1. Recent treatments of trust in relation to language have focused on testimony: on cases in which someone comes to believe something on the basis of what another has told them. A series of highly illuminating papers have brought out that traditional views, of a kind that construe what the other tells me as evidence that things are as they are said to be, fail to capture fundamental, distinctive features of testimony. In particular, they obscure the fact that when another gives me some information I am in relationship with her. There is a crucial contrast between believing what someone tells me and learning from observation of her expressive behaviour. In the former case, my reasons for the belief that I acquire involve trust in the person who informs me: this involving the idea that the other is accountable for the truth of what she says.

My aim in this essay is to suggest that points of this general form have significant analogues in relation to a different, though related, issue: in relation to a ‘trust’ involved quite generally in taking someone to have said something. I will draw on considerations developed by Knud Løgstrup. These considerations are neatly summarised in his observation, ‘In its basic sense trust is essential to every conversation.’ It is clear from the way in which he develops this point that the ‘trust’ of which Løgstrup speaks has a rich ethical dimension. This may encourage the idea that his remarks should be read as a contribution to ‘the ethics of conversation’ – where that phrase is taken to mark a form of enquiry that is distinct from, and secondary to, a philosophical attempt to clarify the nature of language. That would, I believe, be a serious mistake: a mistake that I will try to bring into focus in part through consideration of a certain reading of Wittgenstein along with Grice's well-known treatment of conversation.

2. In a conversation with a friend about yesterday's seminar, I say, as it might seem quite out of the blue, ‘Mary is coming over this evening’. You struggle for a moment to grasp what is going on and even (our having a number of Marys amongst our joint acquaintances) who it is I am speaking of.