 According to those who accept testimony as a genuine knowledge source, the process of generating testimonial knowledge begins with a speaker S who knows a proposition p by perception, inference, or testimony (chains of testimony are okay) and who has a desire to communicate p to someone or other. A hearer H gains knowledge through a speech act of S communicating p to H, who has to be competent in the language in which p is expressed, to know the words and grammatical forms, which H has learned, on most accounts, also chiefly through testimony but also in other ways such as analogy (according to some).