Response to Case Two

One potential worry about this case is that Sally offers different testimony in the worlds in which she intends to comment on car A and the worlds in which she intends to comment on car B. I have maintained that Matt's belief about Sally's intentions is unsafe because he would have formed the same (false) beliefs in worlds where Sally decided to comment on car A. However, safety is standardly relativised to a method. That is, the important thing is not whether there are nearby worlds where Matt forms a false belief, but rather whether there are nearby worlds in which Matt forms a false belief by employing the same method. If Sally offers different testimony in each case then surely Matt's belief is not formed via the same method.

This objection fails for two reasons. Firstly, Matt's unsafe belief concerns Sally's communicative intentions, whereas Sally's testimony concerns the fuel efficiency of a car. The mechanisms Matt would use to reach a judgement about Sally's communicative intentions are identical in each case. Matt has precisely the same evidence in each case, the only difference is that in the one case his belief about Sally's intentions is correct, and in the other case it is incorrect. Matt's belief about Sally's communicative intentions is not a testimonial belief, so the claim that she offers different testimony in each case is irrelevant (this response, of course, is the same as the response to the second objection in section 2.1.2).

Secondly, even if Matt's belief regarding Sally's communicative intentions were testimonial there is reason to doubt that this objection works. It seems that when considering the safety of testimonial beliefs the speaker's communicative intentions should not be built into the method component of our safety assessment. There are cases in which the speaker has very different communicative intentions, yet it seems clear that the same method is employed by the audience when forming their testimonial belief. This is not to say that the speaker's communicative intentions are epistemically irrelevant, but there are many roles such intentions can play which don't require them to be built into the method component of our safety assessments for testimonial knowledge. Consider the following cases:

ANCIENT SCHOLAR: Archaeologists have just uncovered a manuscript detailing the rise and fall of ancient civilisation x. They have extremely strong evidence that it was written by Heromomouse, an ancient scholar belonging to a different civilisation – ancient civilisation y. They know Heromomouse to be extremely reliable. They read the parchment and learn many facts about ancient civilisation x.

Version 1: Heromomouse wrote the manuscript in order to educate the masses about the history of ancient civilisation x, and he intended the manuscript to be kept in the great public library.

Version 2: Heromomouse intended the manuscript as a gift for the king's private library, and he intended it to be read only by the king. Moreover, he does not expect (or even intend) the king to believe a word of it. Heromomouse knows that the king is far too pig headed to believe that there was ever a civilisation greater than his own. Nonetheless, Heromomouse ensures that the document is as accurate as possible out of a patriotic desire for his king to have the greatest private library in the land.

Heromomouse knows that the king will have him beheaded at any suggestion that there was a civilisation greater than his own. However, he also knows that the king is so delusional that he will interpret Heromomouse's chronicling of civilisation x as a metaphor for the rise and fall of his own civilisation. Heromomouse knows that no sane person would read the manuscript this way, but this doesn't matter since the manuscript is for the king's private library. He still wishes for the king to have a great library, thus he still strives for accuracy. However, he intends to be interpreted as expressing an entirely different message.

In each version of this case Heromomouse's communicative intentions are rather different. In the first case he is openly offering testimony regarding the rise and fall of civilisation x. In the second case he does not intend his manuscript to be read by anyone other than the king, and he does not intend to be believed. In the final case he does not even intend to be interpreted the same way, he intends to communicate something completely different to the other two cases. If we wish to claim that the audience employs a different belief forming method in cases where the speaker's communicative intentions are different then we must claim that the archaeologists employ different methods in each of these cases. Yet, this is surely false. In each case the archaeologists employ the same method to learn about civilisation x. Thus, the fact that the speaker has different communicative intentions in each case does not entail that the method employed by the audience in each case is different. So there are two reasons to reject the 'different methods' response to COMPETING INTENTIONS. Firstly Matt's knowledge of Sally's intentions is not testimonial, so the difference in communicative intentions is irrelevant. Secondly, although they no doubt do play an important epistemic role, communicative intentions should not be built into the method component of safety judgements about testimonial knowledge.