Why do we trust the testimony of others?First, I want to briefly describe the parameters of trust and testimony that Zagzebski refers to in his book Epistemic Authority: A Theory of Trust, Authority, and Autonomy in Belief and then outline the reasons why she also rejects the reductionist account, before examining the reasons why she suggests that we trust the testimony of others. For Zagzebski, there is an important distinction between asserting that something is true and saying that something is true. you that something is happening. The latter invokes the doctrine of trust and implies an implicit contract between speaker and hearer – an interpersonal contract between speaker and hearer. So when I tell you that P, not only am I asserting that P, but I also intend that you accept P because I said so. The act of telling invokes the role of trust; I ask you to trust me to tell you the truth. Thus, in this model, the speaker has the epistemic responsibility to justify the hearer's belief and the hearer can defer to the speaker when challenged by others. Zagzebski rejects the reductionist account of testimony by proposing that the trust we have in others is not based on any evidence such as inference or inductive perception. Instead, we trust ourselves in knowledge (self-trust is a necessary prerequisite for having evidence anyway. It asks: how can one seek evidence if one does not trust oneself in first place?) and we then direct this trust towards others because we believe that their faculties are similar or comparable to ours, and that they are also truth-seeking, so for the sake of consistency we trust others as we do we trust ourselves. It is therefore on the basis of truth...... middle of paper ......requisite for knowledge, in which testimony is included. For Zagzebski, the authority of testimony and the rejection of the reductionist view of testimony is that it is a model of trust in testimony in which the listener relies directly on the speaker: it is said that the speaker conveys a truth to another person. This is done for a reason – the good of the speaker and the hearer – and to convey the truth that has been conveyed and participate in the standard of truthfulness, so that the hearer is justified in his or her instance of knowledge. We know that we can count on the good of the speaker and on his search for truth, because this is what we ourselves do, and we have the right to orient what we experience on that of others: we agree prima facie because of the shared quality that we all reasonably trust, ourselves and others.