Testimony and grammatical evidentials

Abstract

Testimony is typically offered with the use of a declarative sentence. But declaratives differ from one language to the next. Does testimonial practice differ cross-linguistically too? This chapter discusses grammatical evidentials to illustrate that it does. My illustration of the significance of evidentials to the epistemology of testimony has a negative and a positive part. For the negative part, it is argued that some definitions of testimony are mistaken because they do not apply to testimony offered by a declarative containing an evidential. The positive component discusses a new puzzle presented by McCready (2015) that evidentials raise about the justificatory status of testimony-based beliefs.