 The type of inference exemplified in the cases described at the beginning of this entry will strike most as entirely familiar. Philosophers as well as psychologists tend to agree that abduction is frequently employed in everyday reasoning. Sometimes our reliance on abductive reasoning is quite obvious and explicit. But in some daily practices, it may be so routine and automatic that it easily goes unnoticed. A case in point may be our trust in other people’s testimony, which has been said to rest on abductive reasoning; see Harman 1965, Adler 1994, Fricker 1994, and Lipton 1998 for defenses of this claim. For instance, according to Jonathan Adler (1994, 274f), “[t]he best explanation for why the informant asserts that P is normally that … he believes it for duly responsible reasons and … he intends that I shall believe it too,” which is why we are normally justified in trusting the informant’s testimony. This may well be correct, even though in coming to trust a person’s testimony one does not normally seem to be aware of any abductive reasoning going on in one’s mind. Similar remarks may apply to what some hold to be a further, possibly even more fundamental, role of abduction in linguistic practice, to wit, its role in determining what a speaker means by an utterance. Specifically, it has been argued that decoding utterances is a matter of inferring the best explanation of why someone said what he or she said in the context in which the utterance was made. Even more specifically, authors working in the field of pragmatics have suggested that hearers invoke the Gricean maxims of conversation to help them work out the best explanation of a speaker’s utterance whenever the semantic content of the utterance is insufficiently informative for the purposes of the conversation, or is too informative, or off-topic, or implausible, or otherwise odd or inappropriate; see, for instance, Bach and Harnish 1979 (92f), Dascal 1979 (167), and Hobbs 2004. As in cases of reliance on speaker testimony, the requisite abductive reasoning would normally seem to take place at a subconscious level.