ABSTRACT
In order to elucidate the distinctive kind of second-personal epistemic dependence that they think lies at the heart of a proper philosophical understanding of testimony and its significance, Moran andMcMyler rely as much on the contrast between taking someone’s word for something and being convinced by them as they rely on the contrast between believing on the basis of testimony and believing on the basis of ordinary evidence such as footprints, bloody daggers, and so on. We depend epistemically on others in various ways, they say, but our distinctively second-personal epistemic dependence consists in the more restricted case: telling and being told, believing someone and being believed. In what follows, I want to examine this claim. After all, as Anscombe says, “[t]he greater part of our knowledge of reality rests upon belief that we repose in things we have been taught or told” (1979, 143, my emphasis). And one might wonder whether there is anything distinctively second-personal about teaching, once it is distinguished from telling.
