He accepted the invitation with evident pleasure, and, coming forward, began a simple address, which at once fascinated every little hearer, and hushed the room into silence.
(Contrast the hearer with the over hearer).
That is, discourse always involves a speaker or writer and a hearer or reader as well as something said about some reality.
From a contemporary perspective, the most remarkable point here is, in our opinion, that they see the determination of the locutionary act by the hearer, not as a matter of merely decoding the conventional meaning of the sentence uttered, but as a matter of inference that has to be based on linguistic meaning plus contextual information concerning the speaker's intentions.
In addition, the hearer has to look for the contents or assumptions the speaker ostensively intends her to consider.
According to anti-reductionism, then, a hearer doesn't need positive support for testimonial reliability, or the speaker's sincerity, to justifiedly believe what the speaker says.
If this were right, however, it would imply that a hearer cannot know p or be justified in believing p as a result of testimony unless that same proposition is known by (or justified for) the speaker.
Is a speaker S trustworthy for hearer H only if H has positive evidence or justification for the reliability of this particular speaker S? This is far from clear.
Again, however, Hare would presumably say that any suggestion, implicit in the entailed "Light the fuse", that the hearer should focus upon lighting the fuse is corrected in context by the initial instruction that he then step back.
In any case, in addition to the "active" disposition of a sign to evoke particular psychological states of a hearer, the meaning of a sign is also constituted in part by a "passive" disposition to be used to express the psychological states of a speaker (1944, 57 58).
The effect of implementing the INFORM as an utterance is then that the hearer knows whether X is true.
