, there is another dimension of reliability in play. To doesn’t explain what the warrant consists in. Let’s focus on the first give a testimonial reason, a speaker must indeed be truth-conducively dimension of reliability: why is the telling likely to be true? What reliable. But she must also be appropriately responsive to how the directly explains why the telling is likely to be true is the speaker’s truth- quantity and quality of her evidence bears on her addressee’s specific conducive reliability — that is, her disposition to assert the truth — in doxastic circumstances — that is, the context in which he would, this interlocutory context. The addressee’s trust may causally explain if he trusted her, come to believe what she tells him. An emphasis why the speaker is reliable. But it’s the reliability that explains why the on reliability can serve an assurance view if it targets the speaker’s telling is likely to be true.51 And now we can appreciate the second relation not only to the truth but also to her addressee’s context- point. Without an appeal to S’s reliability, an account of A’s testimonial sensitive epistemic needs. reason would admit the possibility that A has bootstrapped his way Other proponents of the assurance view join critics of the assurance into possession of a reason through his mere affective trust in S. On view in taking for granted that an addressee’s epistemic needs are reflection, we should agree that such bootstrapping is not actually 52. In Knowledge on Trust (151–3), Faulkner seems to assume that the only worry about bootstrapping to which his account might be susceptible is the worry that an attitude of trust commits the trusting to act in a way that is insensitive 50. Richard Holton develops one angle on this observation in “Deciding to to evidence that the trusted is not worthy of the trust. That is not my worry. Trust, Coming to Believe,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 72 (1994), 63– I take for granted Faulkner’s point that “in deciding to trust S to j, A does 76. I develop another angle in “Telling as Inviting to Trust,” section VIII. not decide to trust come what may” (152). My worry applies most sharply Faulkner places the observation at the center of his definition of affective when there is no evidence of S’s untrustworthiness available to A, though S trust (Knowledge on Trust, 146), thereby treating it as the key to his assurance is nonetheless unreliable. Faulkner claims that, in such a case, A may have an view of warrant. epistemic reason to believe what S tells him – a reason grounded in A’s affec- 51. Compare: you can cause your clock to be a reliable indicator of the time by tive trust in S. I claim that that would involve illicit bootstrapping. repairing it, but the repair job — even if it is ongoing: say you have to hold 53. I lack space to defend the claim about promising here. For a full defense, the cord at a precise angle to retain the electrical connection — isn’t itself evi- see my “Promise as Normative Power” and “Promise and Time,” both in dence of the time. It causes evidence of the current time to be produced, but preparation. it itself is not that evidence. The evidence is what the clock says, given that the clock is reliable. 54. See the work by Weiner, Lackey, Schmitt, and Goldberg cited in note 11.

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exhausted by his need to believe the truth.55 But that’s too simple a he does not deserve.58 Whatever we say about Williams’s issue — does conception of epistemic needs. When you wonder whether p, you’re the norm of sincerity rest on a norm of justice? — it seems undeniable wondering not only whether it is true that p but whether you have that testimonial trustworthiness, beyond mere sincerity, requires not sufficient epistemic warrant, in your actual circumstances, to believe merely that you tell your addressee the truth but that you more broadly that p. When you wonder whether to trust S’s testimony that p, you’re do justice to his need for the truth from you. wondering not only whether her assertion is true but whether it gives I too accept that point, but my emphasis on the addressee’s you, in your actual circumstances, sufficient warrant to believe that p. epistemic needs is different. When I note that a speaker might fail There are thus two burdens on the shoulders of any speaker who tells to be appropriately responsive to her addressee’s context-sensitive you that p: to tell you that p only when it is true that p, and to give you epistemic needs, I mean that she might either tell him something that what would count, in your actual doxastic circumstances, as sufficient he doesn’t, in his context, have sufficient epistemic reason to believe, warrant for believing that p. As we’ve seen, we can easily imagine or fail to tell him something that he does in context have sufficient cases in which a speaker falls short of being a reliable testifier by doing reason to believe (and that is supported by evidence available to S). the former but not the latter. That is, we can see how a speaker might Again, it isn’t at all difficult to come up with cases in which S has tell you the truth without being appropriately responsive to your sufficient reason to believe that p in her context and does on that basis epistemic needs. believe that p, but without being entitled to tell A that p — simply One distinctive feature of my version of the assurance view thus because it takes more evidence to count as sufficiently warranted derives from how I conceive the addressee’s epistemic needs. All to believe that p in his doxastic context than it does in hers. We can proponents of the assurance view can accept a point that Bernard summarily illustrate with an allergy case: my pretty good evidence Williams emphasizes: that beyond telling what you believe to be the may suffice for me to believe that this bowl of snacks is nut-free but truth, sincerity requires doing so in a way that does justice to how not for you to believe it, given your nut-allergy. I looked to see if the much of the truth your addressee needs and deserves from you.56 snacks contained nuts before I began to eat because I dislike the taste We thus get Williams’s case in which S is opening A’s mail but when of nuts. “No nuts,” I concluded, so I scooped up a handful. Now you confronted tells A only that someone is opening his mail, not that she arrive and ask me, “Does the bowl contain nuts?” I’m about to tell you herself is. As Faulkner observes, S is here violating a crucial norm of that it does not contain nuts, since that’s what I believe, but then I trust — in the aretaic sense, S is being untruthful — despite telling A remember your allergy. “I can’t say,” I reply. Of course I could say, and nothing but the truth.57 Testimonial trustworthiness and the norm of with no impropriety — if I thought you merely shared my distaste for sincerity require being appropriately informative in this respect: you nuts. But your allergy imposes a higher standard on my telling. It must tell your addressee as much of the truth as he needs and deserves would be a violation of illocutionary norms to treat you as entitled to from you. That ‘needs and deserves’ marks a complexity that Williams believe by the evidence that suffices to entitle me to believe. discusses at length: A may make an unjust request for information that Though one may balk at calling a violation of illocutionary norms 55. See, for example, Faulkner, Knowledge on Trust, 47–8 and 180–1. an ‘insincerity’ when the speaker does believe what she asserts, we 56. Bernard Williams, Truth and Truthfulness (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 100–110. 57. Williams’s mail-opening case is Faulkner’s case 32 in Knowledge on Trust. 58. Truth and Truthfulness, 110–122.

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may naturally call it a failure to be properly informative.59 To get a out on his own!) In cases where your doxastic circumstances differ, case of this sort, let’s flip the previous case around and imagine that the epistemic standard that governs your testimony may well differ you’re the speaker, with a severe nut allergy, and I’m your addressee, from the standard against which you would form and retain a belief of known merely to dislike nuts. You’ve been checking out the snack- your own. The norm governing testimony and the norm governing the bowl and are confident enough for my needs but not for your own speaker’s belief are different norms that may give the speaker different that the bowl does not contain any nuts. I ask you if the bowl contains directives: either ‘tell that p but don’t believe that p,’ or ‘believe that nuts, and you tell me that it does not — despite not yourself believing p but don’t tell that p.’ The norms can come apart in these ways what you assert. Are you insincere? Are you in any respect attempting because tellings are not announcements of what you believe but acts to deceive me? Well, we may imagine that your refusal to explain why of assurance, wherein you put yourself under a norm defined from you are not yourself eating from the bowl manifests an attempt to your addressee’s perspective. deceive me about your allergy. But that’s a different matter, and its You must meet this norm — as we might put it, you must be relevance to the present issue is merely that it helps distinguish your properly informative — by being such that your addressee can rely on illocutionary obligations from other aspects of your relationship with you as an informant. Flipping the testimonial relation around, you a given interlocutor. (Why, anyway, should I have a right to know can get a reason to believe a speaker only if the speaker is a reliable about your medical status?) The topic of our actual conversation is informant — that is, reliable not merely as a speaker of truth but as a this bowl of snack food, and you aren’t attempting to deceive me giver of such a context-sensitive assurance. The core of an assurance about that. If without explanation of your allergy (and, again, you may view of testimonial reasons, as I understand it, lies in how testimonial well not owe me any explanation) you refrained from telling me what trust — the species of trust that you manifest when you believe the you believe me entitled to believe in answer to a question I’ve just speaker, not merely what she asserts — presumes that the speaker is asked you, that would amount to a misstep that at least mimics an reliable in both of these dimensions. Testimonial trust presumes that illocutionary violation — an Austinian abuse — since it would count as the speaker is not only truth-conducively but also, as I’ve been saying, withholding information that I manifestly need and deserve and that I closure-conducively reliable — ‘closure-conducively’ because a speaker am now explicitly requesting from you. (I say ‘mimics’ to set aside the acts as a genuine informant only when her assertion that p is informed worry that there cannot be an illocutionary failure where there is no by appropriate responsiveness to her addressee’s context-sensitive speech act. The abuse here mimics an illocutionary act in the way that epistemic needs. What is ‘appropriate’ responsiveness? To count as pointedly failing to respond to an accusation mimics confirming it.) appropriate, the speaker’s responsiveness must permit him to close a As we can see from the cases I’ve discussed, and as I’ll argue with deliberation whether p, or to treat this matter of possible deliberation a fuller theoretical apparatus in the next section, illocutionary norms as closed, simply by believing her — that is, as we say, by accepting her require telling your addressee what he needs and deserves to know assertion ‘on trust.’ given his epistemic standard, the standard against which he would That’s how the norm works on the speaker’s side, and it generates form a belief. (Again, you use your evidence, not his. Obviously, the a complementary norm on the side of the addressee. To accept an idea is not that you should tell him only what he’s in position to figure assertion on trust, you cannot be in the business of assessing the

59. In “Assertion, Sincerity, and Knowledge,” I argue that either this is insincerity speaker for reliability. As other proponents of the assurance view or sincerity does not mark an illocutionary norm. rightly emphasize, when you assess for reliability you violate the

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terms of the trust relation, effectively stepping outside any relation not strictly depend on it — I do want to leave room for the analogy. As of trust and believing (or not) on the basis of your independent I’ll explain in section VII, without the analogy — in particular, without assessment of the evidence.60 When you assess for reliability, you may the idea that belief formation manifests a trusting responsiveness to wind up believing what the speaker asserts, but you don’t believe closure-conducive as well as truth-conducive reliability, whether your the speaker: you don’t accept what she says on her say-so.61 So an own or another’s — it is difficult to understand how belief formation assurance view needs to be anti-reductionist and emphasize that the could in general be subject to epistemic norms. speaker’s reliability figures not in the addressee’s assessment but as a Is what I’m calling ‘closure-conducive reliability’ really a species defeating condition on whether an addressee who trusts without thus of reliability? For it to count as a species of reliability, it must be assessing counts as acquiring a testimonial reason. Anti-reductionists counterfactually robust: for S to count as closure-conducively reliable who are not assurance-theorists emphasize such a defeating condition in telling A that p in the actual world, S must be appropriately on truth-conducive reliability, without realizing that there is a second responsive to A’s epistemic needs in nearby possible worlds — that is, dimension of reliability in play. When we place equal emphasis on in worlds relevantly similar to the actual world in respects relevant to closure-conducive reliability, we open the door to an assurance view our assessment of S as thereby enabling A to know that p. Why think of testimonial reasons that avoids the problem of illicit bootstrapping. that’s the case? One reason to think that closure-conducive reliability Let me emphasize that my theory grounds warrant in the testifier’s is counterfactually robust is that the rational sensitivity at the core of reliability, not in the reliability of the process whereby the addressee trust is itself counterfactually robust. As I’ve already emphasized, trust forms a testimonial belief. As I indicated in section II and as I’ll is reasonable insofar as it is governed by a counterfactual sensitivity explain more fully in section VII, I regard the process whereby you to evidence of untrustworthiness: if there is, or if there had been, form a belief as in general mediated by a responsiveness to presumed evidence that S is not worthy of your trust, you will cease trusting S, or reliability analogous to your reliance on a trusted speaker’s testimony. you would not have trusted S in the first place. Trustworthiness here In other words, I aim to show how belief formation internalizes the includes closure-conducive reliability: evidence of closure-conducive testimonial trust relation as a relation of self-trust, sustained through unreliability makes, or would have made, trust unreasonable as much an exercise of the same capacity for reasonable trust as I’m arguing as evidence of truth-conducive unreliability. Viewing matters from provides the basis for an addressee’s testimonial uptake. While S’s perspective, the invitation to trust at the core of telling is likewise judging that p is not the same as ‘telling yourself’ that p, the self-trust counterfactually robust: in inviting you to trust her S presents herself relation that you instantiate when you believe in accordance with your to you as worthy of your reasonable trust. S need not present you with judgment — rather than mistrusting it — runs in normative parallel with evidence of her reliability; she merely presumes an absence of good the testimonial trust relation that you institute when you accept the evidence that she is unreliable in respects relevant to her capacity invitation to trust at the core of a speaker’s testimonial telling. Though I to give you testimonial warrant. In thus inviting you to exercise cannot offer a full treatment of this analogy between the intrapersonal your capacity for reasonable trust, she presumes that this absence and interpersonal in this paper — and my argument in this paper does extends to nearby possible worlds. If there is good evidence that she 60. This is the thread linking all the work cited in note 6. would have been unresponsive to your epistemic needs in a nearby 61. I emphasized this point at length in “Telling as Inviting to Trust,” where I also world — say, a world in which she is standing a few inches farther emphasized the need for reliability. away from you — that conflicts with her presumption that you would

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be reasonable to trust her in the actual world. One reason to think way — not merely by asserting, or by asserting plus A’s hearing the that such responsiveness to need is a species of reliability lies in how assertion (which we could imagine works via some testimony- the responsiveness can provide a counterfactually robust basis for bypassing machine), but by asserting plus A’s hearing the assertion the cognate species of reasonable reliance. Just as the reasonability of in the way characteristic of testimony. I won’t try to say what causal reliance on such responsiveness to need rests on truths about nearby necessitation is, but we can formulate the points at issue by assuming possible worlds, so must those truths about possible worlds inform that S’s causing A’s testimonial belief that p requires that A come to the responsiveness itself. believe that p in nearby possible worlds, where ‘nearby’ marks this It is worth pausing to note that this appeal to closure-conducive causal modality — the production of testimonial belief — as distinct reliability creates space for a compelling solution to the problem of from other causal relations productive of belief. Such distinctively epistemic value. Why should we value knowledge over true belief? Why, testimonial causal necessitation does not constitutively involve the in particular, should we value reliability in what causes a belief, over species of modality distinctive of truth-conducive reliability: we and above the belief’s truth?62 If ‘reliability’ just means truth-conducive can identify the worlds that are ‘nearby’ relative to the causal nexus reliability then the question appears to have bite: why indeed should without giving any thought to which worlds are ‘nearby’ relative to you care about the truth value of your testimonial belief in nearby our assessment of S as truth-conducively reliable. But such causal possible worlds? But an emphasis on closure-conducive reliability necessitation does constitutively involve the species of modality yields a straightforward answer to the question. The epistemic value distinctive of closure-conducive reliability: we cannot identify causally of closure-conducive reliability lies in how it constitutes the causal ‘nearby’ worlds without giving thought to which worlds are ‘nearby’ relation whereby an addressee forms a testimonial belief. One relative to our assessment of S as closure-conducively reliable. difference between truth-conducive and closure-conducive reliability We might frame the core contrast as follows. Thinking of the is that only the latter bears this constitutive relation to belief formation. relation as a testimonial relation — that is, as a relation in which A may Though we cannot pursue the issue very far here, let me elaborate form a belief in the distinctively testimonial way — entails thinking the core of this approach to epistemic value.63 In order for any question of the relation as one constitutively apt for assessment in terms of of reliability to arise, an appropriate species of causal relation must closure-conducive reliability, though it does not entail thinking of obtain. In order for S to count as causing A to form a testimonial the relation as one constitutively apt for assessment in terms of truth- belief, S must cause A to believe that p in the distinctively testimonial conducive reliability. Once we’re interested in the status of A’s belief as knowledge — an interest that will naturally accompany the practices 62. See, for example, Linda Zagzebski, “The Search for the Source of Epistemic Good,” Metaphilosophy 34 (January 2003), 12–28; Jonathan Kvanvig, The Value of justification that apply to testimonial chains (about which I’ll have of Knowledge and the Pursuit of Understanding (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni- much more to say in section VIII) — then we’ll naturally be interested in versity Press, 2003); and the papers collected in A. Haddock, A. Millar and whether S counts as truth-conducively reliable. But if our interest is only D. Pritchard (eds), Epistemic Value (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). I lack space to engage this literature here, since it mostly does not focus on in A’s testimonial belief, we needn’t ask if it was formed in a way that is testimonial belief, but I do engage it in “Trust and Epistemic Value,” in prepa- truth-conducively reliable: we might reasonably care only whether it ration, which addresses the intrapersonal question raised briefly in section III: how does closure-conducive reliability figure in the norms governing self- is true. The important point is that that attitude is not available on the trust relations at the core of judgment and belief? question of closure-conducive reliability. The dimension of knowledge 63. For a full explanation, see my “Trust and Epistemic Value.” that I’m theorizing with the term ‘closure-conducive’ is necessarily in

philosophers’ imprint – 25 – vol. 14, no. 17 (june 2014) edward s. hinchman Assurance and Warrant view whenever we have the causal nexus through which one may application earlier in this section: the nature of a reason is one thing, form a testimonial belief. What accounts for this interplay between how one became able to give that reason another. There I argued that causal and epistemic modality is simply that testimonial causation is a second-personal relation, mediated by trust, might explain how S causation through a second-personal relation wherein the speaker comes to be truth-conducively reliable in addressing A, where truth- undertakes a species of influence that depends constitutively on the conducive reliability is not itself second-personal. Here, I’m arguing addressee’s capacity for reasonable trust. that something that is not second-personal, consulting a third-party’s That argument articulates an aspect of the broad thesis for which I website, might explain how S comes to be reliable in a way that is am arguing in this paper: that testimonial beliefs have a distinctively nonetheless second-personal. However it is produced, closure- second-personal epistemic nature. But is closure-conducive conducive reliability involves a second-personal responsiveness, not reliability, which I’m arguing provides the key to understanding the mere possession of information or just any ability to ‘get it right.’ The epistemic nature of testimony, itself genuinely second-personal? In guru’s website may give S information that in turn enables A to count sections VII through IX, I’ll reply to a worry aimed at the assurance as closure-conducively reliable in addressing A. But what it is for S view of testimony in general: that testimonial warrant cannot have to be thus reliable makes essential reference to S’s relation to A — not a second-personal basis. In the meantime, I’ll treat the worry as only in the actual world but in nearby possible worlds. One might specific to my conception of the role played by closure-conducive object that what matters is S’s relation to the doxastic context that reliability within an assurance view. From the perspective of an A happens to be in, a relation that doesn’t itself essentially involve assurance view, the problem with appeals to truth-conducive A. But that context is defined by A’s actual epistemic needs, and S’s reliability is that a speaker’s reliability as an asserter of truth is not responsiveness to them must be counterfactually robust. We can second personal: when she tells A that p, S’s reliability in asserting characterize A’s needs abstractly, but S’s reliability consists in her the truth on the question whether p has nothing directly to do with responsiveness to those needs conceived as A’s — that is, as the needs her relation to A. But now what of S’s reliability in giving A a reason of this particular person to whom she addresses her assertion. that could serve to close A’s deliberation whether p? Perhaps there’s One might still object that even if S must be responsive to A’s a guru with a website who can determine what would be a sufficient context-sensitive epistemic needs, the species of reliability in question reason in this or that abstractly characterized doxastic context, is reliability in addressing the needs of anyone in a doxastic context including a context like A’s. Say S consults this website before telling relevantly similar to A’s. One might think that closure-conducive A that p, and the consultation is what makes S closure-conducively reliability must, like truth-conducive reliability, be implicitly general — a reliable in telling A that p. Imagine that the website somehow gives matter of getting a general kind of thing right. A truth-conducively S a responsiveness to A’s context-sensitive epistemic needs that is reliable speaker is reliable in getting the proposition right — that is, in counterfactually robust, in the way we’ve just discussed. Does that asserting that p only when p really is true. And a closure-conducively show that closure-conducive reliability is not second-personal? reliable speaker is reliable in getting her interlocutor’s doxastic It does not. Her interaction with the guru’s website may perhaps context right — that is, in assuring an arbitrary addressee that p only explain how S became closure-conducively reliable, but what her when that addressee really is entitled to close doxastic deliberation closure-conducive reliability is directly involves her relation to A. with the belief that p (or to treat the deliberative matter as closed The observation applies a point that I emphasized in a different in believing that p). Viewed from this angle, S’s reliability in getting

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her interlocutor’s context right is no more second-personal than her which I simply mean: as adequate to your actual epistemic needs. In reliability in asserting the truth. any given case, you might not have done so; you might have treated As in the dialectic with which I concluded the previous section, the disposition as manifesting a mistake or confusion about your a full reply to this objection would take us quickly into deep issues epistemic needs — or, in the most interesting cases, as manifesting a in epistemology and the philosophy of mind, since I would argue kind self-sabotage. This important dimension of your self-relations by drawing an analogy between testimonial reliance and a single reveals a striking parallel between interpersonal and intrapersonal subject’s self-reliance when the subject forms a judgment that p. In trust. In each dimension of trust, you rely on the trusted both truth- a fuller treatment, I would argue that your self-relations when you conducively and closure-conducively. The latter species of reliance is form a judgment crucially include a relation isomorphic to the relation second-personal, or directed in the way of a second-personal relation, in which you stand to a speaker when you depend on her status not even in the intrapersonal dimension. Whenever you rely on a source merely as truth-conducively but also as closure-conducively reliable.64 or ‘mechanism’ of belief formation closure-conducively, you treat it as When that relation is realized intrapersonally it becomes clear that adequately ‘caring’ for — that is, as taking care of — your actual context- it is not a relation between the subject and a source of information, sensitive epistemic needs.65 conceived as a guide to ‘getting it right.’ You do not rely on yourself These remarks raise large issues. But setting aside that larger inquiry, to have formed a correct view of the epistemic needs that happen to we can note that the presumption of closure-conducive reliability be yours. You rely on yourself to meet those needs, and to meet them figures at the core of testimonial trust. Whatever we say about the as your own. Of course, you do rely on yourself to get your needs deeper role of trust in judgment, your trust in a speaker who tells you right, and you rely on yourself to get ‘the world’ right when you form that p rests most fundamentally on your dependence on her as closure- a judgment, but the latter is a question of truth-conducive reliability: conducively reliable. We can see this clearly when we ask what drives you rely on your epistemic faculties to give you the truth. The question the distinction that any version of the assurance view will emphasize, of closure-conducive reliability here is a question of self-concern: is between believing the speaker and believing merely what she asserts. your disposition to treat the doxastic question whether p as settled by In each case, you depend on the speaker as truth-conducively reliable. your evidence a disposition that does justice to your epistemic needs? The distinction emerges insofar as in the former case, but not in the The question is not how you ‘feel’ about yourself but whether you are latter, you depend on the speaker as closure-conducively reliable. To actually meeting those needs. You typically do trust yourself in this depend on a speaker as closure-conducively reliable is to grant her way, relying on your status as closure-conducively reliable every time executive authority over your beliefs — to treat her assertion not as you form a belief. Such self-trust is required even in simple cases of mere input to your independent deliberation whether p but as on its perception. When you form a belief you treat the disposition that gives own settling whether p. When you merely believe what she asserts, content to the self-trust — the disposition to treat your present evidence you do not treat her speech act as settling whether p; but when as sufficing to settle some matter that you might have deliberated, or you believe the speaker, you do. To treat her speech act as settling deliberated further — as manifesting appropriate self-concern, by 65. One might try to distinguish trustworthiness in testimony from trustworthi- 64. For part of this argument, see my “Reflection, Disagreement, and Context,” ness in judgment as merely an application of the distinction between the oth- American Philosophical Quarterly 49:2 (2012). For another part, see my “Judging er-regarding and the self-regarding. In “Assertion, Sincerity, and Knowledge,” as Inviting Self-Trust.” I argue that the distinction is not so simple in this application.

philosophers’ imprint – 27 – vol. 14, no. 17 (june 2014) edward s. hinchman Assurance and Warrant whether p is to treat the speaker as not only truth-conducively reliable knowledge-inducing way? Why is the acquisition of specifically on the question whether p but also as closure-conducively reliable – testimonial warrant incompatible with the addressee’s stepping back given your epistemic needs on the question whether p. Unlike truth- and assessing matters evidentially? We can answer by more carefully conducive reliability, closure-conducive reliability goes right to the examining the norms governing the illocution of testimonial telling. core of the testimonial trust relation. When you trust a speaker who tells you that p, you make yourself vulnerable to being illocutionarily abused in various ways, both truth- V. How the norm governing testimonial assurance is revealed through conducively and closure-conducively. But you also, and partly thereby, illocutionary abuse elicit from the speaker sympathetic concern. (As we’ll see, the concern That completes the first task set at the beginning of the previous can manifest truth-conducive insincerity without ceasing to play this section. I’ve explained how warrant can be made available through role.) It is this sympathetic concern that motivates the speaker to testimony without attributing to the addressee a belief that the judge from your epistemic predicament, not only from her own. And speaker is worthy of his trust: this is possible when the trust involves it’s this motive that typically informs the act of assurance that she gives treating the speaker not merely as truth-conducively reliable but you, codified by her invitation to trust. If you refuse the invitation, you also as closure-conducively reliable. The next task is to explain what reject the concern — an abuse of the illocution on the addressee’s side. might be wrong with coming to believe what a speaker tells you As I emphasized in section III, these abuses do not show that no telling only because you have assessed her as worthy of your trust. An anti- was performed. Sympathetic concern is not required for performing reductionist who is not an assurance theorist might equally insist that this speech act. Rather, it — or (as we’ll see) its behavioral facsimile — is one can acquire testimonial warrant without positively assessing the required by the illocutionary norms that govern you, given that you are speaker as trustworthy, though anti-reductionism on its own would performing this speech act. Such concern, or its behavioral facsimile, not provide a basis for regarding such assessment as incompatible is required in order for the speech act to succeed in its illocutionary with acquiring the warrant. I’ve claimed that the addressee cannot aim: to provide for the addressee distinctively testimonial warrant. simply assess for evidence that the speaker is closure-conducively It is our shared understanding of the possibilities of abuse that reliable — compatibly, that is, with acquiring whatever specifically constitutes our shared grasp of the norms informing the speech testimonial warrant the speaker is offering. In support, I’ve gestured act of telling. Again, I mean ‘abuse’ in the Austinian sense: when at an argument that draws a parallel between interpersonal and speaker or addressee commits an abuse, in this sense, then while the intrapersonal trust. But, as we’ll now see, we can give a fuller illocutionary act does occur — there is no ‘misfire’ — it is not, as Austin explanation of the prohibition without appealing to the intrapersonal puts it, fully ‘consummated.’66 In my discussion of (T) in section III, I case. In sections III and IV, I gave a distinctively assurance-theoretic was talking about the intention A’s recognition of which constitutes S’s argument for anti-reductionism. I’ll now explain how this argument performance of the illocutionary act, whereas I’m now talking about goes beyond anti-reductionism in revealing a second-personal S’s intention that her illocutionary act be consummated — an intention species of illocutionary abuse. In sections VI and VII, I’ll explain how directed toward the speech act’s performance, not an intention that second-personal element is genuinely epistemic. constitutive of its performance. An unconsummated illocutionary What’s wrong with assessing for evidence that the speaker is reliable not only as a truth-gauge but also in this more directly 66. For these terms, see note 42.

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act is one that has not brought about the relation at which the act intentions, but does not take or assume responsibility in the way constitutively represents its agent as aiming. S’s act of telling A that p that the norms governing the illocution require, then she counts as constitutively represents S as aiming to institute a trust relation with violating or abusing those norms, norms that do nonetheless apply A. As I’ve emphasized, to achieve this relation S needn’t get A to believe to her.68 To live up to the responsibilities that she incurs when she her — that is, to believe that p on her say-so. We need to distinguish presents herself as having those intentions, she must acknowledge both (i) S’s intention to perform the illocutionary act of telling A that that she has incurred them — that is, she must recognize that she p and (ii) S’s intention that her illocutionary act be consummated has become thus responsible. But nothing like an acknowledgment, from (iii) S’s intention to perform the perlocutionary act of convincing recognition, or ‘assumption’ of responsibility figures in my explanation A that p — that is, of being believed by A. But in intending that her of how she incurs the responsibilities. illocutionary act be consummated, S does intend that A trust her by Second, I am not explaining the dynamic in terms of anything treating her speech act as having made available a warrant intended appropriately called ‘norms of trust.’69 Though my account does to be conclusive. A may not regard that warrant as conclusive because emphasize the norms informing a speech act that I metaphorically he is aware of countervailing considerations that S has overlooked frame as an invitation to trust, I do not posit any actual trust relation (assuming her sincere). But S’s speech act is unconsummated if A between speaker and addressee. These norms are therefore not ‘norms fails to regard the warrant as conclusive barring those countervailing of trust’. What I emphasize is the speaker’s invitation to trust — not any considerations. Otherwise put, the act is unconsummated if A fails to attitude of trust or any trust relation. As we’ve seen, and as I’ll now trust S, perhaps because he treats S’s presumption to offer warrant as explain more fully, the epistemic work that gives the addressee access defeated by evidence of untrustworthiness, or perhaps simply because to testimonial warrant is both logically and causally prior to any actual he ignores the claim that S’s assurance makes on his attention. And trust that the addressee may have in the speaker. As I observed in there are failures of trust between those extremes. It is, again, our section II and will now explain at length, the speaker’s illocutionary shared grasp of what’s at stake for both sides of this relationship that aim in performing a testimonial telling is to make warrant available informs our grasp of the norms that shapes the speech act. to her addressee. She may or may not have the further perlocutionary Before proceeding further let me offer two clarifications. First, I aim that he trust her. am not explaining the dynamic between speaker and addressee in Here is how the illocutionary-normative dynamic works in detail. terms of the speaker’s ‘assumption of responsibility’ for her speech As I suggested in section IV, the principal abuse from the speaker’s side act.67 Though my account does emphasize, by way of (T), the speaker’s is a failure to live up to her responsibility for her speech act — that is, a intention to make warrant available to the addressee, I do not explain failure appropriately to acknowledge the responsibilities that the act’s how either party falls under the illocutionary norm in question by implicit assurance creates.70 There are two such responsibilities, the positing any mental state of ‘assuming’ or ‘taking’ responsibility. As 68. I develop this as a problem for McMyler in my review (cited in note 7). I’ll explain, a speaker becomes responsible in various ways by virtue 69. Faulkner’s account emphasizes “norms of trust”; see his Knowledge on Trust, of presenting herself as having the intentions attributed by (T). If Chapter 7. she performs the speech act, by presenting herself as having those 70. I say ‘appropriately’ to mark the fact that the acknowledgment cannot be merely intellectual. S must be trying to fulfill the responsibility and her con- 67. Both Moran’s and McMyler’s versions of the assurance view (in the works cited duct must rise to at least a minimal standard of competence in fulfilling it. in note 6) place great emphasis on the speaker’s assumption of responsibility. There is, after all, always room for the thought that S is so incompetent at

philosophers’ imprint – 29 – vol. 14, no. 17 (june 2014) edward s. hinchman Assurance and Warrant first of which is straightforward. When S tells A that p, S must be willing may, like anyone, abuse the institution in other ways.) But I won’t try to cite reasons for A to believe that p should she be issued a legitimate to defend that view here, so I’ll provisionally assume that lying is as challenge. As we’ve seen, S needn’t believe that p herself.71 Nor, if she such an illocutionary abuse.74 What matters, for my purposes, is the does believe that p, need she cite specifically the reasons for which contrast between lying and a different species of illocutionary abuse she believes it. She must, however, be willing to do or say something to (assuming that lying is itself an abuse) constituted by the very different defend the warrantedness of believing that p in A’s doxastic context. If act of bullshitting. By ‘bullshit,’ I always mean the act of bullshitting. it emerges that S is unwilling to cite or at least point to reasons for A to (As a noun, ‘bullshit’ appears to have several distinct meanings.) How believe that p (should she be issued a legitimate challenge), then she exactly does bullshitting differ from lying? must withdraw her assertion that p. If the unwillingness figured in her With an important revision that I’ll state presently, we do well to attitude when she performed the act, then it was an Austinian abuse begin from Harry Frankfurt’s definition of bullshitting as involving 72 for her to have performed it. not merely be awkward to refrain from deception in some of these situations; It will take longer to characterize the second responsibility, though it would be positively disrespectful towards your interlocutor. In others, the element of disrespect is outweighed by requirements of kindness or coop- the discussion will, in the end, return us to familiar ground. I’ve argued eration. Lying seems absolutely crucial to our ability — in this world — to live that it is no abuse of the illocution if S tells A that p while failing herself up to basic moral norms of respect, kindness, and cooperation. It would be to believe that p because she regards the doxastic standard as higher very surprising if a norm built into a speech act crucial for fostering the in- stitutions in which such moral norms are realized conflicted, or so directly in her context than it is in A’s context. What then of lying? I’m not conflicted, with those norms. One could say that lying is by itself always pro sure that lying is as such an abuse of the illocution of telling. Lying tanto disrespectful, but that would give rise to paradox, since one would then have to say that doing this pro tanto disrespectful thing is, in many real-world can certainly be abusive. But then it’s abusive toward the person lied situations, the only way to manifest genuine respect. (Again, I lack space for to or of broader norms, not (as such) of the illocution by which he a full argument. For a fuller argument against specifically Kantian accounts of the wrongness of lying, see my “Conspiracy, Commitment, and the Self,” is lied to. We need that distinction, because we need to explain why Ethics 120:3 [April 2010].) 73 lying is sometimes not abusive at all. (I say ‘as such’ because a liar 74. But I’ll offer a diagnosis of one confusion that may inform the assumption. There’s a danger of confusion here about the concept of an Austinian abuse. fulfilling the responsibility that she counts as abusing the illocution (through Austin himself used the term to mark a failure by either interlocutor, and es- inattentiveness, or the like) despite intending not to do so. Just as the act pecially by the speaker, to live up to the norms inherent in the nature of the might ‘misfire’ (i. e. not be performed) through sheer incompetence, so might illocutionary act in play. We assume that the act has ‘come off’ — that is, has it ‘fire’ but through incompetence fall short of consummation. been performed without a ‘misfire’ — and now the question is what further 71. See again my remark in section I on apparent Moore-paradoxical implica- requirements this performance constitutively places on speaker and address- tions of this possibility, an issue I treat fully in “Assertion, Sincerity, and ee. One’s view of these requirements will of course reflect one’s view of the Knowledge.” nature of the speech act. Austin deemed lying an abuse of the illocution, but that may merely reflect a failure to make all the distinctions required to un- 72. A willingness to cite reasons furthermore tends to vindicate the presumption derstand how the illocution works. (See How to Do Things with Words, op. cit., of trustworthiness. (For elaboration, see “Telling as Inviting to Trust,” 586.) 40. Austin called this category of abuse “Insincerities,” but his editors note 73. As a matter of fact, everyone lies many times a day and thinks nothing of it. that, in other versions of the lectures, Austin called this category “Dissimula- “Are you hungry? Do you mind if we eat late, after I’ve finished this pressing tions” (18). On page 40, Austin claims that “one element in lying” is not be- task?” “Why no” — a lie. “Oh, I was just on my way to see you” — a lie. “You lieving what you assert. And he claims that this lack of belief brings lies into look great after all those weeks at the hospital” — a lie. And so on. These are the category of Insincerities. But my point from section I, which I’ll continue not like the case from section I in which Sharon tells Aaron that the winter to develop, is that not believing what you tell someone needn’t involve insin- will be mild without believing it but also without lying. Sharon was not try- cerity. Sincerity and insincerity are more complex than Austin was assuming. ing to deceive Aaron, but the speakers here are trying to deceive. It would I defend this claim at length in “Assertion, Sincerity, and Knowledge.”) philosophers’ imprint – 30 – vol. 14, no. 17 (june 2014) edward s. hinchman Assurance and Warrant

at its core a failure to care appropriately about the truth of what you We’re now ready for the revision. Though he’s right that there’s assert.75 Lying is not bullshitting, he argues, because the liar aims to an important difference between bullshitting and lying, Frankfurt is deceive her interlocutor and therefore does care appropriately about wrong about the nature of bullshit. Bullshit doesn’t, or at least needn’t, the truth. Lying requires that you attempt to know what’s true as the manifest a failure to care about the truth. Bullshit instead manifests fulcrum of your effort to prevent your interlocutor from believing a failure to care appropriately about the context-sensitive epistemic it. We may elaborate Frankfurt’s point by noting that the liar is in needs of your interlocutor. You can fail to care appropriately about the business of guiding her interlocutor’s thought with reference the context-sensitive epistemic needs of your interlocutor while being to the truth — away from it — and therefore must acknowledge her very much — even overridingly — concerned with the truth, as the responsibility to cite truth-conducive reasons if challenged. Again, the following example illustrates. Say Sieglinde tells Aidan that his wife is reasons she’ll cite will be in the service of her lie and will be intended having an affair, and Aidan replies ‘Don’t bullshit me!’ What is Aidan to pull her interlocutor away from the truth as she sees it. But the fact likely to have in mind? He may not in the least suspect Sieglinde of that her lie thus infects her entire effort to shoulder the responsibility lying, and the charge in any case falls far short of lying. ‘Don’t bullshit shows that she does acknowledge it. Insofar as she acknowledges the me!’ lacks the key implication of ‘Don’t lie to me!’ — namely that responsibility, however duplicitously, she in a way satisfies the norms the speaker is, or at least may well be, in the business of outright inherent in the illocutionary nature of her speech act. The bullshitter, deception. Thus far, Frankfurt’s analysis is correct. His analysis goes by contrast, does not as such acknowledge this responsibility. Her wrong only when it implies that Aidan must be thinking of Sieglinde abuse of the illocution is therefore more direct and thoroughgoing. as unconcerned, or as not concerned in the right way, with the truth. It is in this respect that we can regard bullshitting as worse than Aidan needn’t be thinking of Sieglinde in those terms at all. He may be lying. Lying can be more insidious and may often do more damage, but perfectly aware that she believes that his wife is having an affair. He bullshitting is a more fundamental violation of the norm built into the may conceptualize her intervention as an attempt to get him to open act performed. The bullshitter as such sees no point in citing reasons his eyes to the truth in what she says. He may think of her, in sum, as why her interlocutor should believe what she tells him, since she does acting from a passionate devotion to the truth. But he’s still worried not take seriously the fact that she thereby gives him an assurance. about what she’s up to, and ‘Don’t bullshit me!’ perfectly expresses this She does not, in general, treat the relation that she thereby invites her worry. What worries him, as we might naturally construe the case, is interlocutor to institute with her as imposing any obligations on her that Sieglinde believes that his wife is having an affair on the basis of at all. The liar manipulates through the mutual acknowledgment of evidence that would not count as conclusive in his doxastic context – a those obligations combined with a duplicitous strategy for discharging context very different from her own. Elaborating the worry, perhaps them. The bullshitter manipulates, by contrast, through a duplicitous he regards her as unempathetic or unimaginative about others’ lives. strategy for, at best, merely appearing to acknowledge the obligations Or perhaps he fears that a false intimacy motivates her to make him and no thought whatsoever toward discharging them – since she isn’t feel that they operate in a single doxastic context. ‘Don’t bullshit me!’ party to the acknowledgment. here means ‘Don’t disregard my epistemic needs!’ He might have put his claim of need in terms of respect: ‘Given that you’re addressing me, 75. Harry Frankfurt, “On Bullshit,” in his The Importance of What We Care About (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). Again, as we’ll see presently, treat me with the respect appropriate to this illocution!’ The example I don’t think this definition is correct. makes clear that, in the illocutionary dimension that defines the act, a

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teller respects her addressee by aiming to be appropriately responsive faith. There is no reason to assume that a speaker is herself the best to his epistemic needs. To put the difference in terms that will be useful judge of whether she is bullshitting her interlocutor. A speaker may later, failure to care about the truth is a monadic wrong, but failure to well feel that she is telling him that p in good faith, with due regard care about your addressee’s epistemic needs, or at least to act as if you to the illocutionary norm that we’re discussing, while nonetheless cared, is fully bipolar.76 If you address A in the way characteristic of failing to live up to it. It doesn’t seem at all odd to say that a speaker testimony without being thus appropriately responsive to A’s context- bullshits without realizing it. Childish speech acts force a related sensitive epistemic needs, you aren’t merely in the wrong, you’re complication. When a five-year-old tells someone that p in utter wronging A. disregard to his epistemic needs, as self-centered children so often do, When I say that you have to ‘care’ about your addressee’s epistemic is she bullshitting her addressee, or merely revealing that she doesn’t needs I don’t, of course, mean that you have to feel in any particular yet grasp the illocution? To say that a speaker bullshits presupposes way about him. You don’t have to care one way or another about your that she does grasp the norm that she violates.77 addressee — I mean, in a purely psychological sense — to count as It is important for another reason to emphasize that the speaker’s caring about or for (or taking care of) his epistemic needs, whether illocutionary obligation to care about or for her addressee’s epistemic context-insensitive or context-sensitive. (In section VIII I’ll argue that needs is not psychological but dispositional-behavioral: only thereby you have to accord your addressee a kind of recognition-respect. But can we understand the strategy of the liar. We can thereby see how that isn’t a matter of how you feel about him.) By ‘care,’ I mean the an effective liar is typically responsive to the core testimonial norm, species of illocutionarily appropriate responsiveness — not a feeling since the deception requires that the liar be responsive, and that she but a dispositional state — toward your interlocutor’s epistemic needs acknowledge that she ought to be responsive, to her interlocutor’s that we’re investigating at length here. epistemic needs — both context-sensitive and -insensitive. The liar But this observation forces a further complexity. Consider doesn’t care about his epistemic needs as such, of course, but she is Sophie’s predicament: she tells Anwar that p but without being in committed to acting as if she cared about them. It’s in these dispositions position — perhaps through ignorance, perhaps through a failure of to act or behave that a liar is appropriately responsive to those needs. imagination — to understand Anwar’s epistemic needs in this context. An effective liar shapes her intervention in responsiveness not only to So she is not in position to care for his needs (or to take care of them). the truth but to A’s doxastic context — aiming to appear trustworthy Does she violate the illocutionary norm? It is quite odd to say that from his perspective, and when challenged citing reasons fashioned Sophie is bullshitting Anwar when she would be responsive to his to seem plausible and relevant to him. We thereby get a deeper epistemic needs if only she could understand them. Perhaps the explanation of the distinction between lying and bullshitting. The answer will depend on how culpable Sophie is for her ignorance or liar typically acknowledges her illocutionary responsibility and then lack of imagination. In some cases, we’ll want to say that she does care exploits the trust fostered by that acknowledgment. The bullshitter, about Anwar’s epistemic needs, though she can’t care for them (or take by contrast, doesn’t acknowledge the responsibility. Lying can be care of them). But when she is culpable for the deficit, we may look with suspicion on her presumption that she is engaging him in good 77. Thanks to Miranda Fricker for pressing me to offer the clarifications in this paragraph. These distinctions are murky in practice, but I think that’s only 76. For this terminology, see Michael Thompson, “What is it to Wrong Someone? because it is often difficult to tell how they apply. The distinctions themselves A Puzzle About Justice” (op. cit.). are clear enough.

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more insidious than bullshitting because, while bullshitting prevents truth-conducively reliable — the assurance that you give in testimony, illocutionary consummation, lying exploits that consummation. which would provide the basis of this reason, is an assurance not that Let me elaborate. Note again that lying is not simply telling your there is this reason — you aren’t asserting that — but rather of your interlocutor something that you fail to believe. As we saw in the having anticipated and engaged this interlocutor’s context-sensitive final example of section I, failing to believe what you tell may mark a epistemic needs. Even if such deception is always wrong, the relation recognition that your interlocutor’s doxastic context differs from your that you invite when you tell is compatible with an effort to deceive the own. If that’s why you fail to believe what you tell, you obviously are invitee. Again, I’m not claiming that a liar will never count as failing not lying; and it seems a mistake to regard you as insincere in any to satisfy her addressee’s epistemic needs. I’m claiming that when we other respect.78 Here, you satisfy the terms of a sincere telling laid distinguish the truth-conducive from the closure-conducive elements down by (T): you intend to give your interlocutor a reason to believe in testimonial reason-giving, we’ll see that the abuse distinctive of what you tell him simply through his recognition that that’s what you lying is truth-conducive, not closure-conducive. One good way to see intend. Both the liar and the bullshitter, by contrast, are insincere: this is to see that the truth-conducive abuse characteristic of lying each intends only to represent himself as having that intention. But is compatible with the institution of an illocutionary trust relation, not every insincerity abuses the illocution in the same way. (As I’ve wherein A trusts S and S manifests a disposition to vindicate that trust. suggested, lying may not abuse the illocution at all. But, again, I’m Again, an effective liar will be very concerned that A’s trust in her taking for granted that it does.79) should appear to A to be well founded. Insofar as a lie is wrong, that would be because a liar misrepresents We can see this even more clearly by observing how a bullshit- her intention to offer a reason, not because she fails to be based testimonial relation by contrast fails to institute the trust relation appropriately responsive to her interlocutor’s epistemic needs. Even that the speaker invites. In telling A that p, the bullshitter manifests an if it is always wrong to represent yourself as offering a reason when intention to be responsive to A’s epistemic needs that she simply lacks. you don’t believe there is one — because you don’t believe yourself It isn’t that the responsiveness takes a deceptive form. Rather, she is merely unresponsive — at least, in the testimonial dimension that we’re 78. Again, I defend this claim, and pursue more fully the questions that it raises about the nature of sincerity, in “Assertion, Sincerity, and Knowledge.” investigating.80 The trust relation, should it ensue, is therefore directly 79. Here, parenthetically, is one further reason to think that lying does not as such compromised. The initiating party to it has no disposition to live up to abuse the illocution. A successful lie typically institutes the testimonial trust the obligations that she assumes when she invites the trust. It follows relation that it invites, with each party pulling her or his illocutionary weight by living up to cognate responsibilities. These responsibilities derive from that the testimonial trust relation that you invite when you tell A that our conception of what it takes to establish and maintain an instance of that p is not most fundamentally a matter of speaking the truth. Bullshit kind of illocutionary relation, and it seems consistent with the establishment abuses the illocution even when it aims at truth. A benevolently truth- and maintenance of such a relation that the party that invited it was lying. Just as you can wrong someone illocutionarily without wronging the person speaking bullshitter abuses the illocution of telling at its core, whereas in any other respect, so you can wrong someone in some non-illocutionary a malicious liar may perhaps abuse the illocution only at its periphery respect — say, morally — by performing an illocutionary act without wronging the person illocutionarily. Again, a lie-based testimonial relation is often a (and may not abuse it at all, if I’m right in my aforementioned hunch very bad thing. But it is not a bad thing as such. Such a relation is sometimes, by the same non-illocutionary standard, a good thing — or so we tend to as- sume. Deception is sometimes, we assume, not only morally permissible but 80. She may of course feel good or bad about the fact that A has these epistemic morally required. (For a bit more on the morality of lying, see note 73.) needs, or resonate with them in some other non-testimonial way.

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that lying, though usually considered abuse in other respects, is not an illocutionary abuse by reflecting again on the contrast between [as such] an illocutionary abuse). lying and bullshitting. Just as a liar manipulates the trust relation that Let me also note explicitly what I hope is obvious: that abusing an her telling invites from within that trust — by abusing the trust in a illocution may be good fun for all involved with no one significantly way that at the same time crucially relies on it — so her addressee may harmed. Consenting adults may flout any set of norms toward wonder whether she is lying without thereby ceasing to play his part constructive ends, and someone who did not understand how to in sustaining the relation. Of course, if he positively ceases to trust, bullshit would also not understand how to be closure-conducively then he abuses the illocution of telling from his side. If the speaker reliable. A propensity to bullshit about trivial subjects may mark a has abused the illocution by lying, that is exactly what he should do: healthy appreciation of how much is at stake when the conversation meet her abuse with an abuse of his own. But he can wonder whether turns more serious. When a speaker invites you into a trust relation, it to abandon trust without actually doing so — thereby remaining inside does not follow that you should take the invitation seriously. the trust relation — because a liar’s strategy depends on a parallel One might object that the bullshitter is not, qua bullshitter, in the distinction. S would, if lying, aim to exercise closure-conducive game of telling. But (T) explains how bullshitting is not only compatible reliability without truth-conducive reliability. In parallel fashion, A with but requires telling. In the full version of (T) — relegated to a would, if wondering whether to trust from within the trust relation, footnote appended to the formulation given in section III — S tells question S’s truth-conducive reliability without questioning S’s closure- A that p by intending to represent herself as intending to give A an conducive reliability. Because lying engages both aspects of testimonial entitlement to believe that p simply through his recognition that that’s trust — the truth-conducive and the closure-conducive — we need to what she intends.81 And the bullshitter does intend to represent herself take this complex view of the testimonial trust relation that it at once thus. She intends to represent herself as instituting a trust relation both invites and exploits. that, by her failure to acknowledge her illocutionary obligations, By contrast, we do not need to take such a complex view of how she doesn’t actually intend to institute. That suffices for telling: to bullshitting bears on testimonial trust relations. Since bullshitting is count as telling A that p, S need merely intend to represent herself a failure of closure-conducive reliability, it does not (as such) raise to A as acknowledging those obligations. So the bullshitter does any question of truth-conducive reliability at all. As we’ve seen, a perform an act of telling. Her failure isn’t a failure to tell, but a failure speaker can be overridingly concerned with the truth of her beliefs, to consummate the telling by pulling her weight — or even by trying and perfectly competent to assess them for truth, while nonetheless to pull her weight — in the relationship that she represents herself as counting as bullshitting her addressee. Insofar as she is closure- intending to institute. conducively unreliable, this assessment of her truth-conducive We’re now in position to answer the question with which I opened reliability is simply irrelevant to any assessment of her as living up this section. What’s wrong with assessing for evidence that the to her illocutionary obligations. If she is not even trying to do justice speaker is closure-conducively reliable? We can see what makes this to her addressee’s context-sensitive epistemic needs, what difference could it make to him that she is truth-conducively reliable? It could, 81. Again, this formulation glosses over some complexities that I’ve already dis- of course, make this difference: he could refuse the trust-relation into cussed. As I said, I’ll sometimes shorten the ‘gain access’ and ‘make available’ in (T) and my explanation of (T) to ‘get’ and ‘give,’ And I’ll sometimes omit the which she appears to be inviting him, and believe what she says on qualification that S intends the entitlement to be prima facie and conclusive. the basis of an assessment of her as truth-conducively reliable. That

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is, he could treat her as a truth-gauge. But anyone, even the farthest needs actually are would have to be entirely within S’s treatment of removed overhearer, can treat a speaker as a truth-gauge. The question A — not a distinction between how S represents her telling and how before us is not simply whether he can form a warranted belief on the she treats A in attempting to make that representation effective . basis of her assurance. Both closure-conducive and truth-conducive We can see this vividly with an example. Imagine a new case unreliability are incompatible with the addressee’s having sufficient with Sarah and Adam: his plan to move north raises his doxastic assurance-based testimonial warrant — incompatible, let’s say for standard, and she, knowing this, tells him flat-out that the winter short, with a testimonial entitlement to believe. The question is how will be mild. Now distinguish two variants: (a) Sarah is simply they are incompatible with this entitlement, and the observation that unresponsive to Adam’s epistemic needs, and (b) Sarah is responsive we’re developing in reply is that closure-conducive unreliability is to his epistemic needs, but she believes it serves some purpose to incompatible with such entitlement in a special way. Truth-conducive mislead Adam about them, addressing him as if his needs were other unreliability (as in lying) works through the testimonial trust relation, than she knows them to be. The distinction between (a) and (b) whereas closure-conducive unreliability (as in bullshitting) works may make an important difference to our moral or otherwise extra- against that trust relation. illocutionary assessment of Sarah’s treatment of Adam, but the cases One might object that A can wonder about S’s closure-conducive appear to manifest violations of a single illocutionary norm. We can reliability from within the trust relation, in the same way that, as distinguish lying from bullshitting because we can imagine the liar we’ve observed, he can wonder about S’s truth-conducive reliability sustaining an illocutionary trust relation at least insofar as she is without thereby ceasing to trust S. Is there room for A to think a genuinely responsive to her addressee’s context-sensitive need for thought with this content: ‘Perhaps S is exploiting my trust — that is, an entitlement tailored to his doxastic predicament; the liar thereby my disposition to let myself be directly influenced by her concern for acknowledges a core part of the responsibility she undertakes in my context-sensitive epistemic needs — to mislead me about those performing the speech act. There is no analogous acknowledgment needs’? The thought appears to manifest a confusion. In the sort of of responsibility — no illocutionarily appropriate responsiveness to case under discussion, S cannot be lying about A’s epistemic needs Adam’s epistemic needs — in the ‘attempt to mislead’ in variant (b). simply because S is not talking about those needs at all. S is manifesting We’ve seen how a liar can be truth-conducively unreliable while being concern for A’s epistemic needs in how she talks about whatever she is closure-conducively reliable. That amounts to being unresponsive to talking about, but she is not talking about her concern. So there is no your addressee’s context-insensitive need to believe the truth while conceptual space for an analogue of lying, as opposed to bullshitting, being responsive to his context-sensitive need for an entitlement in this further dimension; there is no distinction in this dimension to believe. The only way to be closure-conducively reliable — that between S’s relation to the truth of what she tells A and S’s relation is, appropriately responsive to your addressee’s epistemic need for to A.82 If S is somehow misleading A about his epistemic needs, the an entitlement to believe — is to manifest competence in an effort to distinction between how S represents those needs and what those meet that need. Sarah equally fails to do this in both variants. The 82. Of course, S could tell A things about his doxastic context when she tells him fiduciary dynamic that informs our understanding of lying cannot that p, but that would generate a different case with a potentially different sustain any parallel understanding of bullshitting. doxastic context. In any case we might consider, what I’m calling A’s doxastic context shapes A’s entitlement to close doxastic deliberation. If S tries to tell this as her telling him that q, where his doxastic context when she tells him A things about his doxastic context when she tells him that p, we can codify that q needn’t be identical to his doxastic context when she tells him that p.

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The contrast provides a basis for my claim at the beginning of this the assurance that she gives him when she tells him that p embodies section: what’s most fundamentally at stake when S tells A that p is a an interpretation of his epistemic needs that could replace his own. species of sympathetic concern and therefore a care relation. Before Like any provision of care, the act manifests a substantial presumption. returning to epistemic matters in the next section, let me drive that The presumption explains the act’s correlative risks. I’ve been point home with another example, a minor variant on one I used earlier. taking an Austinian approach to the epistemology of testimony, both Say Sigrun tells Alan that his wife is having an affair. Like Siegfried by starting from the observation that telling, like promising, gives in my earlier example, Sigrun regards her interlocutor as possessing an assurance and by exploring the illocutionary nature of telling by all available evidence and weighing it properly. Alan’s mistake, like inquiring into the risks interlocutors run of ‘infelicity.’84 We can begin Ann’s, lies in an excess of doxastic caution. But there’s one difference to grasp the role of care in the invited relation by seeing how the between Alan and Ann: unlike Ann, Alan is not merely confused about speaker’s presumption to care provides a context for the risks that what’s at stake in a doxastic context shaped by evidence of marital I’ve been emphasizing. The act of telling invites trust, I’ve argued, infidelity. His mistake, by Sigrun’s lights, is motivated: having been by representing its agent as presuming to act from concern for duped by romantic partners in the past, he is disposed to treat the the addressee’s epistemic needs. The presumption brings risks of doxastic standard as high enough to allow him not to conclude that rejection to the speaker, but it invites risks of greater harms to the it’s happening again. Insofar as he’s confused about the standard, his addressee. It is obvious how taking a speaker’s word runs the risk that motives are complicit in the confusion. And these motives now set the belief you form will prove false, with all the consequent further Sigrun’s task. She must get him to feel the force of his own epistemic risks of false belief. What’s less obvious is what I’m claiming lies at needs above the obfuscating noise of his motives. Alan’s epistemic the core of the assurance view of testimony: the risk you run that a needs are such that what he most needs is such an intervention. He trusted testifier has either misinterpreted or is flatly unresponsive to needs her to interpret for him his own context of epistemic needs. He how your doxastic context informs your need to believe on the basis cannot, in sum, draw a doxastically defensible conclusion without of her assurance. That result could prove worse than false belief. The her — or without someone like her in this respect. It’s clear, I think, norms built into the illocution of telling have as their function to make that an interpretation of his needs in this context must amount to a these risks manageable by codifying how questions of testimonial provision of care.83 trustworthiness may be conceived as such and adjudicated. But no This merely makes vivid a crucial aspect of all such interventions. such norms can make telling safe. Even if testimony gave us none Though Siegfried does not regard Ann’s confusion as similarly but true beliefs, we could not receive it without running the risk that motivated, his assurance does amount to an interpretation of her such reliance manifests a mistake about when or how we should context-sensitive epistemic needs that he intends to supplant her own form them.85 interpretation. Even when the speaker does not regard her interlocutor 84. For the first strand, see Austin’s “Other Minds,” in his Philosophical Papers, as making any mistake, merely regarding him as needing ‘information,’ third edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979); for the second, see Austin’s How to Do Things with Words, op. cit. 83. This provision of care is required, as I claimed earlier, by a norm of respect. 85. Looking ahead, one explanation why that’s so, which I’ll elaborate on in sec- Alan has lost an aspect of his self-respect, though he can regain it by relying tion VII. When S tells A that p, she typically empowers A to tell others that on Sigrun’s greater respect for the context-sensitive integrity of his doxastic p. That is, A presumes that S has an eye not only on his epistemic needs deliberation. I’ll emphasize this aspect of such cases in section VIII. but on those of his likely interlocutors. S may, of course, try to address

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VI. How this illocutionary norm is epistemic knowledge-conducive reliability — what I’m calling closure-conducive I’ve now given the core of my account. Let me set up the next stage reliability — that I treated in section IV. How do these two aspects of my of my argument by offering two observations about how accounts account fit together? How does my account of the illocutionary norm along the lines that I’m pursuing tend to be received. In my experience, amount to a deeper investigation into closure-conducive reliability? In the most common reaction among epistemologists to any version of section V I did not emphasize the strictly epistemic dimension of this the assurance view has two steps: (a) concede that the interpersonal norm. How could a norm that functions conversationally to prohibit dynamic on which the assurance view focuses deserves philosophical bullshit at the same time function to make available a species of attention; (b) deny that it has anything ‘strictly’ to do with epistemology. epistemic warrant? And the most common reaction among ethicists is to note, as if it I presented the argument in section V as if my ultimate aim were were obvious, that a testifier’s primary obligation is to the truth, not to show that bullshit, and the illocutionary norm that prohibits to her addressee. Epistemologists thus pat us assurance theorists on bullshit, have a hitherto untheorized epistemic orientation: that the head for being good ‘ethicists,’ while ethicists rap our knuckles bullshit violates a norm not merely of truth but of knowledge. In this for misappropriating ‘ethical’ terms like ‘justice’ for epistemology. I’ll section, I’ll flip that argument on its head, arguing that the question engage the ethicists’ charge of misappropriation in sections VIII and of knowledge at issue asks whether the speaker is reliable in meeting IX. In this section and the next, I’ll confront head-on the charge that this norm. If bullshit is partly epistemic, it stands to reason that a my account of the bipolar norm that informs the illocution of telling part of epistemology will address the prevention of bullshit. The way cannot figure at the core of an account of epistemic warrant. in which epistemology does this, as I’ll now argue, is by revealing My version of the assurance view rests on my claim that the how bullshit manifests a species of testimonial unreliability that treatment of this illocution that I gave in section V forms a crucial directly undermines the bullshitter’s presumption to be providing her part of an account of epistemic warrant, despite its apparently ‘ethical’ addressee with testimonial warrant. I take for granted my argument countenance. The key to seeing that the claim is true lies in seeing in section IV for the epistemic nature of closure-conducive reliability. how my account of this illocution is also an account of the species of The question is now what closure-conducive reliability, so conceived, has to do with the illocutionary norm articulated and defended in this presumption by telling A not to tell X, Y, or Z — or for that matter any- one — what she tells him. But she nonetheless manifests the presumption section V. that she understands an aspect of those relations. Even if it’s intelligible that We can pose the objection that I’ll engage by picturing a testimonial testimony might give us none but true beliefs — and I doubt it is (would that really be a speech act?) — we have epistemic needs that go considerably be- scenario that includes both an addressee and an unaddressed yond our need to believe the truth or even to manage resource issues. While overhearer. Imagine S tells A that p within earshot of B, who can S is not responsible for every aspect of the trust relations that her assurance see perfectly well that S is both truth-conducively and closure- might help institute in A’s life, she is not entirely free from responsibility for them. If she incorrectly assesses his epistemic needs in a way that leads him conducively reliable in telling A that p. Still, S has not addressed B, so to incorrectly assess those of others, she must accept some blame for his in- S has not given B any sort of assurance that p. We can easily imagine correct assessments. Austin famously claimed that via testimony “I may be responsible for getting you into trouble” (“Other Minds,” op. cit., 100), but he that B reasonably comes to believe that p through appreciating the should have written, “I may be responsible for getting not only you but those warrant-generating force of S’s speech act. Even if I’m right about whom you get into trouble into trouble, and for getting into trouble those whom those whom you get into trouble get into trouble, and so forth.” The truth is less the epistemic importance of closure-conducive reliability, that thesis pithy but more interesting than Austin’s maxim. doesn’t on its own vindicate an assurance view of testimonial warrant,

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and it especially doesn’t show that bullshit-prohibiting illocutionary This distinction in cases strikes me as compelling, but I concede norms have anything to do with warrant. In the imagined setting, B that these observations do not come close to settling the matter. gets everything that A gets from S apart from the assurance. And Intuitions about cases will differ, and even when they agree they may in getting all this, goes the objection, B gets everything he needs leave us wondering why. What I’ll now offer as an argument does not in order to acquire a distinctively testimonial warrant. In sum, if depend on intuitions about when it makes sense to say that B ‘takes S testimonial warrant is a matter of the speaker’s reliability, then – if a at her word’ but on how it makes sense. I’ll argue that it does not make speaker makes it available to her addressee – she thereby makes it sense to regard B as believing S in the second case above, as opposed available to everyone within earshot of her speech act. The niceties to believing merely what she asserts (or believing her honest, etc.), of her illocutionary relation with her addressee are simply not to the because B cannot simply trust S to be closure-conducively reliable. epistemological point. Again, I regard trusting X to be F as merely relying on X to be F. There is The objection presumes that S is closure-conducively reliable. nothing to prevent B from merely relying on S to be truth-conducively But the question is: for whom? S has addressed A, not B. Yet we’re reliable. But B cannot merely rely on S to be closure-conducively to imagine that B is the one who believes her. (A’s response to her reliable87 — not, at least, if we might hope to assess the reliance as speech act is irrelevant to this thought experiment.) Does it make reasonable. When we spell out the latter species of reliance — closure- sense to say that B believes her, as opposed to what she asserts? We conducive as opposed to truth-conducive — we see the problem with can of course imagine cases in which S does not realize that she is the idea that B might be reasonable in thus relying on S: S is not in addressing B as a part of a crowd to which she is not directing her any way in the business of being responsive to B’s context-sensitive attention. Say S is having a hard time convincing the crowd of what epistemic needs. So if B were to rely on S to be closure-conducively she’s trying to tell them, when B surprises her by shouting, as if from reliable, he would be relying on S to be or do something that she is not offstage, ‘Well, I believe her!’ No problem understanding what’s in any way aiming, or presenting herself as aiming, to be or do. That going on there, but that’s because S was addressing B after all. What is what doesn’t make sense in the idea that B might reasonably ‘take of a case in which S is specifically not addressing B, say because she S at her word’ even when S is not addressing B. This is unintelligible is addressing only A: she whispers to A that she means her telling because it is unintelligible how B might be reasonable in simply ‘only for your ears.’ Then A whispers back disbelievingly. And now B, relying on S to be or do something that she is not in any way aiming, cup to wall, overhearing the exchange, calls out from the next room, or presenting herself as aiming, to be or do. ‘Well, I believe her!’ That does seem problematic. It seems that S can Note that I’ve said that B cannot be reasonable in simply or merely plausibly reply, ‘You can’t believe me, as you put it, since my words relying on S in this respect. Equivalently put, he cannot reasonably rely weren’t meant for your ears!’ It seems that B’s expostulation must, to on her in the way of trust — without also relying on his own deliberative avoid confusion, mean merely that he believes her honest, or that he assessment of her status as reliable. B can, of course, reasonably rely on regards her as reliable, or the like — not that he takes her at her word. S to be closure-conducive reliable relative to his doxastic context if he She hasn’t, after all, given him her word.86 87. Again, the awkwardly redundant expression, ‘rely on S to be reliable’ is short- hand for ‘rely on S to tell the truth’ or ‘rely on S to be appropriately responsive 86. Cf. my remarks on the constitutive lack of clarity of the addressee/overhearer to his epistemic needs’, depending on whether I’m referring to the truth-con- distinction in section II. ducive or to the closure-conducive instance.

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also judges that his doxastic context resembles A’s in relevant respects. How does this point connect with my arguments in sections IV and But that withholds trust in the same way as believing someone only V? Other proponents of the assurance view claim that the normative because you’ve assessed her as truth-conducively reliable. As we’ve relation between speaker and addressee can, on its own, ground the seen, it’s not only possible but common. But, as I’ve now argued at testimonial warrant. As I explained in section IV, I reject that claim length, that is incompatible with taking the person at her word. As and insist that only an epistemic species of reliability can figure in the I acknowledged in section III, it can be difficult to tell when you’re ground of epistemic warrant — though, as I’ve argued, the closure- trusting someone and when you’re merely believing what she says conducive dimension of that reliability is available to be relied on only because you believe her to be relevantly reliable. In some cases, we within a trust relation. My positive claim is that a speaker who lives up seem to do some of both — trusting a bit but also ‘reserving judgment’ to the illocutionary norm that defines the illocutionary nature of the because we’re also a bit mistrustful. Again, I don’t want to traffic in speech act thereby manifests a key part of what grounds testimonial the fiction that we are always, or even often, wholehearted when we warrant, since she thereby manifests closure-conducive reliability. trust. My point is merely that even this dynamic of ambivalent trust is So the normative relation between speaker and addressee does possible only for a hearer whom the speaker has actually addressed. If figure in the ground of testimonial warrant, but only insofar as it is a the speaker has not addressed you, you can reasonably believe what manifestation of closure-conducive reliability. The bullshit-prohibiting she has asserted but you cannot reasonably believe her. Critics of the illocutionary norm that I characterized in section V gives normative assurance view often complain that they cannot see the epistemic content to the mode of address that in turn provides a key part of what significance of the distinction between addressee and overhearer on you rely on when you take a speaker at her word. which the assurance view places so much emphasis. On my version One might nonetheless worry that living up to the norm of the assurance view, the epistemic significance lies here: only characterized in section V is not strictly required for closure-conducive an addressee, and not any overhearer, can be reasonable in simply reliability. Could not an addressee ignore that illocutionary dynamic relying — that is, in relying simply or solely — on the speaker’s closure- and rely on the speaker’s status as closure-conducively reliable directly? conducive reliability. As we’ve seen, S’s closure-conducive reliability Either the speaker is closure-conducively reliable or she is not. If she is her caring disposition to do justice to her addressee’s epistemic is, why should it matter to the epistemic value of her speech act that needs by telling him that p when but only when he has, in his context, she live up to the illocutionary norm? Here we reach a key point of sufficient epistemic warrant to believe that p. But in the case we’re disagreement between my version of the assurance view and versions imagining, B is manifestly not S’s addressee. Simply relying on S to of reliabilism that are, in some respects, friendly to the assurance view be closure-conducively reliable is therefore not something that B can without embracing it.89 Could not a process of belief-formation that reasonably do. B cannot simply rely on S to be closure-conducively included testimonial relations count as a reliable process, such that reliable without thereby manifesting confusion or ignorance about where he stands in his testimonial relation — since he’s an overhearer, 89. See Sanford Goldberg, “Norms of Trust, De Re Trust, and the Epistemology of Testimony,” in C. Jäger and W. Löffler (eds), Epistemology: Contexts, Values, 88 not a testimonial trust relation with S. Disagreement, (Frankfurt: Ontos-Verlag, 2012), pp. 229–56, for an approach to testimonial warrant that is sympathetic to the emphases of the assurance 88. I thereby reply to one of the core objections to the assurance view pressed view while remaining firmly reliabilist. (That paper builds on the reliabilist in works cited in note 11. (Thanks to Elizabeth Fricker and David Owens for view of testimony elaborated in Goldberg’s Relying on Others [Oxford: Oxford pressing me to make this reply clearer.) University Press, 2010].)

philosophers’ imprint – 39 – vol. 14, no. 17 (june 2014) edward s. hinchman Assurance and Warrant when a hearer relied on the speaker in such a way as to realize that on which — whether intrapersonally or interpersonally — your belief process his belief would thereby acquire epistemic warrant? One counts as the upshot (or not) of reasonable trust. This emphasis on might assume that that is a way of formulating the view I’m defending the reasonability of trust, rather than on the reliability of the process here, as long as the process in question counted as not merely truth- of belief formation, vindicates the status of belief formation as a norm- conducively but also closure-conducively reliable. Does not my governed process for which the believer is appropriately responsible. If account of testimonial warrant coincide with a version of reliabilism closure-conducive unreliability leads you to form a belief for which your that includes closure-conducive alongside truth-conducive reliability? evidence does not in context suffice, that is not something that simply For two interrelated reasons, my account is not a version of happens to you — “Oops!” — but manifests a deficit or misapplication reliabilism. First, as I explained in section IV, my account locates the of self-concern for which you are blameworthy — especially from your reliability (or unreliability) in the testifier, not in the process whereby own point of view, but also from the point of view of others who might the addressee forms a testimonial belief. If I conceived of the testifier’s have a stake in assessing this aspect of your epistemic character. reliability as merely the ‘worldly’ component of a reliable belief- The second respect in which my account is not a form of reliabilism forming process, the testimonial trust relation would itself figure as derives directly from this emphasis on norm-governed responsibility. a component in that process, and we’d be mired in the mystery that A typical reliabilist view of epistemic warrant is epistemologically a belief-forming process can somehow be assessed as reliable in two externalist: the point of appealing to the reliability of the process normative dimensions, the truth-conducive and the closure-conducive. whereby the belief was formed is to vindicate the possibility of In defining the process as one of belief-formation — that is, as one of warranted belief that bypasses what the subject could justify or closing doxastic deliberation, or of keeping it closed — we’d apparently otherwise take responsibility for. The average subject doesn’t know leave no room for the idea of any norm-governed error beyond the how his perceptual processes work and couldn’t realistically be truth-conducive error of believing a falsehood. It would be possible for expected to take responsibility for justifying perceptual beliefs in you to form a belief for which you do not possess sufficient epistemic a way that is sensitive to epistemically relevant aspects of those warrant, just as it is possible for you to form a belief that turns out to be processes. But that doesn’t matter, the reliabilist argues: any subject false, but the only way to regard you as reliable in forming a belief for can have warranted perceptual beliefs merely by relying on what is, in which you do, in context, possess sufficient warrant is to regard you fact, a truth-conducively reliable process. And a reliabilist may make as appropriately concerned for your own context-sensitive epistemic the same maneuver in the present context. When social conditions needs – just as regarding you as truth-conducively reliable is to regard are such as to make possible a reliable process of forming testimonial you as appropriately responsive to your context-insensitive need to beliefs, then a hearer can have warranted testimonial beliefs by relying believe the truth. The process of forming a belief is not, therefore, on this de facto reliable process.90 No reliabilist theory of testimonial something that we should regard as itself reliable (or unreliable) justification has seen fit to include closure-conducive reliability simpliciter. We should instead regard its reliability as deriving from a alongside the familiar truth-conducive species. Given the internalist reasonable (and its unreliability as deriving from an unreasonable) exercise of trust, whether in yourself qua judge or in another qua testifier. 90. For this move, see Goldberg, Relying on Others, op. cit. Goldberg argues the epistemically externalist orientation pioneered by reliabilism generates The appeal to reliability (or unreliability) should not characterize an anti-individualistic orientation when applied to the case of testimonial the process of forming a belief simpliciter, but that in your reliance knowledge.

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orientation that I’m about to embrace, reliabilists could not easily governed by a counterfactual sensitivity — including appropriate expand their theory in that direction, and I suspect most would not responsiveness — to evidence of untrustworthiness in the speaker. want to try. Since I am not defending a version of reliabilism, I won’t Why do we need to think of the reasonability of trust in terms of pursue that question. The present question is whether my account has a sensitivity to evidence of untrustworthiness? In section IV I argued the structure of a reliabilist view. My reply is that it does not, simply that the difference between testimonial trust and mere reliance does because it is not an externalist account of epistemic warrant. not lie in a difference between the attitudes or relations considered The internalist element in my account emerges from my emphasis merely as such but in a difference in what you rely on: in testimonial on the reasonability of trust. As we’ve seen, the reasonability of trust trust you rely on the speaker not only to be truth-conducively reliable crucially depends on how trust manifests a counterfactual sensitivity but also to be closure-conducively reliable. Again, when you rely on to evidence of untrustworthiness in the trusted. By my assurance- a speaker only to be truth-conducively reliable, you do not trust her; theoretic lights, it is important to construe the sensitivity as a sensitivity and if you come to believe what she asserts, it is not because you to evidence of untrustworthiness – not to trustworthiness or to believe her. In that case, the reasonability of your reliance derives from evidence of trustworthiness – because it is important not to require your evidence that the speaker is truth-conducively reliable. Here that the addressee positively assess the speaker for trustworthiness; we needn’t appeal to a sensitivity to evidence of her truth-conducive that is incompatible with his believing the speaker in the respect unreliability; that will be built into your deliberative sensitivity to that the assurance view emphasizes. So while the addressee is positive evidence of her truth-conducive reliability. It is only when not responsible for producing a deliberative assessment of the you trust her — when you rely on her not only to be speaking the truth speaker’s trustworthiness, he is responsible for being and remaining but also to be appropriately responsive to your epistemic needs — that appropriately responsive to evidence of untrustworthiness in the we must construe the reasonability of your reliance in terms of a speaker. The way to respond appropriately to (significant) evidence (counterfactual) sensitivity to evidence that she is not thus reliable. of untrustworthiness in the speaker is to cease simply trusting the Wherefore this difference? The difference derives from a crucial speaker.91 In such a case, the addressee can step back and assess the difference in what you’re relying on the speaker to do and be. In the speaker as trustworthy despite this evidence of untrustworthiness. As first case, you’re relying on the speaker to assert the truth — that is, to I’ve noted several times, such a stepping-back maneuver is always be impersonally responsive to whether what she asserts is true (that is, potentially available, and I’m not claiming that there is any clear line to be such that if p is [or were] not true then she will [or would] not between the extent to which we trust and the extent to which we assert that p). But in the second case, you’re relying on the speaker resist trust, and remain thus disengaged, while nonetheless coming to be appropriately responsive to your context-sensitive epistemic to believe what the speaker tells us. For grown-ups, testimonial trust needs — that is, to be second-personally responsive to you in a crucial is usually a matter of degree. My point is that the extent to which you respect. As I’ll argue in sections VIII and IX, you’re relying on the trust is the extent to which you are not in the business of deliberatively speaker to acknowledge or recognize you in a respect relevant to the assessing the speaker for evidence of trustworthiness. But your trust testimonial relation that she presents herself as aiming to institute is reasonable to the extent that it is not, as some say, ‘blind’ but instead with you. In thus relying on her (or not), you in turn provide (or fail to

91. Remember my clarification in section III: by ‘evidence’ here I mean significant provide) the complementary acknowledgment or recognition of her. evidence.

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VII. How this epistemic norm differs from bipolar practical norms one engaging the structure of my account. I am offering an explanation I’m not quite done replying to the charge raised at the outset of the of distinctively testimonial epistemic warrant, and my explanation previous section that my assurance view is ‘ethical’ rather than properly emphasizes that the speaker’s closure-conducive reliability imposes a epistemological. But my reply will now take a new turn. I’ve thus far necessary condition on the addressee’s coming to have such warrant. argued that the closure-conducive reliability at the core of a warrant- But what, again, is closure-conducive reliability? I have explained it giving testimonial assurance is indeed properly epistemic, while as reliability in engaging your addressee’s context-sensitive epistemic leaving unquestioned the assumption that my assurance view is in the needs, in this core respect: assuming he has occasion to wonder business of making the epistemology of testimony ‘ethical’ in some whether p, you would tell him that p if but only if he would, if he important respect. Do I aim to expand the realm of the epistemic in trusted you, thereby prove sufficiently warranted to believe that p. We an ‘ethical’ direction, blurring or complicating the distinction between might say that closure-conducive reliability is reliability in gauging epistemology and ethics? I emphatically have no such aim. I would sufficiency of warrant for your addressee. But that makes it seem insist on the distinction more or less as my critics understand it. I aim that I am explaining testimonial warrant as deriving, in part, from to reveal exactly how that distinction applies — and I think it clearly the speaker’s reliability in gauging testimonial warrant. The account applies — within the realm of illocutionary acts. My thesis is that the looks viciously circular. It’s as if someone tried to explain the legality distinction between the epistemic and the ethical applies in a way that of a judge’s verdict in terms of the judge’s reliability in gauging the we need an assurance view of testimony to understand. legality of her verdicts. That explanation makes no sense without an In this section I’ll state exactly how the norm governing testimonial independent understanding of what such legality involves. In parallel telling differs, as properly epistemic, from the practical or ethical fashion, my account of testimonial warrant makes no sense without norms that govern advising and promising. In the next section, I’ll an independent understanding of what testimonial warrant involves. explain how the epistemic norm is bipolar in a way that in one respect Can I provide such an independent account? parallels but in another diverges from the bipolarity of these practical Note that two strategies are not available to me. First, I cannot norms. In the concluding section, I’ll argue that the epistemic norm appeal to the truth-conducive dimension here. I cannot explain is more fundamentally bipolar or second-personal than any practical closure-conducive reliability as reliability in gauging truth-conducive norm. It will thus emerge that, far from taking epistemology in a more warrant, since the whole point of distinguishing the closure-conducive practical or ethical direction by emphasizing the second-personal from the truth-conducive dimension of warrant derives from how your stance that a testifier adopts towards her addressee, my assurance status as being epistemically warranted in believing that p cannot be view of testimonial warrant articulates a species of second-personal established by merely determining whether your evidence makes relation that is more radically second-personal than any practical or it likely that p is true. As I’ve emphasized, there is always a further ethical species. I thus reply equally to the epistemologists who regard question: whether your evidence makes it sufficiently likely that p is me as doing ethics and to the ethicists who regard me as illicitly true, where the question of sufficient likelihood of truth engages the borrowing ethical concepts for epistemology. practical exigencies that form what I’ve been calling your doxastic The core difference between this epistemic norm and bipolar context — that is, your context-sensitive epistemic needs. Second, I practical norms will emerge from my reply to another objection, this cannot simply rest with the claim that closure-conducive reliability is reliability in transmitting epistemic warrant — not what that warrant is,

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but merely how it is made available to the addressee. If I took that charge of circularity. The closure-conducive dimension of testimonial route, I’d make my account susceptible to the charge that it does not warrant isn’t a matter of gauging warrant as such, but of gauging this show how an assurance is properly epistemic — the very charge that downstream context of social relations. What you present yourself as the paper is devoted to rebutting. That route would lead to a hybrid most fundamentally responsive to when you tell A that p is A’s need theory: testimonial warrant is truth-conducive and therefore no to pass that information along, on your say-so, to others whom you different in nature from the warrant made available to an overhearer, can foresee might also have a use for it. Even if you don’t foresee that or to an addressee who mistrustfully assesses the speaker as if he were A might have occasion to pass the information along to others with an overhearer, but this truth-conducive warrant can be transmitted in different epistemic needs from A’s, you aim to put A in position to a special way when an addressee accepts the speaker’s invitation to provide it to others who share his doxastic context. The warrant that trust. That, again, is not my view. My version of the assurance view you would make available to A is thus radically social. In making it does not address merely the ‘ethics’ of testimonial interlocution; it available to A, you aim to make it available to those to whom you addresses the epistemology of testimonial warrant. I’m arguing that can foresee A having occasion to make it available in turn — on your when she makes warrant available, the speaker’s assurance contributes, say-so — even when those others have foreseeably different epistemic as such, to the constitution of that warrant. Her assurance does not needs from A’s (or, of course, from your own). figure merely in the psychological or ‘ethical’ conditions that explain As I’ll argue in the concluding sections, what is at stake in these how she makes the warrant available to her addressee but also, and relations is a distinctively epistemic form of recognition-respect, crucially, in the conditions that explain what it is for her addressee to whereby a speaker normatively recognizes the epistemic needs that be thus warranted. shape the testimonial chain that she is initiating or extending, and I’ll develop an alternative reply in this section, a reply that will addressees normatively recognize the authority thus constituted in emphasize a distinctive feature of testimony: that any given testimonial part by her recognition of them. My account is thus radically anti- exchange is typically embedded in a testimonial ‘chain,’ whether by individualistic while, as we saw in the previous section, resisting continuing a chain or by giving rise to one. Understanding the fully epistemological externalism. I am talking not about a reliable process social nature of testimonial warrant, I’ll argue, requires understanding extended through social relations, but about the institution of relations how the testimonial warrant made available in any given exchange is of mutual recognition and respect.92 constituted in such a way as to be thereby — via such a chain — made 92. My argument thus engages the polemic in Goldberg’s Relying on Others. Gold- more generally available. I’ll argue that the assurance at the core of berg argues that a proper understanding of testimonial warrant helps us see distinctively testimonial warrant must manifest responsiveness not the radical nature of the epistemological externalism at the core of reliabi- only to the addressee’s epistemic needs but to the epistemic needs of lism, since it enables us to shed at last the individualistic orientation of tradi- tional epistemology, which he argues still infects recent reliabilist treatments those whom you can foresee that this interlocutor will in turn address of testimony. While my emphasis on the question of the reasonableness of as he passes your testimony down the chain. Your closure-conducive the addressee’s trust motivates a rejection of epistemological externalism, I sympathize with Goldberg’s more general polemic against individualistic reliability is therefore in part a reliability in meeting the epistemic assumptions in epistemology. I am arguing, in effect, that the best way to needs of these interlocutors. The role played by these ‘downstream’ shed an individualistic orientation requires understanding why epistemo- logical externalism is false. Epistemological externalism is false because your addressees — switching metaphors from chain to stream to account for status as warranted in a given belief rests on your exercise of reasonable the direction of ‘flow’ — provides what I need in order to escape the trust — whether in an interlocutor or in your own judging self (I give the latter

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It will help us pursue both this argument and the argument of my will suffer among some of his narrow-minded peers. Weighed against concluding sections if we inquire more directly into the nature of the value of reaching a conclusion about such an important matter, epistemic needs. Your epistemic needs are — in a provisional formula such trivial or vice-engendered worries count for almost nothing. (Of to be qualified presently in the social direction just sketched — what course, we could describe a different case — say with less evidence you ought, doxastic-deliberatively speaking, to care about: that is, available — in which they would count for more.) But S doesn’t treat they are the concerns that you ought to let inform the standard for A’s worries about his marriage or children as so massively outweighed concluding a doxastic deliberation with a belief. Let me elaborate by the value of reaching a conclusion. It’s important not to remain by appeal to some of the examples from section I. We can easily doxastically undecided for longer than you should, but these imagine that the duped spouses in my cases (Ann, Aidan, and Alan) countervailing values bear directly on how long you should keep your ought to care about what an attribution of infidelity will do to their mind open. We’re imagining that S regards A’s sensitivity to these marriage or to their children, but that they ought not to care about values as legitimate but improperly executed. ‘Yes, it makes sense what it will do to their social standing as such or to their sheer self- to let these concerns weigh against drawing a conclusion here,’ S complacency. And we can imagine that that’s how their interlocutors implicitly assures A, ‘but you’ve taken that rather too far. Trust me: the (Siegfried, Sieglinde, and Sigrun) view these doxastic contexts. Let’s available evidence does now outweigh these legitimate concerns.’ To imagine both that this is their view and that the view is correct.93 counter the charge that she’s bullshitting A, S may need to show that Speaking schematically, on a natural understanding of each case she regards the concerns as legitimate. By contrast, if A replied with the speaker S makes two assumptions: (i) that she’d be bullshitting ‘Don’t bullshit me — you know I simply can’t be bothered to confront her addressee A if she didn’t manifest appropriate responsiveness my spouse right now!’ that could, without relevant background, only to A’s marital or parental predicament, but (ii) that she doesn’t owe count as ironic or facetious. And relevant background would have to the same responsiveness to A’s broader social or narrowly personal include something — a relationship (say a dying parent) or a project predicament. The mere fact that recognition of the infidelity will (say a soon-to-be-completed-manuscript) — that S could regard as inconvenience A or disrupt his vanity doesn’t, S assumes, raise the worth caring about. Without such relevant background and assuming doxastic standard for A, nor does the inevitability that A’s reputation it isn’t ironic or facetious, A’s accusation may simply reveal that he’s unreachably cut off from reality on this matter. argument in other work, e. g. in “Judging as Inviting Self-Trust”) — where the exercise of reasonable trust manifests a receptivity to influence that is none- We are now ready to see how epistemic needs contain an implicit theless fully agential. The influence in question implicitly acknowledges that social dimension. Note that there is an important exception to the the reasonability of the trust that it invites derives from a grasp of how the trust implicates you in further testimonial relations with those whose trust principle that equates A’s epistemic needs with what A ought (doxastic- you might invite in turn. Our grasp on the reasonability of testimonial trust, deliberatively) to care about. Say Sam tells Allison not that Allison’s as a receptivity to influence informed by closure-conducive reliability, thus spouse is having an affair but that the leader of some organization to manifests — from both sides of the testimonial relation — our grasp on the deeply social nature of testimonial warrant. Epistemological externalism is which Allison belongs is having an affair. And imagine both (i) that false, in sum, precisely because of what makes epistemological anti-individu- among the considerations that structure Allison’s doxastic deliberation alism true. is an institutional analogue of the self-complacency that the speakers 93. If we don’t think they’re correct in what they think their interlocutors ought to care about, then we’ll view them as aiming at illocutionary consummation dismissed as not worth caring about in the earlier cases, and (ii) that but mistaken about how to achieve it. Sam does not consider this institutional version any more worthy of

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concern. Imagine, moreover, that Sam is right. Does that mean Allison We can grasp the force of this point more clearly if we start from a can’t legitimately complain that Sam is unresponsive to one of her one-person case, asking how epistemic needs figure in deliberation. needs? No, the institutional context of Allison’s epistemic needs may Say you try to close deliberation by thinking ‘I’m just too lazy to easily make the complaint legitimate. Because of this institutional continue deliberating.’ It won’t work. You might stop deliberating. context, Sam must concede that his testimonial intervention would But you couldn’t thus close deliberation: this is at best a way of put Allison in position to tell others who share her institutional ‘resting’ with a hypothesis, not a way of making up your mind — of complacency that their leader is having an affair. Since Allison and deciding the matter. What now if we imagine that you really love all these others regard the complacency — a ‘commitment to stability,’ your laziness? Say it’s what you most love about yourself, and you’re etc. — as a legitimate concern, anyone within this group whom passionately devoted to it. It’s still hard to see how that could make a Allison told what Sam tells her would accuse Allison of bullshitting difference. Perhaps that’s because we can’t imagine how one could be him if Allison failed to manifest appropriate responsiveness to these passionately devoted to one’s own laziness, but generalization to other mutual concerns. Allison can, on this basis, legitimately accuse Sam of examples suggests a different moral. Can we imagine how any such bullshitting her if Sam does not manifest appropriate responsiveness devotion — to one’s own laziness, to the sound of one’s own voice, to the concern. The basis of the accusation would not be that Sam etc. — might become doxastically relevant? Imagine there’s a Lazy must regard the concern as legitimate but that he must regard Bums Club, members of which share intentions premised on their Allison’s concern not to be accused of bullshitting (given what that shared laziness. Or, from another angle, a Cult of You, members of would entail for her illocutionary interventions) as legitimate. And we which share intentions premised on their shared devotion to serving can easily imagine not only that Sam does regard the latter concern your every passing mental state. In that case, it seems you could close as legitimate — again, despite not regarding the accusation as based deliberation, by imagining your interlocutor’s needs in this shared in any legitimate concern — but that he is correct to do so. It follows doxastic context. The moral is that it’s not so much what you care from Sam’s presumption to provide a care-giving relation that he will about that allows you to close deliberation as what you can count on care (or at least represent himself as caring) about Allison’s legitimate others caring about. concerns, some of which may thus count as Allison’s epistemic needs That thought yields ‘relativism,’ in John MacFarlane’s sense,94 about only because those to whom Allison might ‘pass on’ Sam’s testimony ascription of the conclusive epistemic entitlements at issue — as misconstrue their illegitimate concerns as legitimate. (As we’ll see, this opposed to ‘contextualism’ or ‘sensitive invariantism.’ These labels complexity might add an interesting twist to a gossip case: imagine derive from a parallel debate over how the norm governing ascriptions that the gossipers are acquainted with the target of the gossip but that of knowledge is sensitive to context. It might be not at all sensitive the context of gossip is low-stakes insofar as gossipers assume that no to context (strict invariantism), sensitive to the would-be knower’s one will confront the target with the gossip. But if A is a close friend context (sensitive invariantism), sensitive to the context of one who of the target, then it is natural to treat the standard as higher — even ascribes the knowledge (contextualism), or sensitive to the context of if the gossipers believe that A ought not to confront the target with one who assesses the ascription (relativism). Though I lack space to the gossip.) What counts as a ‘legitimate’ concern, for the purpose of 94. See his “The Assessment Sensitivity of Knowledge Attributions,” op. cit. Note assessing an addressee’s epistemic needs, thus rests on an irreducibly well that the use to which I’m putting this idea is very different from the use social conception of legitimacy. to which MacFarlane puts it.

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develop it fully,95 the application of this terminology to our issue marks insofar as he relies on her word in telling them. But that merely shows an important point about doxastic-deliberative closure: one achieves that S can be criticized, and the presumption that there is testimonial it by regarding oneself as entitled to a conclusion not from one’s warrant in play defeated, if she fails to do justice to these recipients’ own perspective (as the sensitive invariantist would say) or from the epistemic needs. And of course the criticism will have to take into perspective of someone ascribing the entitlement (as the contextualist account how foreseeable it was that A should have told a given would say), but from the perspective of someone wondering if the interlocutor. If S tells A that his spouse’s mother is having an affair ascription is true (as MacFarlane’s relativist says). Another name for and A tells his spouse on S’s say-so, S had better be doing justice to A’s someone wondering if the ascription is true is someone potentially spouse’s epistemic needs. But if S tells A that B’s spouse is having an receptive to testimony informed by the entitlement — in a word, a affair, not having the faintest clue that A knows B, then S’s responsibility potential testimonial addressee. MacFarlane’s relativism provides an to B — and what it takes for S to count as closure-conducively reliable abstract formulation of the point about epistemic needs that I’ve just for A — is much less, in part because A might have seen that S didn’t defended: when you wonder whether p, your deliberation is guided by mean to be addressing B. If A should have known that S didn’t mean a concern to do justice to the doxastic context of someone whom you to be addressing B, then S can argue that she’s off the hook, and her might tell that p. This needn’t, as we’ve seen, be your actual addressee closure-conducive reliability uncompromised, because she is no more in a given case, since you can tell A that p when, owing to his different addressing B than an explicitly excluded overhearer.97 context, you don’t regard yourself as conclusively entitled to p yourself. The higher epistemic standard prevails in such a case, just as it But, in that case, there will still be potential interlocutors who share does in a two-person case. We can again use allergy cases to make the your context, and you draw your conclusion from imagined concern point vivid. Earlier we saw how nut-allergic S may, without violating for their epistemic needs.96 any illocutionary norm, tell non-allergic A that the snack-bowl is nut- As I explained in section III, I don’t hold that actual responsiveness free without herself believing that it is nut-free. Let’s now flip that is required for there to be a given instance of testimonial telling — that case around, noting that non-allergic S would violate the pertinent is, for the speech act not to misfire. If I did embrace that thesis, it would illocutionary norm if she told nut-allergic A that the snack-bowl is nut- lead one to worry how S could tell A that p without being responsive free, given her relatively weak evidence, despite herself believing that to foreseeable downstream recipients in the testimonial chain — those it is nut-free. But what if, in a third case that builds on the second, it whom A might tell, and so on — since it would entail that if S is not is not A but A’s wife B who suffers the nut-allergy? That may have the responsive to some foreseeable downstream recipient then she cannot same effect on S’s illocutionary obligations as A’s nut allergy has in get the chain started, which would seem to undermine the whole idea the second case. We could imagine that S is sending the snacks home of a testimonial chain. But, again, I reject that thesis. I am arguing that with A, where B will almost certainly ask A if they are nut-free. Or we S is under an obligation to do justice to A’s foreseeable addressees could imagine that A will simply recount his day to B, imparting the

97. Note the parallel between this feature of the interpersonal case and the fea- 95. For a fuller treatment, see “Judging as Inviting Self-Trust” and “Assertion, Sin- ture of the intrapersonal case that I discuss in “Reflection, Disagreement, and cerity, and Knowledge.” Context.” The attitude toward the addressee’s epistemic needs that a trust- 96. In “Judging as Inviting Self-Trust” and “Assertion, Sincerity, and Knowledge,” I worthy speaker manifests parallels the attitude that you manifest toward your argue that the act of doxastic judgment is itself constitutively governed by a future self when you ‘project’ into its context, treating what you expect it to norm requiring such concern for potential interlocutors. believe as settling what you should now believe.

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information to B that such-and-such brand of snack is nut-free. Either be hotly contested. (This is part of what gives one a bad conscience way, A will have to judge relative to the higher standard defined by in gossiping: why should you think that you are not illocutionarily B’s epistemic needs, and that foreseeable fact about A will impose implicated in the target’s predicament? what would you say to him if he the higher standard on S’s illocutionary act. Of course, if S reasonably implicated you with a direct challenge to your testimony?) But in many believes that B is out of town, or that A and B never talk about such cases, there is no functional difference between the questions of what things, then S is perhaps off the hook. Note that B’s needs figure in to believe and what you could sincerely tell an interlocutor at hand. In shaping A’s in two different respects. On the one hand, it will matter many cases, the psychological question of what to believe collapses to A not to have nuts in the house, given that his housemate is nut- into the epistemic question not merely of what belief you could justify, allergic. This is true even if A and B never talk. (We might imagine but of what belief another could justify on your say-so.98 that they are so estranged that they share food but do not converse.) The relativism reveals a fundamental difference between epistemic On the other hand, it will matter to A that he be in position to tell B and practical reasons. Both epistemic and practical reasons can be what S has told him. S has no specifically illocutionary obligation to do made available through interlocution, through illocutionary acts justice to all of A’s needs that bear on S’s speech act. But S does have whose consummation requires recognition of a species of care for an illocutionary obligation to do justice to those among A’s needs that the addressee.99 But these acts, telling A that p and advising A to φ, S’s speech act constitutively represents S as meeting. differ insofar as the illocutionary norms informing them impose Why should this be so? And why is this a distinctively epistemic different obligations on the speaker. An advisor must be appropriately feature of the situation? As we’ve seen, in telling A that p, S represents responsive to her advisee’s ‘practical needs’ — which we may gloss herself as making available a conclusive epistemic reason to believe as what this advisee ought, practically speaking, to care about — but that p. While she makes this reason available specifically to A, it is needn’t show any responsiveness to the advisee’s broader social not a reason specifically for A to believe that p. It is a reason for A to context, apart of course from the respects in which that social conclude doxastic deliberation on his own behalf, but also on behalf context influences the advisee’s practical needs in straightforward of those to whom he might foreseeably pass on this information. If ways — without appeal to the relativist thesis that I’ve just articulated. there is a conflict between his doxastic context, narrowly construed, In a typical case, the advisee’s broader context will play a vast role and the context of such an addressee, the higher standard prevails. We in constituting his practical needs. But the way it does so is on a par might indeed question the distinction between his doxastic context, with any other dimension of those needs. In each respect, the advisor narrowly construed, and his broader interlocutory context. In some must be appropriately responsive to a consideration C if, but only if, cases — for example, the original snack case in section IV — this C is something that the advisee ought, practically speaking, to care distinction does make a difference, because S has a reason to form her about (where appropriate responsiveness may, as in the testimonial belief “for herself” before turning to her interlocutor’s needs. And in case, mask insincerity). As we’ve just seen, testimony places a greater gossip cases, wherein part of the point is to disseminate information against a lower epistemic standard than would govern the doxastic 98. For much more on this connection between testimony and judgment, see my “Assertion, Sincerity, and Knowledge” and “Judging as Inviting Self-Trust.” context of the gossip’s target, the crucial difference would divide both 99. For a complementary account of how practical reasons can be made available the target and those illocutionarily implicated in his predicament from through interlocution, see my “Advising as Inviting to Trust.” Again, if the those not so implicated — a distinction whose application may often speech act is insincere, the care will be merely feigned.

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burden of responsiveness on the speaker. When S tells A that p she By (T), once again, the testifier presumes to make available an must be appropriately responsive not only to what A ought, doxastic- entitlement that is both prima facie and conclusive. That is, the testifier deliberatively, to care about but to the testimonial opportunities presumes an executive authority over the doxastic deliberation of her that she creates for A by telling him that p — even if the testimonial addressee. ‘Go ahead and believe,’ she implicitly says, ‘you can take opportunities are shaped by considerations that do not reflect what my word for it.’ By contrast, even the most presumptuous advisor A’s potential interlocutors’ ought doxastic-deliberatively to care about cannot be that presumptuous without violating a norm built into when considered apart from those opportunities.100 the illocutionary act of advising. Advice does not presume executive This difference between testimony and advice is nicely captured by authority. Though an advisor may be overbearing without abusing the Austin’s formula, “If I say it lightly, I may be responsible for getting you illocution, she violates the illocution if she aims to direct his life in into trouble.”101 Austin is discussing claims to know that p, a special case executive fashion. Advice aims at making available a reason that will of testifying that p, and by ‘trouble’ he means the trouble that will befall still need to be weighed by the advisee. It thus serves as input to practical the addressee who goes on to repeat the knowledge claim to a third deliberation, not as a replacement for it. Testimony, by contrast, does party. Lacking the theoretical resources made available by our technical not serve merely as an input to doxastic deliberation. If it did, it could concept of bullshit — with the concept of closure-conducive reliability only give evidence, with no epistemic role left for an assurance to play. that informs it — Austin could only conceive of this trouble in terms of This is hypothetically so because the only reasons that can be weighed the falsity of the knowledge claim. We can broaden that conception: if I in doxastic deliberation are evidential reasons. Since, as I’ve argued, bullshit you, we can elaborate, I may be responsible for your bullshitting assurance does play an epistemic role in testimony, testimony aims as well. It’s (in Austin’s term) the transmissibility of the trouble that has at a species of executive authority that is not available in otherwise no analogue on the practical side. When I advise you to φ I cannot, in parallel interventions on the practical side.102 parallel fashion, be responsible for getting you into this sort of trouble. (I can, of course, be responsible for getting you into trouble — just not VIII. Explaining the difference: how the testimonial norm is bipolar into this sort.) And the reason that I cannot derives from an even more I thereby explain the epistemic component in what I’m calling ‘epistemic fundamental difference between testimony and advice. needs,’ but I have not yet fully explained their status as needs. How could the sort of unresponsiveness to epistemic needs that I’m arguing 100. The role played by concern for A in generating S’s conception of A’s epis- defines bullshitting necessarily amount to a bipolar or second-personal temic needs suggests a rational-care theory of epistemic needs modeled on wrong? You may also, having lost your job, need two thousand dollars Darwall’s rational-care theory of welfare (see his Welfare and Rational Care [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002]). Putting the two theories to- to pay your mortgage this month — does that obligate anyone to do gether would yield the result that epistemic needs are just an aspect of the anything about it? Well maybe it does, depending on other facts about agent’s welfare. Then the present point would be that the illocutionary norm your situation or about your relationship with a given person. But that for telling, unlike the norm for advising, requires that S care (or pretend to care) about more than A’s welfare; S must also care about these further illo- would be an indirect obligation. It seems that needs directly generate cutionary relations. (This is perhaps the most strikingly vantage point from which to observe that rights-based notions do not fundamentally conflict 102. Are there forms of non-coercive intervention that coherently presume ex- with welfare-based notions. I pursue this angle in “Trust as a Second-Person- ecutive practical authority? In “How to Settle on a Shared Intention,” in al Attitude,” in preparation.) preparation, I argue that inviting someone to a share an intention is such 101. “Other Minds,” op. cit., 100. (See also my comment on this remark in note 85.) an intervention.

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obligations, with their corresponding rights and wrongs, only when calls it — in what I’m treating as an intersubstitutable term — ‘second- they are tied to survival or some other fundamental value: the need to personal.’103 But does telling A that p create a comparable right with eat (assuming available food), the need to breathe (assuming available comparable space for wronging A? When you tell A that p, are you oxygen), the need to move freely (assuming the value of autonomy), binding yourself by bonding yourself to A through any right that A and so on. It may seem that a ‘need’ not to be bullshitted by your now has over you? As I’ve emphasized, you are responsible to A in a interlocutor isn’t fundamental enough to generate — on its own — any specific respect. And it’s natural to gloss that responsibility by saying obligations at all, whether monadic or bipolar. If you have a ‘right’ not that A has a right not only to rely on your assurance but to challenge to be bullshitted, it may seem that that could only reflect either some your presumption of authority. But are these ‘rights’ genuinely bipolar broader obligation not to bullshit, based in some more fundamental or second-personal? Thompson and Darwall argue that they are not, value, or some broader fact about your relationship with the speaker. since whether you’ve observed them depends on whether you’ve But if that’s so, then someone who bullshits you fails to live up to a lived up to a claim of monadic or third-personal authority: you’re monadic duty, making you the mere occasion of the wrong, not (in the speaking the truth. And that seems right if we restrict our attention bipolar sense) its victim. to the truth-conducive dimension of the assurance at the core of To answer this objection, I need to provide an account of an testimony. But what if we bring in the equally important closure- addressee’s ‘epistemic needs’ that ties them directly not merely to conducive dimension? We thereby get a relation that is genuinely the illocutionary context but to his person. Here’s how I’ll argue. S’s bipolar or second-personal, yet one that doesn’t fit the model that in conception of A’s epistemic needs derives from her (possibly feigned) their different ways both Thompson and Darwall recommend. And the concern for A himself. S presumes that this concern entitles her to an difference lies specifically in an as-yet-unnoticed difference between executive authority over A’s doxastic deliberation that has no parallel telling and promising. in illocutionary acts that give practical reasons, such as advising 103. Thompson, “What is it to Wrong Someone?,” op. cit.; Stephen Darwall, The or promising. This shows that testimonial telling institutes a more Second-Person Standpoint, op. cit. For Thompson, promising institutes a para- fundamentally bipolar or second-personal relation than advising or digmatic bipolar norm (339, 346). For Darwall, by contrast, promising rests promising. Your right not to be bullshitted, while of course not moral on a more general second-personal norm. He thus criticizes Scanlon for leaving open a merely causal interpretation of the act of assurance inform- or otherwise overriding, is more fundamental than any of the rights ing a promise, arguing that we need a second-personal interpretation on adduced by philosophers interested in practical bipolarity or second- which the assurance manifests a genus of second-personal accountability that Scanlon does not explicitly discuss (204–5, 208). In “Trust as a Second- personality. In the concluding section, I’ll offer a diagnosis of how Personal Attitude,” I second Darwall’s criticism of Scanlon (for Scanlon’s ac- recent treatments of practical bipolarity or second-personality have count of promising, see his What We Owe to Each Other [Cambridge: Harvard overlooked this fundamental dimension of normativity. University Press, 1998], Chapter 7). My criticism of Darwall, both here and in that other paper, concerns the nature of that generically second-personal Let’s approach this deeper structure of recognition by reconsidering form of address, not the need to theorize it. I agree with Darwall in trac- the comparison between telling and promising from which we began. ing its basis to illocutionary requirements. I disagree with him only about the nature of relevant illocutions — though that disagreement leads me to Promising A to φ is a way of binding yourself by bonding yourself to oppose the Kantian tenor of his project and in particular the distinction be- A in this general respect: A now has a right over you. If you violate tween care and respect that he uses to frame it. “Trust as a Second-Personal Attitude” pursues that debate, and “Promise as Normative Power” develops that right, you’ve not merely done wrong but wronged him. Thompson an assurance-theoretic treatment of promising designed to parallel, as far as therefore calls the norm informing a promise ‘bipolar,’ and Darwall a parallel is possible, the present theory of testimonial telling.

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We can understand how the normative structure of telling differs epistemic function. By hypothesis, the bullshitter is addressing A in from that of promising by seeing why we cannot reduce promising the way characteristic of telling him that p. But then she violates the to giving testimony about your future actions. The reduction fails norm internal to telling by treating A as if she were not addressing him. because, when you lie to A about your future actions, the wrong you More specifically: the bullshitter presents herself as intending to make commit has this structure: you did wrong in that you lied to A. As available to A a reason to believe that p, and as intending to make Thompson puts it, A is not the direct object of the wrong; he’s the that reason available simply through A’s recognition that that’s what occasion, not the victim.104 So such a lie cannot amount to a lying she — as a truth- and closure-conducively reliable speaker — intends. promise, which does wrong its target. But that merely shows what But then she doesn’t intend to do what it would take to make that I’ve already argued: lying is not the core violation, the illocutionary reason available. As we’ve seen, what would make that reason available, violation, of the illocutionary norm at the heart of testimony. The core the reason that S presents herself as intending to make available, is S’s violation is instead, as I’ve argued, a failure to care (or to act as if you truth-conducive and closure-conducive reliability, the latter of which care) about A’s context-sensitive epistemic needs. In our term of art, she does not, if she is bullshitting A, possess. As I have suggested the core violation is bullshitting A. And when you bullshit A you are and will now argue more fully, closure-conducive reliability has at its wronging A. This bipolar wrong isn’t the same kind of bipolar wrong core an attitude, or at least the facsimile of an attitude, of appropriate as we get in a lying or a broken promise. It occurs at a deeper level. care for how A in context concludes (or would conclude) his doxastic It will take the rest of this section and the next to explain this deliberation. But if S is bullshitting A when she tells him that p, then S deeper level. First, I’ll explain in more detail how the illocutionary willfully has no such attitude toward A, even in facsimile. Expanding norm informing testimony is bipolar. Then in the next section, I’ll my earlier treatment, I’ll now explain why that’s the deception at explain how it is more deeply or fundamentally bipolar than the norm odds with a consummated telling — not lying but a failure univocally informing a promise. I’ll take for granted the explanation that I offered to address one’s interlocutor. With one set of attitudes, S addresses in sections II through VII of how the norm governs a species of epistemic A so as to tell him that p. But then with another set of attitudes, S warrant. The issue before us now is the bipolarity of the norm. In those undermines the normative force of that species of address. We might earlier sections, I was defending the assurance view against the charge view it as a failure to give appropriate content to the act of addressing that it leaves out the epistemology; I’m now defending it against the A — not to what gets said but to how it is said: the bullshitter’s attitudes charge that it misdescribes a monadic norm as bipolar. (Do remember toward her addressee are inconsistent with the nature of the illocution throughout this discussion that by the ‘illocutionary norm’ of telling I by which she addresses him. It’s in this respect that bullshit misleads mean the norm violation of which yields an unconsummated telling, not at a deeper level than the lie: not in the propositional content of the a misfire. I am not talking about what it takes for a telling to transpire, speech act but in the act’s very nature — that is, in what exactly the but about what it takes for parties to live up to the responsibilities that speaker is doing with that proposition. What the speaker is doing with they incur through their having entered into that relation.) the proposition is something irreducibly bipolar or second-personal. My claim is that this deeper species of bipolarity shapes the nature One might think it an objection to observe that testimonial of the illocution by which testimony is capable of performing its warrant is not interpersonal in the sense of arising from facts about the speaker and her addressee considered in concert. Proponents of 104. “What is it to Wrong Someone?,” op. cit., 340. the assurance-theoretic approach to testimony sometimes appear

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to regard testimonial warrant as arising out of a kind of joint second-personal wrong. Contra both Darwall and Thompson, you can performance by speaker and addressee, but that is not my view. I be wronged in an epistemic dimension. am happy to accept the observation. In emphasizing the normative Darwall or Thompson might object that just as in the truth- dimension of a testimonial relation, rather than the psychological, I conducive dimension, so here: S is either closure-conducively reliable treat the warrant itself as a product of facts about the speaker: that or not. Whether S is thus reliable — that is, good at getting people’s she is appropriately truth-conducively reliable, and that she bears doxastic context right (say, in analogous circumstances) — is not a the appropriate second-personal attitude and competence — care second-personal matter. Hence S’s authority is not second-personal. I or a facsimile thereof — toward the addressee’s context-sensitive earlier replied to a version of this objection, but let me emphasize that epistemic needs. Again, the attitude and competence manifest a the objection would fail to grasp that, unlike in the truth-conducive normative commitment that the speaker incurs through representing dimension, the whole question of closure-conducive reliability herself as having the intentions that constitute her as telling her presupposes second-personality. I presented one angle on this second- addressee — the intentions described by (T). What gives assurance personality in section IV and another in VI. We might summarize with its role in constituting testimonial warrant is, in crucial measure, the the observation that the question of S’s closure-conducive reliability second-personality or bipolarity of that attitude and competence, not is not the question whether S is good at pop quizzes on this or that any fact about speaker and addressee taken together. randomly chosen person’s doxastic context, or even on her addressee’s Since the norm I’ve characterized is internal to the illocution, doxastic context on randomly chosen occasions. The question is testimonial telling realizes a fundamental form of bipolar normativity. whether S is appropriately responsive to your epistemic needs here This bipolarity is not simply a duty/right reciprocity but a willingness- and now. Is S normatively serious and competent when she issues this to-help/acknowledgment-that-I-need-help reciprocity. A natural species of second-personal address? In sum: is S bullshitting you? metaphor formulates it in terms of correlative conceptions of receptivity: Answering the question is sometimes straightforward. You ask S is receptive to A’s needs, and A is receptive to S’s influence. I do not S the time, needing a reasonably precise and accurate answer, and deny that there is a duty/right structure to these illocutionary norms. all you can get out of her are half-baked pronouncements that may I merely also claim that they institute care relations. If I’m right, then work fine for her needs but won’t do at all for yours. So you protest: Darwall is wrong to contrast duty/right norms with norms internal to ‘Stop bullshitting me and look at your watch!’ — a claim of right.106 a care relation. Darwall maintains that care relations manifest third-, Likewise when S manifests motives not to do justice to your doxastic not second-, personal norms, since they are welfare-based, not rights- context. When, in my earlier example, Aidan suspects Sieglinde of based.105 But this contrast overlooks how a care relation can be rights- a manipulative attachment to him, that suspicion naturally breeds based. Caring for someone in the way we’ve discussed can amount to suspicion that she’s unreceptive to important differences between recognizing him, not merely his needs. As a mark of this recognitional her doxastic context and his own. Such a suspicion often makes dimension, note that protesting a violation of this norm can be a way sense. The norm governing this illocution requires that the speaker of pressing a right to recognition. As we’ve seen, ‘Don’t bullshit me!’ acknowledge you as a separate person in this crucial respect. presses a claim of right, violation of which generates a bipolar or 106. This example should make it clear that my account works for mundane cases as well as for melodramatic. ‘Don’t bullshit me’ can protest even a trivial 105. The Second-Person Standpoint, op. cit., 126–30. bout of illocutionary inattentiveness.

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However easy it is to make the acknowledgment in the abstract, it is that illocutionary standard, she isn’t just doing the wrong thing, she’s not always easy to be governed by it. The sensitivity to evidence of wronging you — a form of injustice. untrustworthiness that you exercise when you provide the uptake for One might wonder how a form of justice or injustice could be testimony most fundamentally tracks this acknowledgment. Again, grounded in a form of reliability or unreliability. If S invites A to rely it undermines trust when the exercise of this sensitivity becomes on her strength or speed, she incurs a kind of responsibility to be too self-conscious or explicit. But the sensitivity that makes trust reliably strong or fast in the way that she presents herself as being. But reasonable is most fundamentally a sensitivity to a property that is this is not an illocutionary responsibility, and it does not involve the irreducibly interpersonal.107 species of justice that I’ve characterized. The case in which S incurs an The responsiveness is thus second-personal on both sides. It’s illocutionary responsibility to A differs from other cases in which she natural to gloss the speaker’s responsiveness, as I’ve done, as an incurs a responsibility by inviting him to rely on her, and the difference attempt to do justice to your epistemic needs and therefore to treat you lies in how her illocutionary invitation presumes to give A a reason justly. There is, of course, no testimonial norm that requires anyone grounded directly in an aspect of the invitation itself. As we’ve seen, to offer testimony, but given that S is telling you that p, she owes the illocutionary invitation expresses an assurance that constitutively you your illocutionary ‘due.’ Again, she can give you your just due presents S as reliable on the question not merely of the truth of her while wronging you in other respects: she might gratuitously punch assertion but of its capacity to provide A with epistemic warrant. That or insult you, or she might put this due in the service of a lie. What is, S is presenting herself not merely as bearing some impersonal she cannot do consistently with a consummated (i. e. non-abusive) property — whether truth-conducive reliability or some variety of telling is fail to attend to your epistemic needs. Should she fall short of strength or speed — that makes her relevantly reliable but as bearing 107. At a deeper level, the question introduces a dimension of complexity that an attitude toward A that makes her specifically reliable for him, in his I lack space to treat adequately here. Your question, ‘Is S bullshitting me?,’ specific context of needs. When you invite someone to rely only on ultimately asks whether S’s ‘internal interlocutor’ reliably corresponds to the interlocutor — you, out here in the real world — whom she is actually ad- your status as truth-conducively reliable — as you might do when you dressing. You’re asking whether she is responsive to the addressee actually ‘back off’ your telling with the caveat “Don’t take my word for it: look before her. If so, then to that extent, at least, you can rely on her. Or does she it up, you’ll see!”108 — you incur the sort of responsibility that you incur address you only by invoking internal interlocutors who barely resemble you and whose needs are very different from yours? In that case, you’d better when you invite someone to rely on your strength or speed. In those watch out. (A skepticism about the reasonability of ever trusting testimony cases, you are responsible to be as you represent yourself as being, and might naturally begin from the observation that such questions are exqui- sitely difficult to answer when we’re assessing the speaker explicitly. Is it your addressee will accordingly hold you thus responsible. But there not therefore insane to delegate them to a faculty that operates beneath our need be no question of doing justice to or of normatively acknowledging conscious attention? Can you really exercise a ‘counterfactual sensitivity’ to your addressee in any of these cases. The distinctively normative evidence that the speaker is addressing not you but merely an ‘internal in- terlocutor’? Given that the question makes sense in any case with enough in- element enters only insofar as you present yourself a providing him terpersonal complexity to trigger a speaker’s intrapersonal motives, we must with a reason grounded partly in that very act of assurance.109 Here, (assuming my account) either go skeptical about all but the most trivial tell- ings or credit ourselves with a highly sophisticated capacity for reasonable 108. For more on such backings-off, see my “Telling as Inviting to Trust,” section II. trust. My aim in this paper is to vindicate our common-sense assumption or presumption that testimony can serve as a source of warrant, not simply 109. For a full defense of this claim, see my “Trust as a Second-Personal Attitude.” to articulate it. But I’m not in the business of vindicating it against such a Insofar as we think there is a normative acknowledgement in an invitation skeptical challenge.) to rely on (say) strength or speed, it is because we are treating the invitation

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the closure-conducive reliability that informs the assurance is not presuming to speak for her addressee – the testifier aims at a species merely an impersonal property of yours, but the relational attitude and of executive authority over his beliefs. competence whereby you recognize or acknowledge your addressee How have Thompson and Darwall missed this difference? Darwall by doing justice to his epistemic needs. In this case, though crucially explains the second-personal standpoint in terms of what he calls a not in the others, we cannot understand the nature of your reliability second-personal ‘competence,’ which he explains as the competence without viewing it as a response to a question of justice. to press and respond to the form of interpersonal accountability that P. F. Strawson famously theorized in terms of ‘reactive attitudes.’111 Let’s IX. How this epistemic norm is more fundamentally bipolar than any call this ‘Strawsonian accountability.’ I’ll now conclude by explaining practical norm why I believe that Darwall’s emphasis on Strawsonian accountability What then of the parallel between the two species of assurance from is a mistake that has led him to misunderstand the second-personal which we began? We can now see that the assurance in telling occurs character of testimonial warrant.112 This will resolve Thompson’s at a more fundamental level than the assurance in promising. The key ‘puzzle about justice’ by explaining how bipolar norms could lack a difference is this: unlike the assurance in promising, the assurance foundation in social institutions. in telling touches on questions of deliberative structure. In aiming When a speaker addresses her interlocutor in the way characteristic to give her addressee a conclusive reason, the testifier presumes to of telling him that p, I’ve argued, she posits a deliberative structure speak for her addressee, in this respect: she intends the addressee to for him by presenting herself as in a key respect caring about what he trust her not only as the source of a reason that would figure within ought to care about. ‘The concerns posited by my concern to engage deliberation but as a gauge of the standard determining the structure you define your doxastic context,’ she implicitly says, ‘and you may of deliberation — as a gauge, that is, of when he is entitled to draw a rely on me that they permit concluding that p.’ Then the addressee conclusion. The assurance in promising doesn’t presume to speak for responds by treating, or by not treating, the speaker’s intervention as the promisee in this way and therefore doesn’t address any question appropriately care-giving. That is, he either trusts her or does not. If of deliberative structure. Like advice, a promise makes available a he does not trust, he implicitly replies as follows: ‘But the concern that reason that serves as input to deliberation: that S has promised you defines this act as yours — the concern to engage me — does not get that she’ll φ may give you a reason to rely on S to φ as you plan your me right.’ If he does trust, he accedes to her imposition of deliberative own conduct. But this reason must obviously be weighed alongside structure. Whichever way that goes, the attitude on each side of the other reasons for and against performing any particular action. That’s 111. See Darwall’s discussion of ‘Strawson’s Point’ and ‘Pufendorf’s Point’ in chap- merely to repeat that a promise-based reason, like any practical reason ters 1, 4, and 10 of The Second-Person Standpoint, op. cit. For Strawson’s discus- made available by satisfying illocutionary requirements, cannot be sion, see his “Freedom and Resentment,” Proceedings of the British Academy 48 executive.110 What’s distinctive of testimony, by contrast, is that – in (1962), 1–25. 112. We can trace the mistake back to a mistaken interpretation of Fichte, in partic- ular to a misunderstanding of Fichte’s conception of the “summons” (Aufforde- as an implicitly reason-giving assurance — as, for example, when ‘I’m strong rung) at the core of reciprocal recognition. The summons manifests recogni- enough to lift you up the tree’ serves as advice to let me lift you up the tree. tion of a perspective on the world, which implies deliberative structure, which 110. There is no conflict with the suggestion in note 102. Inviting someone to Strawsonian accountability presupposes but does not explain. To understand share an intention is not, as such, an illocutionary act alongside telling, ad- Fichte’s point, we need the notion of aretaic responsibility that I explicate in vising, or promising. this section.

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relation imputes to its object a concern that constitutes the act, or order’ that Thompson discusses. Again, we can put the key respect potential act, as belonging to its agent. The speaker imputes to the in which this recognition is fundamental in terms of receptivity: the addressee a perspective structured by deliberative requirements speaker must be receptive to another’s needs, while the addressee and permissions, in gauging the satisfaction of which he may simply must be receptive to another’s influence. Such receptivity does not rely on her. And the addressee imputes to the speaker a perspective require a shared practice. In the terms of one of Thompson’s thought structured by the attempt thus to deliberate on his behalf. experiments, Lombard and Schlombard — who, because they do not The reciprocal imputations amount to the recognition on each share a practice, share no monadic normative thoughts — may find side of a locus of epistemic agency — that is, of a doxastic-deliberative each other normatively accessible in the dimension of trust and perspective on the world. What makes each recognition engaging is care. Thompson’s puzzle is how bipolar norms could apply to this just the acknowledgment that the perspective on the other side is a pair, given that they do not share a practice inculcation into which perspective on, among other things, one’s own perspective. The speaker would yield the sense of right and duty on each side of the normative imputes to the addressee a perspective from which he looks back on relation. But what I’m discussing in this paper is a more fundamental her perspective and trusts her. The addressee imputes to the speaker kind of second-personal or bipolar reason or norm than any that must a perspective from which she looks back and either provides, or fails be mediated by a practice or other institution. Though you have to to provide, an adequate basis for that trust — a basis that would lie, as be practically and institutionally savvy to apply the capacities for trust we’ve seen, in both truth-conducive and closure-conducive reliability. and care in play here, the capacities themselves are not informed by If his sensitivity to evidence of untrustworthiness is triggered, thereby practices or institutions. Though they express a common status as alerting him to the epistemically-possible absence of that basis, his biologically human in this example, that biological commonality plays refusal to trust constitutes a claim of right: ‘Hands off, you don’t get to no direct role in constituting the relation. Nor is there a need to posit define my epistemic needs.’ If he does trust, he accepts the provision a Kantian community of ends. Though Lombard and Schlombard hail of care. Of course, he could instead believe what the speaker tells from completely distinct social practices, and for the purposes of the him without trusting her, by refusing the illocution but accepting thought experiment might as well be from distinct species,113 if they the evidence it gives him. But that would also amount to a refusal can communicate, by recognizing each other’s (T)-intentions, they of the care. Putting the addressee’s recognition as a question of the can address each other testimonially. And if they can address each speaker’s care, and the speaker’s recognition as a responsiveness to the other testimonially, they fall under the illocutionary norms of mutual addressee’s needs, captures the second-personal dynamic at stake in recognition that I’m analyzing. Thus related, they transform that the speaker’s status as closure-conducively reliable. Alpine meadow into a realm of right: each bears to the other the trust These formulations merely translate the view defended in previous 113. It seems perniciously speciesist to assume that only human beings are ca- sections into the language of reciprocal recognition. My present pable of the kind of trust and care at issue in a testimonial relation. Though point is this: there is a key respect in which the exchange need not the biological preconditions for such attitudes would place constraints on when a testimonial relation across species could count as consummated, we yet involve any Strawsonian accountability. To explain and defend haven’t done that bit of biology. For all we know, extraterrestrials or dolphins this claim, let me develop it in response to Thompson’s more general may — in addressing us — turn out to be inveterate bullshitters. Or they may not. Assuming a capacity for communication, it’s far from a priori whether ‘puzzle’ about bipolar normativity. The form of recognition informing members of a given species can count as trustworthy informants for mem- a testimonial exchange is more fundamental than any ‘dikaiological bers of another.

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and care, or the failure or refusal thereof, that either consummates φ you present yourself as aiming to give A a reason to φ — a reason the relation or does not. However that falls out, the pair itself falls grounded in your status as relevantly trustworthy. When you promise into bipolar normative relation — entirely outside antecedent social A to φ you present yourself as aiming to give A a reason to plan on the practices or institutions and with no need to ‘posit’ anything beyond assumption that you will φ — a reason again grounded in your status as the two of them there in the meadow. One could say that they thereby relevantly trustworthy. In each case, relevant trustworthiness involves institute a practice between them, but the institution of this practice appropriate responsiveness (in the promissory case, appropriately would not presuppose that they shared any prior practice or institution. ongoing responsiveness) to how A ought to be oriented toward the We’re now almost ready to draw the connection to accountability. good. (Your promissory obligation lapses if circumstances change But before we get there, let me make one observation about the such that it no longer serves the promisee’s practical needs, in respects species of accountability at stake in the application of illocutionary relevant to your promise, for you to do what you promised to do.114) norms. When Lombard intervenes in light of Schlombard’s orientation But you aren’t merely intervening in light of an orientation toward the to the good and tells him that p, she thereby manifests an expectation good. You present yourself as aiming to influence A’s orientation toward that Schlombard will hold her accountable in two dimensions: as a the good — that is, to intervene within A’s orientation toward the good. speaker of truth, and as a gauge of his epistemic needs. This form of Now compare testimonial telling. When you tell A that p, you present accountability does not presuppose any prior practice or institution yourself as making available a reason to believe that p — a reason between them; it presupposes merely that each possesses and can grounded in your status as relevantly trustworthy. As we’ve seen, this apply the concept of a testimonial telling. If one insists that shared reason would derive from your status as both truth-conducively and possession of this concept just is such a prior practice or institution, closure-conducively reliable, where the latter involves appropriate then my claim is that they need not share any further practice or responsiveness to A’s orientation toward the good. But here’s the institution. The force of that claim lies in how it draws a principled difference. You do not, in the testimonial case, present yourself as distinction between the illocutionary norms informing testimony and aiming to influence A’s orientation toward the good. You do not, in the illocutionary norms informing purely practical assurances such as addressing A testimonially, present yourself as aiming to influence A’s advice or a promise. practical orientation at all. You present yourself as aiming to influence The assumption that the illocutionary norms informing an A’s reasons to believe but not as aiming to influence how A acts on assurance must be grounded in something worth calling a shared his beliefs. To influence A’s beliefs, you have to pay due attention to practice makes more sense in application to advisorial or promissory A’s orientation to the good — not merely to what A believes worth relations. It is indeed hard to see how Lombard and Schlombard, who pursuing but to what A really ought to pursue. You thus intervene in do not share any institution or practice, could engage each other in the light of A’s orientation toward the good. But you are not intervening ways of advice or a promise. What could account for this difference? within A’s orientation toward the good. The difference manifests a key distinction between two ways in which If we restrict attention to your assurances that presume to intervene you might intervene with an assurance: you might intervene within A’s within A’s orientation toward the good, there are two ways for you orientation toward the good, or you might intervene merely in light of not to be accountable: (1) it wouldn’t be fair to hold you accountable, A’s orientation toward the good. (I say ‘the good’ to leave open whether this is A’s personal good or the moral good.) When you advise A to 114. I develop this observation at length in “Promise as Normative Power.”

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(2) there is simply no way to hold you accountable. There might broadly shared — that we simply trust them on the matter (though, be no way to hold you accountable for two reasons: (i) because again, we regard this as very unlikely). But what if we confronted you lack the psychic mechanism required for communication of a these aliens as a Lombard confronts a Schlombard — with no shared reactive-attitudinal sanction, (ii) because your interpersonal situation practice or institution and therefore with no mutual expectations of does not provide the sort of social mechanism required for such shared response? Here, I think Shoemaker’s conclusion does follow. communication. Some philosophers argue that psychopaths mark a Here it would be impossible (without confusion or ignorance) for an limit of accountability insofar as they are incapable of empathetically alien to hold you accountable, since it would be impossible (again, resonating to reactive-attitudinal address.115 But holding a non- without confusion or ignorance) for the alien to expect you to respond psychopath accountable is impossible if you cannot presuppose that as intended to the reactive-attitudinal sanction. your addressee will understand how you regard the targeted action If that’s impossible, then a Lombard can ‘advise’ a Schlombard only as worthy of your response. David Shoemaker poses a thought by providing testimony, not by inviting practical trust directly. And experiment in which aliens want to blame you for what they regard parallel considerations will yield a parallel result about promising. as the terrible wrong of bending some blades of grass underfoot.116 Imagine an alien ‘promising’ you to unbend the grass after you’ve Can they, without confusion or ignorance, hold you thus accountable? trampled it: this promise would give you reasons to plan on the Shoemaker plausibly argues not, since you cannot (we assume) assumption that the grass you bend on your present hike will be understand how merely bending these blades could as such be wrong. unbent. But how could you plan on that assumption? There is no (We’re not imagining that the aliens hold false beliefs — for example, conceivable point, as far as you can tell, in thus unbending blades of about the status of grass as sentient.) I do not believe that Shoemaker’s grass. The alien appears to care a lot about it, so perhaps, as before, she conclusion follows, since he stipulates that the aliens are just like us in might get you to see what planning reasons her promise gives you — if every other respect. If they are just like us, why couldn’t they intelligibly you and she share enough practices or institutions for her to reason hope that they might get us to trust them about the wrongness with you or, failing that, to invite you simply to trust her. But if you of grass-bending?117 Since we can imagine that they might argue share no practices or institutions with this alien, then her promise is us — on the basis of how they more broadly share our practices — into completely empty. Though you may have some reason to hold her to sharing their sensitivities to grass (however unlikely we think that doing what she ‘promises’ to do, the fact that you have no conceivable is), we can also imagine that they might display such astonishing stake in her doing it transforms your normative stance from that of a trustworthiness — again, based in their competence in practices more promisee to that of someone who merely aims to enforce this alien’s avowed practical commitment. It puts you, in other words, outside 115. See, for example, Gary Watson, “The Trouble with Psychopaths,” in R. J. Wal- a promissory relation with the alien, transforming the ‘promise’ into lace, R. Kumar and S. Freeman (eds), Reasons and Recognition: Essays on the Phi- losophy of T. M. Scanlon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 307–331; and a mere statement of intention. Like the alien’s ‘advice,’ her ‘promise’ David Shoemaker, “Attributability, Answerability, and Accountability,” Ethics intervenes in the way of testimony rather than in the way of any 121 (2011), esp. 627–630. more directly practical form of influence. Her ‘promise’ testifies to her 116. “Attributability, Answerability, and Accountability,” 625. intention, and your ‘holding’ her to this intention amounts to no more 117. I pursue this thought in “Trust and Reasons,” in preparation, treating it as the key to overcoming the debate over the possibility of ‘external’ practical than your insistence that she live up to this testimonial assurance by reasons. ensuring that it is true.

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My hypothesis is that considerably more social structure must be To understand the second-personal dimension of testimonial in place for acts of advising or promising to be intelligible as such warrant, I’ve argued, what we need is the notion not of accountability to your addressee than must be in place for you to communicate within a social practice but of attributability — of what Gary Watson the intentions that bring you and your addressee under the calls aretaic responsibility.119 The illocution of telling codifies a illocutionary norms informing testimony. This extra social structure relation of speaking for and being spoken for — where the question concerns the point of holding either party accountable within the on each side is one of attributability (of normative imputation) but illocutionary relation, a point that articulates what is substantially not yet of accountability (of holding each other accountable). Watson at stake within the addressee’s orientation toward the good such argues that attributability is not yet accountability because the latter that the intervention can be justified. The alien unintelligibly (to must meet an additional fairness constraint.120 I am now adding you) expects you to acknowledge the disvalue of bending blades of to that argument the further reflection that, beyond the question grass, and you unintelligibly (to her) expect the alien to acknowledge of fairness, we can identify a further intelligibility constraint. We that you simply could not find a deliberative route to that cannot start from accountability and work back to attributability by acknowledgment — unintelligibly, in each case, given the assumption simply stepping back from these questions of fairness and further that you and the alien share no practice or institution. But it is not intelligibility. I am arguing that the specifically testimonial illocution similarly unintelligible for the alien to expect you to acknowledge functions in a way that we cannot understand in terms of how it the testimonial reason that she presents herself as giving you, or would be fair or otherwise intelligible for interlocutors to hold each for you to expect the alien to intervene in light of your orientation other accountable. toward the good. The practical illocutions are in a way more robustly The dynamic of illocutionary recognition is as such entirely interpersonal than the testimonial illocution. But they purchase aretaic: it concerns not accountability relations but relations of these dimensions of interpersonality at the cost of compromising the normative imputation. If you feel misrecognized, you’ll refrain dimension of second-personality that we see most purely articulated from trusting — that’s the species of ‘holding responsible’ in this in testimony. Though we can answer Thompson’s ‘puzzle about dimension. You’ll adopt that self-protective stance that acknowledges justice’ for testimonial assurances, the puzzle remains unanswered the invitation to trust but refuses to give it. In other words, you’ll for the assurances at the core of advising and promising.118 One might commit an abuse of the illocutionary act that the speaker performs, try to explain this by noting that the trust relations invited by advising providing the ‘uptake’ sufficient for its performance — viz. recognition and promising include a moral relation, and that the trust relation of the speaker’s intentions in performing it (i. e. those in [T]) — but invited by testimony just as such is not yet a moral relation. But then refusing the relationship that the act constitutively aims to institute. the puzzle about justice — how genuine bipolarity could require an apparently monadic relation to practice or institution — would 119. “Two Faces of Responsibility,” op. cit. I follow Watson (and others: see the next note) in viewing Strawsonian accountability as constrained by consid- become a puzzle about morality, with the term ‘morality’ merely erations of fairness that don’t apply at the aretaic level where you merely marking the puzzling feature. impute the action (ibid., 272ff). 120. For other defenses of (what amounts to) a fairness constraint on accountabil- ity, see Susan Wolf, Freedom Within Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 118. I attempt to solve the puzzle for promising in “Promise as Normative Power” 1990), Chapter 4, and R. Jay Wallace, Responsibility and the Moral Sentiments and the puzzle for advising in “Trust and Reasons.” (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), Chapter 6.

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Again, when I say that you abuse the illocution, I don’t mean that you generally reliable in asserting that p only when her audience is enti- abuse the speaker or any other norm: mistrust may be exactly what tled to believe that p? — but aretaic reliability, which centrally includes this speaker deserves. Still, you needn’t feel any resentment or the S’s specific assurance, to this specific interlocutor, that she addresses like. Resentment and other reactive attitudes become appropriate him with appropriately epistemic concern.121 insofar as the illocutionary act aims to intervene within the addressee’s orientation toward the good, by providing the addressee with a reason whose intelligibility to the addressee as a reason presupposes that the addressee can recognize the reason’s authority for him — whether by responding to the force of arguments or by responding to the speaker’s manifest trustworthiness, both of which presuppose shared practices or institutions. If the act does not aim to intervene within the addressee’s orientation toward the good, the 121. I wrote the first full draft of this paper in the spring of 2007, at the kitchen illocutionary relation need not rest on shared practices or institutions. counter carrying my first-born son in a sling. I made some key revisions in the spring of 2009, likewise carrying my second-born son. Thanks to UWM You may withhold trust through a feeling of misrecognition without for the family leaves. And thanks to Donald and Jamie for those work ses- feeling entitled to resent the speaker — or to subject her to any sions — both for sleeping and for keeping up my spirits. In a different form of reactive attitude. Here, there is second-personal engagement community, I’m grateful to Richard Moran, Frederick Schmitt (who revealed his identity as referee), Matt Weiner, and an anonymous referee for helpful without Strawsonian accountability. If you do trust, your recognition comments on early drafts. I have more recently benefitted from conversation likewise consummates the illocutionary relation — again, as it may with Paul Faulkner, Elizabeth Fricker, Miranda Fricker, Sandy Goldberg, Peter Graham, Alison Hills, Ben McMyler, David Owens, and other participants in be, without accountability. a workshop organized by David Owens at the University of Reading in July I have tried to explain the recognition relation informing the illo- 2011, and from an email correspondence with Joseph Shieber. These discus- sions helped me see vividly both how different my version of the assurance cution of telling by developing what amounts to an aretaic notion of view is from other versions and how tricky it can be to explain these differ- reliability. Imagining yourself now in the speaker’s role, when you tell ences. The paper was accepted for publication in April 2008, but I hesitated A that p what you’re assuring A isn’t merely that it is the case that to send back the final draft (for more than five years!) because there were aspects of my argument that I felt I did not fully understand. I had to let other p, but also that you’ve anticipated his epistemic needs. It’s the latter work — in particular, the papers on judging, asserting, promising, epistemic assurance that you don’t give to an overhearer. What goes into ‘antici- value, and the second person to which I’ve referred in footnotes — ‘catch up’ with the argument that I’m pursuing here in order to see how this entire body pating A’s epistemic needs’? Most fundamentally, this: you judge that of work hangs together. In the end, I have not changed much. In 2011, I re- p from A’s doxastic context. This requires imagination, and it requires plied to an objection in section VII and restructured the final three sections recognition of A. That is, the A in whose context you imaginatively to make the shape of my argument clearer; in 2012, I added sections IV and VI, in which I explain how my version of the assurance view differs from judge must be relevantly like the actual A whom you’re addressing. It other versions and how those differences let me dodge problems that arise is in this respect that telling most deeply embodies bipolar or second- for other versions; and in 2013, I clarified the nature of closure-conducive reliability in section IV (provoked by Christopher Peacocke’s comments on a personal normativity. And it is in this respect that A must be on guard different paper in which I deploy that concept), the illocutionary basis for the against being bullshitted. So the defeating conditions on reasonable distinction that I draw between lying and bullshitting in section V, and the distinction between accountability and attributability as I’ve deployed it in trust must receive an interpersonal construal: the reliability in ques- section IX. Everything else — most of the paper — is substantially as it was in tion is not statistical probability — does S generally speak truly? is she 2008.

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