Epistemologists have argued that there are three basic sources
of belief: perception, testimony and inference. These three
belief sources correspond directly to the way in which many
languages mark statements morphologically for sources of evidence
for the statements (evidentiality). In this paper, we connect
generalizations from the fields of epistemology and evidentiality.
We also introduce a new method for investigating
how reliable people find different types of evidence to be. A
study based on this method indicates that speakers of English
rank different sources of evidence according to the same criteria
that govern the use of grammaticalized evidential marking