In my paper, I probed the gap between the Gricean approach and Millikan’s approach to human communicative agency. In particular, I argued in favor of the Gricean separability thesis, i.e., the thesis that the process whereby an addressee fulfills an agent’s communicative intention (by understanding or recognizing her informative intention) is distinct from the process whereby the addressee further fulfills (if and when he does) the agent’s informative intention (by accepting either a new belief or a new desire for action). I am grateful to Marius F. Jung for his valuable comments on my paper, in which he tries to offer positive suggestions towards bridging the gap between the Gricean separability thesis and (social) epistemology.
In particular, I agree with Marius F. Jung that the issues of whether and to what extent a communicative agent’s testimony should or can be assessed as reliable and justified, and thereby construed as knowledge (and not as mere opinion) by her recipient, are of fundamental importance. I also agree with him that it is worthwhile to try and bridge the gap between the psychological investigation of the process whereby an addressee assesses the reliability of a speaker’s testimony and the major divide between the reductionist and the anti-reductionist perspectives in the epistemology of testimony. However, I still want to resist using the particular bridge (or bridges) Jung is building for me. In the following, I want to briefly explain why.
First of all, let us be clear that what we are dealing with here is the addressee’s basic epistemic task of assessing the reliability of a communicative agent’s (the speaker’s) testimony or assertion, i.e., utterances with truth-conditional contents, because only assertions can be assessed for their reliability or believability. Only a speaker’s assertions, not a speaker’s requests, can directly enlarge her addressee’s knowledge of the world. For the purpose of the discussion of Jung’s epistemological project, we should simply ignore addressees’ responses to speakers’ utterances of requests, i.e., of utterances that lack truth-conditional contents. (I ignore here the fact that a speaker’s request may enlarge an addressee’s knowledge of the speaker’s own character traits.)
Secondly, as I understand it, Jung would like to directly link the investigation of the addressee’s task of assessing the reliability of a speaker’s assertion to the dispute between the reductionist and the anti-reductionist perspective in the epistemology of testimony. I will reconstruct Jung’s basic strategy by means of the six following assumptions.
He construes the addressee’s overall process of assessment of the reliability of a speaker’s assertion as an argument.
As I understand it, he also accepts Sperber et al.’s (2010) view that the overall process whereby an addressee assesses the reliability of a speaker’s assertion can be divided into two component processes: the assessment of the authority of the speaker (who is the source of the testimony) and the assessment of the content of the speaker’s assertion.
He further focuses on the addressee’s assessment of the authority of the speaker as the source of the testimony, at the expense of the assessment of the content of the speaker’s assertion.
He links the addressee’s assessment of the authority of the speaker as the source of the testimony to ad hominem arguments.
He draws a distinction between local and global ad hominem arguments.
Finally, he argues that only local, not global, ad hominem arguments are valid methods whereby an addressee can assess the reliability of the speaker’s assertion.
I want mainly to take issue with Jung’s very first assumption: when assessing a speaker’s assertion, the addressee is evaluating the reliability or believability of her utterance. He is not arguing with her and therefore not producing an ad hominem argument. (Construing the addressee’s process of appraisal as an attack against the speaker seems far-fetched to me.) In accordance with Jung’s second assumption (at least, on my reconstruction of his train of thought), the addressee’s appraisal can in turn be seen as a two-fold process: the addressee can focus on either the content or the source of the speaker’s utterance (or both). If the former, then the addressee’s task can be construed as a consistency check: he checks the compatibility of the truth of the speaker’s assertion with the truths of a relevant sub-set of his own beliefs. In the latter case, he scrutinizes some of the speaker’s relevant moral or “personal” properties (to use Jung’s own phrase). In particular, he will assess the personal authority of the speaker along two main dimensions: her epistemic competence (or knowledge) about the relevant domain of discourse and her moral honesty, i.e., her benevolence towards him.
Of course, the addressee’s assessment of the speaker’s reliability along these two dimensions is an inferential process, which builds on the addressee’s beliefs about both the content of the speaker’s assertion and the speaker’s personal authority. In an informal sense, it is a reasoning process. But I want to resist the view that this process should be construed as an argument, let alone as an ad hominem argument. As Sperber et al. (2010) and Mercier & Sperber (2011) have interestingly argued (no pun intended), to argue is to try and cause an addressee to accept a new belief (to endorse the truth of some proposition), by providing explicit reasons for it, i.e., by construing it as the conclusion of a set of premises from which it derives either deductively or inductively. In fact, arguments are devices used by a speaker in order to try to overcome her addressee’s reluctance to fulfill her informative intention (i.e., his reluctance to accept a new belief in accordance with her informative intention), on the sole grounds of her authority. If so, then speakers (communicative agents) argue, but an addressee doesn’t: an addressee evaluates the speaker’s argument. Of course, an addressee who disagrees with a speaker’s argument in favor of some proposition P can turn into a speaker and offer counter-arguments to try to cause his opponent to change her mind about the truth of P.