Why do we trust the testimonial accounts of others? First, I want to briefly outline 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 he also rejects the reductionist view, before examining the ways in which it suggests the reasons why we trust the witness accounts of others. For Zagzebski, there is an important distinction between stating that something is the case, and telling you that something is true. The latter invokes the doctrine of trust and implies an implicit contract between speaker and listener, an interpersonal contract between speaker and listener, so when I tell you that P, I not only affirm that P, but I also intend that you accept P because I said so . The act of telling invokes the role of trust; I'm asking you to trust me to tell you the truth. Thus, in this model, the speaker has an epistemic responsibility to make the listener's belief justifiable, and the listener 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 inductive inference or perception. Instead we trust ourselves to have knowledge (self-confidence is a necessary prerequisite to having evidence anyway. You ask, how can one look for evidence if one doesn't trust oneself in the first place?) and then we direct this confidence to others because we believe that there are faculties similar or comparable to ours, and that they too are in search of the truth, therefore for consistency, we trust others as we trust ourselves. Therefore, it is on the basis of trust… half of the paper… requirement for knowledge, in which testimony is included. For Zagzebski, the authority of testimony and the rejection of the reductionist conception of testimony is that it is a model of trust in testimony in which the listener relies directly on the speaker: the speaker is said to convey a truth to a other person. This is done for a reason – the good of both the speaker and the listener – and to convey the truth that has been conveyed and participate in the norm of truthfulness, so that the listener is justified in his claim to knowledge. We know we can count on the speaker's good and his pursuit of truth, because this is what we ourselves do, and we are justified in directing what we experience onto that of others: we grant each other prima facie because of the shared quality which we all have reasonable confidence in, both in ourselves and in others.