The Speaker’s Expectation of Trust
Given a speaker who tells one that p, there are ways of responding to what one is told whereby one wrongs (or does an injustice to) the speaker. This motivates the idea that a speaker is entitled to expect that her say-so not be responded to in those ways. Chapter 3 argued that this sort of normative expectation is the key to understanding the conversational pressure that bears on an audience who is told that p. Chapter 4 considers recent attempts to understand the source and scope of the speaker’s normative expectation. It argues that all extant attempts fail in this regard. The lesson that it takes from these failures concerns the main challenge of providing what is wanted: our account must illuminate how the interpersonal and pragmatic dimensions of the speech acts of telling and testifying interact with the epistemological dimension of testimony.