Understanding that We’re Getting Told: A Response to Richard Moran

Kathryn Petroff

 

Abstract

 

According to Richard Moran’s view of testimony, hereafter the “assurance view,” the act of telling involves a speaker asking that listeners acknowledge his or her authority to invest an utterance with epistemic import. Moran claims telling and giving evidence can be distinguished because evidentiary concerns impinge upon the speech-act after listeners understand the illocutionary force of the speaker’s remarks. However, I will argue Moran does not account for the fact that listeners often use data about the speaker and their environment in their interpretations of the force of the speaker’s utterance. This fact seems to have practical consequences, as in the recent “lawyer dog case” brought to the Louisiana Supreme Court. Thus, it seems prudent to modify the assurance view to acknowledge that listeners use evidence to interpret and respond to speakers’ acts of assuming authority for their utterances. The modified assurance view does not treat the act of telling as the act of giving evidence, even though listeners may use evidence to interpret acts of telling. In addition, it allows epistemologists to consider the way listeners’ understanding of a speaker’s authority to testify can be informed at all levels by their interpretation of the speaker’s identity and their environment.

 

• Introduction

In “Getting Told and Being Believed,” Richard Moran offers a view of testimony that accounts for why we have reason to believe another individual. While other accounts might explain why we are justified in thinking an individual’s words are good evidence, Moran’s aims to show why we might be justified in believing other individuals themselves. He calls this view the assurance view, as it suggests a speaker is “asking for a certain authority of his be acknowledged” when he tells someone something.^[1]Moreover, Moran distinguishes the act of telling from the act of giving evidence by claiming that evidentiary concerns do not impinge upon the act of telling until after the listener has understood the force of the speaker’s utterance.^[2]However, I will argue in this paper that the listener’s interpretation of evidence about speakers and their environments informs their understanding of the illocutionary force of the remarks that speakers make. Moreover, I will claim this fact can have practical consequences, as in the “lawyer dog case” that was recently brought to the Louisiana Supreme Court. This suggests we should adopt a modified version of the assurance view according to which the listener uses evidence to interpret and respond to the speaker’s act of assuming authority for the epistemic import of his or her utterance. The modified assurance view, I will claim, still counts as non-Humean, as it involves the listener using evidence to interpret the speaker’s act of telling. Moreover, I argue, the modified view I have proposed seems useful as epistemologists consider how individuals’ authority to testify is informed at all levels by their audience’s interpretation of evidence about their identity and their environment.

1. The Assurance View

Moran is interested in situations in which listeners believe an individual rather than a proposition, a piece of evidence, or some other thing. He writes that he wants “to examine the relation of believing where its direct object is not a proposition but a person.”^[3]While we might want to say a speaker is presenting evidence to a listener when they tell them something, Moran argues this is not the case. “Paradigmatic situations of telling cannot be thought of as the presentation or acceptance of evidence at all,” he claims.^[4]According to Moran, when we learn about someone’s beliefs through their testimony, we are particularly dependent on their intentions. Learning of someone’s beliefs through what they tell me means “I am dependent on such things as their discretion, sincerity, good intentions— in short, on how they deliberately present themselves to me.”^[5]After all, the speaker could be lying to me, saying something true but misleading, or being insincere. The fact that listeners are so reliant on the intention of the speaker in cases of knowledge gained from testimony points toward the difference between testimony and evidence. Moran argues that if evidence was intentionally presented to us in the same way testimony is, we would consider it doctored. “If speech is seen as a form of evidence, then once its intentional character is recognized,” he writes, “we need an account of how it could count as anything more than doctored evidence.”^[6]For instance, if I intentionally left my fingerprint on a glass for someone to find, then that fingerprint would seem suspect as a piece of evidence. But if I state something with the intention telling the truth, then that intention does not seem to render my statement suspect.

For this reason, Moran claims the act of telling involves “not simply giving expression to what’s on your mind, but… making a statement with the understanding that here it is your word that is to be relied on.”^[7]When a speaker tells a listener something, they are taking responsibility for the truth of their remarks. Moran illustrates the difference between telling and presenting evidence in his discussion of the Antonioni film Blow Up.^[8]In the film, a photographer “takes some pictures in the park of a woman and man, and then later discovers one of his shots apparently shows the man’s corpse lying in the bushes.”^[9]When the photographer looks at the photograph and sees the corpse of the man, it matters little what his intention was in taking the photograph in the first place— it counts as evidence regardless. According to Moran, the photograph’s “status as evidence is wholly independent of his beliefs or intentions.”^[10]However, this would not be the case if the photographer chose to sketch a picture of the murder instead. If the photographer were to show a sketch to a friend, Moran writes, “he would be offering him a very different kind of reason to believe what happened.”^[11]After all, the sketch would not stand on its own as a piece of evidence, as a photograph did. In the case of the sketch,“beliefs and intentions are crucial for its status as a reason to believe anything about what was there in the park.” Believing an individual’s testimony, Moran argues, is much like believing a sketch. In an act of telling, he claims, the speaker “must present his action as being without epistemic significance apart from his explicit responsibility for that significance.”^[12]That is, the speaker does not offer his utterance as evidence, but instead takes responsibility for his utterance in a way that has epistemic importance. Drawing from Paul Grice’s account of non-natural meaning, Moran claims telling is an intersubjective process involving the speaker and listener’s mutual recognition of the speaker’s intention. “Mutual recognition of intention can play a role for the audience of providing him with a reason for belief,” he writes.^[13]This occurs due to the fact that the listener sees “the speaker as presenting himself as accountable for the truth of P, and asking, through the recognition of his intention, that this offer of his assurance be accepted.”^[14]In this way, Moran accounts for the difference between testimony and evidence: the intentional presentation of evidence can detract from its value, but mutual recognition of a speakers’ intentional speech can provide a listener with a reason for belief.

Of course, Moran acknowledges there are cases when listeners can fail to recognize the speaker’s intention. When a speaker engages in the act of telling someone something, Moran writes, he “is asking for a certain authority of his be acknowledged— the authority to invest his utterance with a particular epistemic import.”^[15]If telling involves the speaker asking that their authority be acknowledged, then it makes sense that the listener could withhold that acknowledgement. As such, certain facts about the world need to be the case in order for listeners to acknowledge speakers’ authority to invest their utterances with epistemic importance. When a speaker assumes responsibility for an utterance in cases of testimony, Moran writes, “the appropriate abilities and other background conditions must be in place for it to amount to anything.”^[16]In order for the speaker to assume responsibility, the speaker must be believed to be reliable, trustworthy, and in possession of the relevant knowledge. Of course, Moran notes, we might worry that the fact that these background conditions have to be in place means acts of telling have more in common with acts of giving evidence than we might think. If mutual recognition of a speaker’s intention relies on the listener’s consideration of background conditions about the speaker, then wouldn’t we be say the listener is considering evidence presented to them?

Not so, claims Moran. “These background conditions can themselves be construed as evidential,” he writes, “but they are not themselves sufficient for giving any epistemic significance to the speaker’s words.” Even if we might take the reliability or trustworthiness of the speaker to be reasons for accepting his or her assumption of responsibility for the truth of his or her testimony, these things are not wholly what grants the utterance its epistemic significance. According to Moran, the relevance of background conditions “only comes into play once it is understood that a particular speech-act is being performed with those words (i.e., an assertion or promise rather than something else).”^[17]For Moran, it is only after listeners interpret the illocutionary force of the speaker’s utterance that they engage with evidentiary concerns such as whether the speaker is reliable, trustworthy, and in possession of the relevant evidence. Because evidentiary concerns do not impinge on listeners’ understanding of the speech act being performed, the act of telling cannot be construed as the same thing as giving evidence. “In considering the speaker’s words,” Moran writes, “the audience’s belief in his knowledge and trustworthiness do not do him any epistemic good if it is still left open just what kind of action (if any) the speaker is presenting his utterance as.”^[18]Therefore, Moran suggests, even if listeners do not accept the speaker’s assurance that his utterance is true based on evidence about the speaker, that does not mean that the act of telling is equivalent to the act of presenting evidence.

III. A Case for Modifying the Assurance View

Is it true that listeners do not consider background facts about the speaker or their situation in determining the force of his or her utterance? For instance, consider a scenario involving two students, Mary and Bill, who are enrolled in a philosophy class for which article X was assigned. Unbeknownst to Mary, Bill does not think women are very rational, intelligent or perceptive. Mary tells Bill that she has a criticism of one of the philosopher’s arguments in article X. In response, Bill explains the premise of article X to Mary. Mary protests that Bill misunderstood her. She had grasped the article perfectly and meant to express she had a criticism of it. Now, what happened in this situation? It seems Bill misunderstood the illocutionary force of Mary’s statement. Because he views women as irrational and unintelligent, he thought the force of her remark was to express confusion about article X rather than offer a criticism of it. That is, his interpretation of evidence about Mary’s identity influenced his interpretation of the illocutionary force of her remark. Before Bill could grant or withhold recognition of Mary’s intent, evidentiary concerns shaped his idea of what her intent was in the first place. As such, it does not appear the relevance of background conditions “only comes into play once it is understood that a particular speech act is being performed with those words,” as Moran suggests.^[19]Instead, Bill seems to use evidence from what he believes to be the case about Mary’s identity to understand the illocutionary force of Mary’s remark.

Of course, one might object, this is an example of the way prejudice interferes with our normal manner of interpreting illocutionary force. This could mean my example is abnormal, singular, or an exception to the general rule Moran provides. Perhaps we tend not to use evidence about speakers to interpret the illocutionary force of their remarks except for in cases when we have certain prejudices against their social identities. However, it seems we can think of many cases when we use evidence about a speaker or their environment to interpret the illocutionary force of their remarks. For instance, imagine Bill has observed a blizzard outside the window. Mary walks inside the room, covered in snow, and remarks that it is a beautiful day outside. Drawing on evidence regarding the state of the weather outside the window, Bill might infer that the force of her remark is to make an ironic joke about the weather rather than to state that it is indeed a beautiful day outside. Accordingly, even in cases when we are not using evidentiary concerns involving prejudice against a speaker’s identity to interpret the illocutionary force of a speaker’s remark, it seems we might use evidence about a person’s environment to try to determine what they are saying. What I mean to bring out by these examples is that it seems evidentiary concerns might often come into play before Moran believes they do. In many cases, it seems we use evidence we have about a particular person, the category of individuals that person belongs to, and that person’s situation in order to interpret the illocutionary force of their remarks. After all, it seems we use data about everything from a speaker’s facial expression and tone of voice, to our memories of the speaker, to the environment of the speaker to interpret the force of their remarks. This is not to say we always evaluate all of the data I have described in interpreting illocutionary force. It also need not be the case that we consciously appraise the evidence I have described in interpreting force. In some cases, we might infer the force of a speaker’s remark from data about them without even thinking about it. Or we might interpret the force of their remarks in a way that is conscious but that we find hard to articulate after the fact, as it involves non-propositional knowledge regarding how to rapidly interpret people’s expressions, posture and so on.

Moreover, it seems the fact that we use evidence about speakers’ identities to interpret illocutionary force can have serious and sometimes devastating practical consequences. In a recent case that has been termed “the lawyer dog case” by the media, the Louisiana Supreme Court decided defendant Warren Demesme had not in fact asked to receive counsel when he was under interrogation. The Washington Post reports that the Louisiana resident told the detectives who were interrogating him to “just give me a lawyer, dog.” According to Louisiana law, detectives must cease questioning a suspect when he or she requests a lawyer. However, the detectives continued to interrogate Demesme, and claimed they believed he was asking for a “lawyer dog” instead of invoking his right to counsel. The Louisiana court ruled in the detectives’ favor, and refused to throw out the portion of the interrogation that occurred after Demesme claims he asked for counsel. The judges asserted that the ambiguity of Demesme’s remarks meant they did not qualify as an act of asserting his right to counsel.^[20]However, one could argue the detective’s prejudice against Demesme’s identity as a young, black man, rather than any ambiguity on Demesme’s part, accounts for the fact that they misinterpreted the illocutionary force of his act of asserting his right to counsel. Because the court ruled his interrogation would not be thrown out, Demesme is awaiting trial in the Orleans Parish jail.^[21]Therefore, the detective’s misinterpretation of the force of Demesme’s remark will have a serious and lasting impact on his life. Given that misinterpretation of illocutionary force based on evidence about speaker’s identity and environment can have such striking practical effects, it seems we need a theory capable of discussing it. If we lack a theory that accounts for the way prejudice might interfere with our understanding of illocutionary force, then we are at a loss to explain situations such as Demesme’s.

Of course, it might be objected that we can imagine some hypothetical case in which we do not use evidence to interpret the force of a speaker’s remarks. I will not go so far as to say we always use evidence to interpret illocutionary force in every situation. Regardless, what I mean to bring out by the examples I have discussed is that there does not seem to be as sharp a distinction between giving testimony and giving evidence as Moran thinks there is. Recall that Moran argues “the paradigmatic situations of telling cannot be thought of as the presentation or acceptance of evidence at all.”^[22]Instead, Moran claims telling involves the speaker asking for a certain authority of his to be acknowledged (18).^[23]But it seems the audience often must interpret evidence about the speaker and his environment in order to determine that he is asking for his authority to be acknowledged and in order to determine whether they should in fact acknowledge it. As such, it appears the speaker’s act of asking that his or her authority be acknowledged relies in many cases on the existence of evidence, such as the speaker’s tone, identity, or environment, that he or she may not be in control of. This does not mean telling is the same thing as presenting evidence. Rather, it seems that listeners must often interpret evidence before telling can occur. Therefore, it seems too strong to claim that situations of telling cannot be thought of as involving the presentation or acceptance of evidence, as Moran does. Rather, one might refine his thesis by saying that telling often involves the acceptance and presentation of evidence but that it is not merely an evidential relation.

Of course, one might object that my modification of the assurance view loses sight of the distinction Moran means to make between instances of telling and offering evidence. Moran writes that he wants to provide a theory that will address the “question of whether believing the person… is a legitimate, and perhaps basic, source of new beliefs.”^[24]Is the modified assurance view, according to which the process of believing a person can be mediated at all levels by considerations of evidence, still the case of believing a person? It seems this might be determined by seeing how the modified assurance view addresses the difference between the sketch in the photograph in the example drawing from Antonioni’s Blow Up. After all, this example provides a useful analogy that brings out the difference between providing assurance and offering evidence. In the case of interpreting the photograph, it seems we might have to marshal evidence about it in order to understand it. We might blow it up to see if the blood in the image is fake. We might look closely at the angle of light in the photograph to see if it suggests a dead body where there is none. But it still seems to stand on its own as a piece of evidence, regardless of the intentions of the photographer. In the case of the sketch, however, we would have gather evidence about the intentions of the artist. Is the sketch an art piece intended to be hung in a museum? Is it intended to illustrate a dream or fantasy on behalf of the artist? In the case of the photograph, all we have to do is determine whether we believe it as a piece of evidence. In the case of the sketch, however, we have to gather pieces of evidence to determine how we should interpret and what we should believe about the artist’s intention. The same can be said of the act of telling under the modified version of the assurance view I have articulated. In situations in which we are presented with evidence X, it seems we merely believe or disbelieve evidence X. However, in situations of telling, it seems the audience interprets evidence X to determine if the speaker is asking for his authority to be acknowledged and whether they should in fact acknowledge it. As such, it seems I can make the case that the modified assurance view still counts as non-Humean. Moran writes that the Humean perspective considers “the speech of other people [as] something which is treated as evidence of the truth of various claims about the world.”^[25]Yet it seems the modified assurance view I have presented still vindicates testimony as a source of beliefs and does not suggest we should treat speech as mere evidence. After all, I have offered a version of the assurance view according to which the audience evaluates evidence to infer the speaker is presenting himself to be accountable for the truth of P. The epistemic import of the speaker’s act of telling still principally concerns the speaker’s act of offering assurance and the listener’s act of accepting that offer, even if the listener’s interpretation of the speech act is bound up in evidentiary concerns. As such, the modified view I have presented concerns what it means to believe a person rather than what it means to take that person’s speech as good or bad evidence. However, it allows for the fact that our act of believing a person is informed by evidentiary concerns.

Modifying Moran’s claim in this way seems important because it acknowledges that we do not have a perfect understanding of others’ intentions. Rather, our understanding of the force of a person’s speech is informed by our knowledge of who they are, what their situation is, and our beliefs about what they might be trying to say to us. The fact that a person says something does not mean the audience magically grasps the force of their remark independent of the context in which this interaction is taking place. Accordingly, the view I have presented allows us to discuss the way listeners’ interpretation of evidence about a speaker could prevent them from recognizing the speaker’s authority. When a speaker engages in the act of telling someone something, Moran writes, he “is asking for a certain authority of his be acknowledged— the authority to invest his utterance with a particular epistemic import.”^[26]Considerations of a person’s context and identity might prevent us from realizing they are even asking to us to grant them authority to testify to the truth of a certain proposition. Who we understand as authoritative, as well as who we choose to grant authority to, is often informed by our understanding of their identity and the situation at hand. As such, it appears the modified assurance view I have proposed could better equip us to account for the number of ways our recognition of a speaker’s authority to be can be disrupted. Consider the example I discussed earlier in which a pair of detectives failed to understand that Warren Demesme was invoking his right to counsel. It seems Moran’s version of the assurance view would not be able to account for how the detectives’ prejudice against Demesme caused them to misinterpret his speech act. After all, it would suggest the detectives must have understood the force of Demesme’s remark without their beliefs about his identity impinging on their understanding. My modified view, on the other hand, would allow epistemologists to speak about the way the detective’s prejudice against Demesme caused them to fail to recognize the illocutionary force of what he had to say.

Consequently, it seems Moran’s view makes understanding the force of what others are trying to say seem easier and simpler than it really is. Listeners do not understand the force of an act of telling simply because the speaker utters a series of words. Instead, their understanding that an individual is asking to have their authority be acknowledged is informed by their interpretation of that individual and their context. Thus, I have argued Richard Moran’s assurance view needs to be altered to account for the way that listeners use evidence about the speaker and their identity to interpret the illocutionary force of what they have to say. This modified assurance view still counts as non-Humean because it involves using evidence to interpret a speech act rather than treating a speech act as evidential. Moreover, it offers us the ability to account for situations in which acts of telling fail because of the listeners’ interpretation of facts about the speaker’s identity or environment. After all, given that the assurance view concerns individuals asking to be granted authority, we would want to be able to use it to address situations in which our beliefs about others’ authority is informed by our prejudices against their identities. For this reason, it seems the view I have presented provides a more accurate description of the relationship between evidence and testimony as well as one that would be useful in cases of addressing which knowers we choose to believe.

 

 

 

 

References

Blow Up. Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni. Produced by Carlo Ponti and Pierre Rouve. Screenplay by Michelangelo Antonioni and Tonino Guerra. Performed by David Hemmings and Vanessa Redgrave. United States: Premier Pictures, 1966.

Grice, H. P. “Meaning&nbsp.” Philosophical Review66 (1957), 377-388.

Moran, Richard A. “Getting Told and being Believed.” Philosopher’s Imprint5.5 (2005): 1-29.

Tom Jackman. “The suspect told police ‘give me a lawyer dog.’ The court says he wasn’t asking for a lawyer. “Washington Post – Blogs. Nov 2, 2017. Web. <https://search.proquest.com/docview/1959053996>.

^[1]Moran, Richard A. “Getting Told and being Believed.” Philosopher’s Imprint5, no. 5 (2005): 18.

^[2]Ibid., 16.

^[3]Ibid., 2.

^[4]Ibid., 3.

^[5]Ibid., 5.

^[6]Ibid., 6.

^[7]Ibid., 8.

^[8]Blow Up. Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni. Produced by Carlo Ponti and Pierre Rouve. Screenplay by Michelangelo Antonioni and Tonino Guerra. Performed by David Hemmings and Vanessa Redgrave. United States: Premier Pictures, 1966.

^[9]Moran, Richard A. “Getting Told and being Believed.” Philosopher’s Imprint5, no. 5 (2005): 10.

^[10]Ibid.

^[11]Ibid., 11.

^[12]Ibid., 14.

^[13]Ibid., 18.

388. P. Grice, “Meaning.”Philosophical Review 66 (1957): 377-388.

^[14]Moran, Richard A. “Getting Told and being Believed.” Philosopher’s Imprint5, no. 5 (2005): 18.

^[15]Ibid.

^[16]Ibid., 16.

^[17]Ibid.

^[18]Ibid.

^[19]Ibid.

^[20]“The suspect told police ‘give me a lawyer dog.’ The court says he wasn’t asking for a lawyer,” in WP Company LLC. The Washington Post [database online]. Washington, Nov 2.

^[21]Ibid.

^[22]Moran, Richard A. “Getting Told and being Believed.” Philosopher’s Imprint5, no. 5 (2005): 3.

^[23]Ibid., 18.

^[24]Ibid., 4.

^[25]Ibid., 4.

^[26]Ibid., 18.