Learning from Words*

There is a widely accepted family of views in the epistemology of testimony centering around the claim that belief is the central item involved in a testimonial exchange.1 For instance, in describing the process of learning via testimony, Elizabeth Fricker provides the following: language-user has a belief, which gives rise to an utterance by him; as a result of observing this utterance another user of the same language, his audience, comes to share that belief'2 In a similar spirit, Alvin Plantinga says that ...a belief on the part of the testifiee has warrant only if that belief has warrant for the testifier.3 In both of these passages, we find strands of what I shall call the Belief View of Testimony (hereafter, the BVT).4 There are several different yet related components of the BVT. First, while statements are necessary for the process of communication, they are merely vehicles for expressing beliefs they enable us to make public what would otherwise remain private. Strictly speaking, then, we do not learn from one another's words we learn from one another's beliefs.5 This is one of the