Inferring and Explaining

81 ask us to endorse a standard explanation formost sincere communicative attempts. t* 0 . The speaker believes this because he knows what he is talking about—he believes it because it is, in fact, true. Thus when we accept information through the testimony or authority of others, we tac- itly engage in a dual explanatory inference. We explain the linguistic act as a sincere attempt to communicate the speaker’s belief and then explain the speaker’s having the belief in terms of the speaker knowing what they’re talking about. Larry Wright has helpfully distinguished two quite diferent things that can go wrong when someone communicates a sincerely held belief. Sometimes people have unreliable access to the information they are trying to communi- cate. Tus a rival explanation of my belief that my friend is a good teacher might be that I have only observed him in specialized upper-division courses that would be of interest to philosophy and psychology majors—I have never observed him, for example, in large introductory courses. t* 1 . The letter writer believes that his friend is a good teacher because he has never observed his lousy teaching in large intro- ductory courses. Even when authorities possess excellent access to information, we still worry sometimes about their ability to reliably interpret this informa- tion. In this context, the cautious letter reader might have at least two potential worries about my testimony.Te frst has to dowith specialized training. Obviously, my claims presuppose some fairly technical knowledge about pedagogy, aca- demia, and research standards in contemporary psychology. One would like to think that expec- tations for teaching and collegiality would not vary across the humanities and natural and behavioral sciences. I, hopefully, have the nec- essary background to provide relevant informa- tion about these aspects of my friend’s career. But what about the prediction for professional distinction with respect to his research? I am trained as a philosopher, not a psychologist. Perhaps his psychological “insights” I observed in the course of our collaborative teaching and writing are common knowledge in the feld. Or worse, maybe they are discredited or eccentric. Am I really qualifed to say? A rival explanation once again suggests itself. testImony t* 2 . The letter writer believes his colleague will make a name for himself because of his lack of knowledge about contemporary aca- demic psychology. Avery diferent worry about the reliability of my belief focuses on my ability to “objectively” process the information to which I do have reli- able access. Basically, the worry here is one of perceptual or interpretive bias. Perhaps I so admire his pedagogic technique because it is so similar tomy own inefective classroom style. Or maybe I am so impressed with his psycho- logical hypotheses because they nicely coincide with my own half-baked notions. He is, afer all, my good friend—might I not be guilty of “seeing more with my heart than with my eyes?” So we have yet another category of rival explanation: