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Notes
1 The phrase is adapted from Watson Citation2009.
2 As is customary, I will use S and A throughout to refer to Speaker and Audience in a testimonial interaction, even though the act of testifying need not involve speaking or hearing. Further, to aid comprehension, I will assume S to be female and A male.
3 Cf. Anscombe Citation1979; Cavell Citation1979.
4 All in-text numbered references in brackets in this section refer to Faulkner Citation2011.
5 Although Faulkner repeatedly presents (R) as the fallout of taking seriously the problem of cooperation, he never explicitly explains why this is so. Since he is clear that the issue to which (R) is a response is not simply that the problem of cooperation reveals the epistemic fallibility of taking any testimonial act at face value, the issue seems to be a concern for A as an epistemically responsible agent.
6 It is revealing in this regard that none of the three statements that summarize his ‘trust theory’ at the end of the book [201] mention ‘trust’, implying that the defanged version considered here falls firmly within the scope of Faulkner’s account of testimony.
7 All in-text numbered references in brackets in this section refer to McMyler Citation2011b.
8 See, e.g., McMyler Citation2011a.
9 A striking feature of McMyler’s discussion of non-testimonial trust is the absence of ‘rights-talk’ that is so central to his discussion of epistemic responsibility in the testimonial cases (e.g. the heading of 2.2).
10 Provided, of course, that I do not already have other incompatible commitments, in which case my other commitments constitute a challenge to S’s assertion, requiring her to defend the claim if voiced. Absent such obstacles to reassertion, if I do not treat the act as licensing its reassertion by me, then I have not recognized it as an assertion.
11 In writing this paper, I have benefitted from discussions with Louis Blond, Byron Davies, Catherine Elgin, Jessica Lerm, Richard Moran, Jack Ritchie & Leo Townsend, as well as with the participants in the SIAS summer school on The Second Person, organized by Jim Conant and Sebastian Roedl.