  I propose the following resolution. The language processing mechanism was described above as one which issues in the testifiee believing that which the testifier says. The truth of the testifiee’s belief will therefore depend upon whether or not the testifier is speaking truly, and so this should be called the ‘guṇa’ here. However, we do not always believe what we hear, especially if we have reasons to suppose that the speaker is not likely to be speaking the truth. It is possible, then, that the output of the language processing mechanism is not simply belief in what was said, but rather belief simply that it has been said. There are, roughly, two sorts of case when this can happen: (1) if the testifiee judges that the testifier is deceitful or unreliable or simply uninformed about the topic, and (2) if the testifiee knows on independent grounds that what the testifier is saying is false (which is consistent with the testifier believing it and testifying sincerely), perhaps on a priori grounds concerning the plausibility of the assertion. With a little interpretative licence, we might think that these two conditions correspond to the two conditions imposed by The Manual of Reason on testimony: that the testifier must be an ‘authority’ (āpta), and that the sentence must be ‘semantically fit’ (yogya).