How can I give you a reason to believe what I tell you? I can influence the evidence available to you. Or I can simply invite your trust. These two ways of giving reasons work very differently. When a speaker tells her hearer that p, I argue, she intends that he gain access to a prima facie reason to believe that p that derives not from evidence but from his mere understanding of her act. Unlike mere assertions, acts of telling (...) give reasons directly. They give reasons by inviting the hearer’s trust. This yields a novel form of anti-reductionism in the epistemology of testimony. The status of testimony as a sui generis source of epistemic warrant is entailed by the nature of the act of telling. We can discover the nature of this illocution, and its epistemic role, by examining how it functions in the real world of human relations. (shrink)

Previous assurance-theoretic treatments of testimony have not adequately explained how the transmission of warrant depends specifically on the speaker’s mode of address – making it natural to suspect that the interpersonal element is not epistemic but merely psychological or action-theoretic. I aim to fill that explanatory gap: to specify exactly how a testifier’s assurance can create genuine epistemic warrant. In doing so I explain (a) how the illocutionary norm governing the speech act proscribes not lies but a species of bullshit, (...) in an extension of Harry Frankfurt’s sense, (b) how that norm makes testimony fully second-personal, in Stephen Darwall’s sense, or bipolar, in Michael Thompson’s sense, and (c) how that species of second-personality or bipolarity is more fundamental than the practical species that Darwall and Thompson discuss. One attraction of this new Assurance View of testimony is that it allows us to reconceptualize the natures of normativity and responsibility more generally, viewing the assurance as implicating us in normative relations of recognition, and therefore of justice, that are not yet moralized with reactive attitudes. (shrink)

The oddities in lottery cases and Moore’s paradox appear to support the knowledge account of assertion, according to which one should assert only what one knows. This paper preserves an emphasis on epistemic norms but presents grounds for an alternative explanation. The alternative divides the explanandum, explaining the error in lottery and Moorean assertions with one move and their deeper incoherence with another. The error derives from a respect in which the assertions are uninformative: the speaker is not being appropriately (...) responsive to her addressee’s epistemic needs. And the incoherence derives from a deeper respect in which lottery and some (but not all) Moorean assertions are uninformative: it is difficult to see how the speaker’s assertion could express any judgment she has made or would relevantly make, since she transparently lacks epistemic authority to inform any conceivable interlocutor on the subject. This diagnosis suggests an epistemic approach not directly to assertion but to judgment. Without judging that p, how could a speaker be in the business of informing her addressee that p? If the speaker transparently lacks authority to inform anyone whether p – to give anyone her word that p – how could she without confusion count as judging that p? (shrink)

[The version of this paper published by Oxford online in 2019 was not copy-edited and has some sense-obscuring typos. I have posted a corrected (but not the final published) version on this site. The version published in print in 2020 has these corrections.] Which is more fundamental, assertion or testimony? Should we understand assertion as basic, treating testimony as what you get when you add an interpersonal addressee? Or should we understand testimony as basic, treating mere assertion -- assertion without (...) testimony -- as what you get when you subtract that interpersonal relation? In this chapter, I’ll argue for the subtractive approach and for the more general thesis that its treatment of the interpersonal element in assertion makes understanding that interpersonal element the key to understanding how assertion expresses belief. My theory of belief-expression in assertion treats it as internalizing the transmission of belief in testimony. How we understand that internalizing move depends on how we conceptualize the interpersonal element in testimony. Since what I’ll call the Command Model does not give us the conceptual resources to make this move, we should adopt an alternative that I’ll call the Custodial Model, on which a testifier aims not to convince her addressee but to reason with him – to give him reasons to believe what she tells him grounded in her trustworthiness in thus attempting to influence him. The subtractive approach to assertion thus rests on a key distinction between the aims of reasoning and persuasion. (shrink)

An assurance theory of trust begins from the act of assurance – whether testimonial, advisorial or promissory – and explains trust as a cognate stance of resting assured. My version emphasizes the risks and rewards of trust. On trust’s rewards, I show how an assurance can give a reason to the addressee through a twofold exercise of ‘normative powers’: (i) the speaker thereby incurs an obligation to be sincere; (ii) if the speaker is trustworthy, she thereby gives her addressee the (...) reason. Each claim is controversial; my contribution lies in how I defend them together, linking the sincerity obligation to the provision of reasons. On trust’s risks, I defend a popular thesis about the nature of trust – that trust differs from mere reliance in how it risks betrayal – against the objection that the thesis ‘moralizes’ trust. Such betrayal need not be moral, I argue, because it may derive entirely from how the assurance purports to provide a reason. (shrink)

Some philosophers worry that it can never be reasonable to act simply on the basis of trust, yet you act on the basis of self-trust whenever you merely follow through on one of your own intentions. It is no more reasonable to follow through on an intention formed by an untrustworthy earlier self of yours than it is to act on the advice of an untrustworthy interlocutor. But reasonable mistrust equally presupposes untrustworthiness in the mistrusted, or evidence thereof. The concept (...) of an intention, I argue, codifies the fact that practical reason rests on a capacity for reasonable trust. (shrink)

This paper addresses a problem concerning the rational stability of intention. When you form an intention to φ at some future time t, you thereby make it subjectively rational for you to follow through and φ at t, even if—hypothetically—you would abandon the intention were you to redeliberate at t. It is hard to understand how this is possible. Shouldn't the perspective of your acting self be what determines what is then subjectively rational for you? I aim to solve this (...) problem by highlighting a role for narrative in intention. I'll argue that committing yourself to a course of action by intending to pursue it crucially involves the expectation that your acting self will be ‘swept along’ by its participation in a distinctively narrative form of self-understanding. I'll motivate my approach by criticizing Richard Holton's and Michael Bratman's recent treatments of the stability of intention, though my account also borrows from Bratman's work. I'll likewise criticize and borrow from David Velleman's work on narrative and self-intelligibility. When the pieces fall into place, we'll see how intending is akin to telling your future self a kind of story. My thesis is not that you address your acting self but that your acting self figures as a ‘character’ in the ‘story’ that you address to a still later self. Unlike other appeals to narrative in agency, mine will explain how as narrator you address a specifically intrapersonal audience. (shrink)

Can a reason to believe testimony derive from the addressee’s trust itself or only from reliability in the speaker that the trust perhaps causes? I aim to cast suspicion on the former view, defended by Faulkner, in favor of the latter – despite agreeing with Faulkner’s emphasis on the second-personal normativity of testimonial assurance. Beyond my narrow disagreement with Faulkner lie two broader issues. I argue that Faulkner misappropriates Bernard Williams’s genealogy of testimony when he makes use of Williams’s genealogical (...) argument in his own preferred assurance view of testimony. Though Williams doesn’t clearly articulate it, there is a deep reason why Williams’s genealogy cannot underwrite an argument for trust-based testimonial reasons. Can a genealogical argument underwrite any version of the assurance view? I sketch an assurance view of testimonial reasons that rejects Faulkner’s thesis that such reasons could be grounded in trust. Then I examine what it would take for that assurance view to receive genealogical vindication. (shrink)

How can you give your interlocutor a reason to act? One way is by manipulating his deliberative context through threats, flattery, or other incentives. Another is by addressing him in the way distinctive of reasoning with him. I aim to account for the possibility of this non-manipulative form of address by showing how it is realized through the performance of a specific illocutionary act, that of advising as inviting to trust. I argue that exercise of a capacity for reasonable trust (...) can give us reasons that are not grounded in our motivational susceptibilities. Here I echo Kant on moral motivation. But this rational faculty assesses not principles but persons. Here I echo Hume on the moral virtues. We can thus agree with Kant about the motivational efficacy of practical reasons dispensed through advice but agree with Hume about the form of intelligence needed to put ourselves in touch with them. (shrink)

On one conception of practical rationality, being rational is most fundamentally a matter of avoiding incoherent combinations of attitudes. This conception construes the norms of rationality as codified by rational requirements, and one plausible rational requirement is that you not be akratic: that you not judge, all things considered, that you ought to ϕ while failing to choose or intend to ϕ. On another conception of practical rationality, being rational is most fundamentally a matter of thinking or acting in a (...) way that’s informed by your practical reasons. This second conception construes the norms of rationality in terms that appear to allow the possibility of rational akrasia, since your capacity to act on your reasons can function at a level that need not involve deliberative judgment. Though their treatments of akrasia make them seem incompatible, I’ll argue that the two conceptions of rationality are not incompatible. It is possible to accommodate the core insight motivating defenses of ‘rational’ akrasia within the conception of rationality as codified by requirements of rational coherence. (shrink)

This paper treats two questions about the relation between trust and the will. One question, about trust, is whether you can trust ‘at will.’ Can you trust despite acknowledging that you lack evidence of the trustee’s worthiness of your trust? Another question, about the will, is whether you can exercise your will at all without trust – at least, in yourself. I treat the second question as a guide to the first, arguing that the role of trust in the will (...) reveals how you can trust at will. The key lies in distinguishing two ways of being responsive to evidence. On the one hand, you cannot trust someone – whether another person or your own earlier self – whom you judge unworthy of your trust. On the other hand, trust does not require a positive assessment of trustworthiness. I thus take issue with Pamela Hieronymi’s analysis of trust as a “commitment-constituted attitude.” Your trust is indeed constrained by your responsiveness to evidence of untrustworthiness, but you need undertake no commitment akin to or involving a judgment that the trustee is trustworthy. We can see why trust is not a commitment-constituted attitude by seeing how trust itself plays a role in forming a commitment. (shrink)

How far, if at all, do our intrapersonal and our interpersonal epistemic obligations run in parallel? This paper treats the question as addressing the stability of doxastic commitment in the two dimensions. In the background lies an analogy between doxastic and practical commitment. We’ll pursue the question of doxastic stability by coining a doxastic analogue of Gregory Kavka’s much-discussed toxin case. In this new case, you foresee that you will rationally abandon a doxastic commitment by undergoing a shift in the (...) context in which you doxastically deliberate. The case reveals an important stability condition on doxastic commitment that plays no role in cases modeled on Ulysses and the Sirens, the scenario that has shaped previous attempts to draw an analogy between doxastic and practical commitment. The stability condition thereby revealed is not diachronic -- it does not involve a shift in belief -- but we can construct specifically diachronic cases that reveal an important intrapersonal epistemic obligation. This obligation arises when you expect the shift in belief by ‘projecting’ yourself into a future doxastic context -- thus vindicating a restricted, but only this restricted, application of Bas van Fraassen’s Reflection Principle. Despite some important differences, we can use these diachronic cases as a model for interpersonal cases that reveal an important role for doxastic context in the epistemology of disagreement. But the roles played by projection and context in disagreement ensure that there is no general obligation to be responsive to the opinion of an epistemic peer who disagrees with you. (shrink)

Practical commitment is Janus-faced, looking outward toward the expectations it creates and inward toward their basis in the agent’s will. This paper criticizes Kantian attempts to link these facets and proposes an alternative. Contra David Velleman, the availability of a conspiratorial perspective (not yours, not your interlocutor’s) is what allows you to understand yourself as making a lying promise – as committing yourself ‘outwardly’ with the deceptive reasoning that Velleman argues cannot provide a basis for self-understanding. Moreover, the intrapersonal availability (...) of such a third perspective is what enables you to commit yourself ‘inwardly.’ Here I offer an alternative to Christine Korsgaard’s account of practical commitment, on which committing yourself requires identifying yourself with a principle. You needn’t identify yourself with a principle, I argue, because the unity at which you aim when you commit yourself is a unity not with your acting self but with a later perspective, where the relation is one of self-intelligibility, not self-justification, and therefore needn’t be mediated by principles. This ‘twice-future’ perspective – neither your present intending nor your (once-)future acting but a third perspective that looks back on that relation – plays the intrapersonal role played in interpersonal commitment by potential co-conspirators. Kantians are therefore right to link your ability to commit yourself with your ability credibly to express that commitment to others. But the linkage generates a strikingly unKantian result. The nature of agency cannot provide an apriori basis for honesty because what enables you to commit yourself is what also enables you to lie. (shrink)

This paper defends an internalist view of agency. The challenge for an internalist view of agency is to explain how an agent’s all-things-considered judgment has necessary implications for action, a challenge that lies specifically in the possibility of two species of akratic break: between judgment and intention, and between intention and action. I argue that the two breaks are not importantly different: in each case akrasia manifests a single species of irrational self-mistrust. I aim to vindicate internalism by showing how (...) rational agency rests on our capacity for trusting receptivity to the verdict of judgment. To call the relation receptivity is to characterize it as fundamentally passive. To call it trusting receptivity is to ensure that the passivity is not incompatible with agency, since trust retains a crucial degree of control. I argue that the best way to meet the externalist argument from akrasia is to abandon the assumption that the will must be a locus of activity. (shrink)

How must you think about time when you form an intention? Obviously, you must think about the time of action. Must you frame the action in any broader prospect or retrospect? In this essay I argue that you must: you thereby commit yourself to a specific prospect of a future retrospect – a retrospect, indeed, on that very prospect. In forming an intention you project a future from which you will not ask regretfully, referring back to your follow-through on that (...) intention, “What on earth was I thinking?” I argue that this broader attitude expresses the self-accountability necessary for practical commitment. (shrink)

This paper engages two debates about trust, deriving from two distinct questions about the nature of trust. The first asks how to define trust. Does trusting B to φ involve anything more than relying on B to φ? The second asks about the normative structure of trust. Does trust most fundamentally embody a two-place or a three-place relation? I’ll defend a new position in the second debate that yields an equally new position in the first. The standard three-place model highlights (...) ‘A trusts B to φ.’ The two-place model prefers ‘A trusts B.’ On my new three-place model, both are less fundamental than ‘A φs through trust in B.’ We do, of course, trust people to do things. But the most fundamental form of trust lies in doing something through trust in a person. I call this the Assurance View of trust because I’ll argue that trusting involves accepting another’s invitation to trust – an assurance, in effect, that the other is relevantly trustworthy. Trust thereby differs from mere reliance by how it makes available a reason to rely on the trusted. In mere reliance, your reason to rely on B is exogenous to the reliance relation, emerging, for example, from B’s track record of relevant reliability. When you trust B, by contrast, you take yourself to have a reason to rely on B that is endogenous to your trust, a reason grounded not merely in B’s reliability, exogenously considered, but in B’s ongoing responsiveness to your relevant needs. The Assurance View’s key insight emerges, I’ll argue, from cases wherein trust is disappointed – the trusted does not do what you trusted her to do – yet not thereby betrayed. (shrink)

It’s a popular idea that memory resembles testimony insofar as each can ‘preserve’ epistemic warrant. But how does such ‘preservation’ do its epistemic work? I have elsewhere developed an assurance theory of testimonial warrant. Here, I develop an assurance theory of preservative memory. How could the ‘preservation’ of warrant through memory work through an assurance? What would even count as an intrapersonal assurance? I explain each form of preservation by contrasting the relation that preserves warrant with a pathological alternative. My (...) assurance theory of testimony theorizes the illocutionary norms governing the speech act of telling by explaining what goes wrong when there’s what Austin calls an ‘abuse.’ But what norms govern an intrapersonal memory relation? There are two sides in a memory relation: the earlier self judges that p, then memory keeps the later self in epistemic touch with that judgment by ‘preserving’ its warrant. But this is not an illocutionary relation. (When you ‘tell yourself that p,’ you are trying to ‘convince yourself’ that p and as such typically do not yet even judge that p.) I argue that the earlier self nonetheless offers an assurance by extending an invitation to trust. Your earlier self judges that p in part by projecting a future in which you will continue to trust yourself on the question whether p when you lose access to the evidence that informed the judgment. That projection of trust in yourself posits a worthiness of trust that ought to lead others to accept your testimony that p. Assurance in memory and assurance in testimony thus ought to work together. This aspect of the parallel emerges vividly when we see how it breaks down in the pathology of gaslighting – more than merely illocutionary abuse! – which targets specifically how testimony and memory work together in inviting trust relations. (shrink)

[This draft is dated November 2007. I wrote it while I was a fellow at the Center for 21st Century Studies at UW-Milwaukee, in 2005-06, and published it only on the Center's website as a working paper. Many of the core ideas in this paper wound up in "Receptivity and the Will," Nous 2009, "Assertion, Sincerity, and Knowledge," Nous 2013, and "Assurance and Warrant," Philosophers' Imprint 2014 -- though formulated rather differently. What follows is the original abstract.] This working paper (...) extends a project that I’ve been developing for several years on the role of trust, including self-trust, in rationality and personal autonomy. I’m interested equally in epistemic questions (what to believe) and in practical questions (how to act), though the present paper addresses only the former. In an earlier paper on the epistemic side of my project, “Telling as Inviting to Trust” (Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, May 2005), I offered an explanation of how you can get an entitlement to believe something simply by trusting someone when she tells you it’s so, the entitlement deriving not merely from the assurance but from the trustworthy character of the one who gives it. The present paper adapts my explanation of believing-on-another’s-word to belief as such, via the observation that you can’t form a belief without trusting someone’s judgment – if only your own. I view intrapersonal reasoning about what to believe as an internalization of the interpersonal cases I analyzed in that earlier paper. In each instance, belief-formation has a second-personal dynamic: an invitation to trust on one side, trusting acceptance of that invitation on the other. If I’m right, the dynamic at the heart of all belief manifests not autonomy but a trusting heteronomy, whereby you render yourself appropriately receptive to judgment – your own or another’s. (The idea that judging is inviting self-trust first occurred to me in 2002, but I didn’t get a chance to develop it properly till 2005-06, my fellowship year at the Center for 21st Century Studies. I appreciate the support.). (shrink)

What sense could it make to describe your life as ‘unlivable’? What is it not only to be alive but to have a life that you live or lead? I answer by developing a social understanding of the pursuit of meaning in life. True to other uses of ‘meaning,’ I propose, meaning in a life is communicative. If you experience your life as ‘unlivable,’ recovery can lie in this communicative dynamic: you regain the experience of leading your life by letting (...) others remind you of meanings you have communicated to them in leading it. My argument develops an analogy between two dimensions in which you project an investment – a care, concern, love, or the like – when you form an intention or plan. Intrapersonally, you project your investment as communicatively intelligible to your own future self at ‘plan’s end.’ Interpersonally, you project it as communicatively intelligible to others who might come to love this thing that you love simply because you love it, as an expression of love for you. The normativity of meaning in your life puts rational pressure on you not only to abandon investments that you cannot communicate but to experience the meaning in investments that you retain. (shrink)

Is autonomy – governing yourself – compatible with letting yourself be governed by trust? This paper argues that autonomy is not only compatible with appropriate trust but actually requires it. Autonomy requires appropriate trust because it is undermined by inappropriate mistrust. An autonomous agent treats herself as answerable for her action-guiding commitments, where answerability requires openness to the rational influence of external, critical perspectives on those commitments. This openness to correction makes one vulnerable to manipulation and can be exploited in (...) ways that undermine autonomy instead of supporting it. We argue that autonomy is undermined by inappropriate trust, and that the inappropriateness lies in the agent’s failure to manifest appropriate responsiveness to evidence of untrustworthiness in the one trusted. The problem isn’t that autonomy requires dispensing with trust but that trust must itself be governed by appropriate responsiveness to evidence of untrustworthiness. Our view confronts two challenges. One challenge lies in explaining why you shouldn’t treat your vulnerability to manipulation as a general reason to let your trusting disposition lapse into an untrusting one. We argue that there is no such general reason to let your responsiveness to evidence of untrustworthiness be supplanted by a suspicious disposition to seek and require positive evidence of trustworthiness. A second, and deeper, challenge arises from the fact that in some especially sophisticated cases of manipulation there is no evidence of untrustworthiness to which you could respond. We argue that you cannot rationally cope with even this unresolvable risk of exploited trust by trusting only yourself. (shrink)

Entering into a trust relation enables you to do things you couldn't otherwise do. As trusted, you can help others do or believe what they have reason to do or believe. As trusting, you can get such help when more private resources run out. I begin by contrasting the way you address someone when you intend him to trust your testimony or advice with the way you might address him if you wanted merely to give him evidence that what you (...) assert is true or to get him to do something. In inviting someone to trust you, you intend to give him a reason by a Gricean mechanism: on the basis of his recognition simply that that is what you intend. Giving and getting reasons in this way rests, I argue, on the addressee's exercise of a distinctive species of rationality: the capacity to trust where and only where it makes sense to trust. I call this capacity fiduciary reason. I explain how an agent's capacity for fiduciary reason functions as an irreducible source both of epistemic reasons and of practical---prudential and moral---reasons. I then apply my conception of trust-based reasons to two debates in the theory of agency. First, I argue that the inclusion of an agent's fiduciary reason in a conception of his practical rationality vindicates an internalist view of practical reasons that accommodates the guiding insight of externalist views: that it always makes sense to think a gap might emerge between your motivational susceptibilities and what you have reason to do. I construe this gap as separating the motives you can reach by a private deliberation from those you can reach only by trusting another's advice. Second, I argue that fiduciary reason plays a crucial role in the diachronic species of practical rationality you manifest when you merely follow through on one of your own intentions. It is no more reasonable to follow through on an intention formed by an untrustworthy earlier self of yours, I argue, than it is to act on the advice of an untrustworthy interlocutor. (shrink)