Trust in Epistemology

Katherine Dormandy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351264860
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Organisational Behaviour
• Index: Business

Trust is fundamental to epistemology. It features as theoretical bedrock in a broad cross-section of areas including social epistemology, the epistemology of self-trust, feminist epistemology, and the philosophy of science. Yet epistemology has seen little systematic conversation with the rich literature on trust itself. This volume aims to promote and shape this conversation. It encourages epistemologists of all stripes to dig deeper into the fundamental epistemic roles played by trust, and it encourages philosophers of trust to explore the epistemological upshots and applications of their theories. The contributors explore such issues as the risks and necessity of trusting others for information, the value of doing so as opposed to relying on oneself, the mechanisms underlying trust's strange ability to deliver knowledge, whether depending on others for information is compatible with epistemic responsibility, whether self-trust is an intellectual virtue, and the intimate relationship between epistemic trust and social power.

This volume, in Routledge's new series on trust research, will be a vital resource to academics and students not just of epistemology and trust, but also of moral psychology, political philosophy, the philosophy of science, and feminist philosophy – and to anyone else wanting to understand our vital yet vulnerable-making capacity to trust others and ourselves for information in a complex world.

1 Introduction

An Overview of Trust and Some Key Epistemological Applications

Katherine Dormandy

Trust in other people and ourselves is fundamental to accomplishing our aims. These include epistemic aims, such as the acquisition of knowledge, evidence, or understanding; the cultivation of intellectual virtue; and the overcoming of epistemic injustice. There are copious philosophical literatures on both trust and epistemology, yet scholars from each are only beginning to draw on the other. Much conversation is still needed, and this volume aims to promote and shape it.

The authors focus on the role that trust plays in epistemology. This is called for because, with some exceptions to be discussed later, it is not uncommon for epistemologists to regard trust as simply part of the philosophical wallpaper: as a precondition for testimonial knowledge (when directed toward others) and for rationality (when directed toward oneself), but of limited interest in its own right.

A précis of the contributions can be found in Section 3. Before that, to facilitate the conversation between the philosophies of trust and knowledge, I give an overview of the trust literature and then of six central issues concerning epistemic trust. The survey of trust in Section 1 zeroes in on the kinds of expectations that trust involves (1.1), trust’s characteristic psychology (1.2), and what makes trust rational (1.3). The discussion of epistemic trust focuses on its role in testimony (2.1), the epistemic goods that we trust for (2.2), the significance of epistemic trust in contrast to reliance (2.3), what makes epistemic trust rational (2.4), and epistemic self-trust (2.5 and 2.6).

1. Theories of Trust

We can trust objects, such as shelves or software, as well as persons. My topic here is trust in persons. Accounts are too varied to systematize neatly, so I will list some salient features on the basis of which they may be grouped.

One feature that I will mention only to set aside concerns how many relata the trust relation has: three, two, or even one. With three-place trust, one person trusts another for some end, such as to be driven to the airport. With two-place trust, one person has a trusting attitude toward another even if there is no particular end for which he trusts her. And with one-place trust, he is simply a trusting person: he goes through life with a high degree of “basal security” (Jones 2004). There is ample room for research into two- and one-place trust,¹ but three-place will be the focus of this introduction. One reason is that epistemic trust certainly involves three-place trust, namely for certain epistemic goods (see Section 2.1), and this holds regardless of whether three-place trust is basic or can be understood in terms of a lesser-place trust.

Three-place trust essentially involves the truster’s relying on the trustee for something; this amounts roughly to working into his plans the supposition that she will do what he is relying on her for (Holton 1994, 68).

Beyond this common view that (three-place) trust entails reliance, there is widespread disagreement about what else it involves. I will look at three areas of debate.

1.1. Predictive and Normative Expectations

In a trust relationship, the truster is commonly taken to have certain expectations, either predictive or normative, toward the trustee. A predictive expectation is an expectation that someone will do something—for example, that the trustee will do what you are trusting her for. A normative expectation is an expectation of someone to do something—for example, the expectation of the trustee to come through. Predictive and normative expectations can come apart: one partner expects that the other will wash the dishes (because he usually washes them when she has worked late) without expecting of him that he’ll do it (it may, strictly speaking, be her turn). And she can expect of him that he will wash them (it is his turn tonight) but not expect that he will do so (because he often forgets).

One way to group accounts of trust is by the types of expectation that they posit. There are four views. One says that predictive expectations alone are constitutive of trust; I’ll call this the mere-predictive account (Dasgupta 1988; Hardin 1993; Coleman 1990, chapter 5). Another says that trust is constituted by predictive and normative expectations; we may call this the combined account (Baier 1986, 1991; Nickel 2007; McMyler 2011; Cogley 2012; Keren 2014, this volume). The third, which I’ll call the mere-normative account, says that only normative expectations are constitutive (Holton 1994; Becker 1996; Jones 1996, 2004; Hinchman 2005; Faulkner 2007; Darwall 2017). There is conceptual space for a fourth account, on which trust does not necessarily come with any expectations at all, being characterized instead, for example, in terms of the psychological profiles discussed in Section 1.2, or on which there is no single account of trust (Simpson 2012). But this section limits discussion to the three accounts on which trust comes with expectations of one form or another. In considering how each type of expectation may feature in trust, we will see some plusses and minuses of each account.

Let’s look first at predictive expectations. Accounts positing them differ over how strong the predictive expectations need to be; two alternative requirements have developed. What I’ll call a strong predictive- expectations requirement says that the truster must believe that the trustee will come through (Hieronymi 2008; Keren 2014, this volume; McMyler 2011). What I’ll call a weak requirement says, more generally, that he may harbor any kind of positive expectation, ranging from belief to a probability assignment just above one-half (Hardin 1993; Hawley 2014a).²

The strong predictive-expectations requirement is motivated by the following sort of case (Hieronymi 2008, 218): you accept your friend’s invitation to dinner, but are subsequently invited to a clashing event. Unbeknownst to you, your friend learns of the conflict. As a result, he does not believe that you will make good on your dinner commitment, so when you turn up he expresses pleased surprise. Hieronymi argues that you have cause to be dismayed at his response, on the grounds that his disbelief displays a lack of trust in you.

Against the view that trust involves strong predictive expectations, however, is the observation that trust is voluntary, whereas beliefs are not (Holton 1994): a person can choose to trustingly rely on someone even if his confidence that she will come through amounts to less than full-on belief. Indeed, trust can be “therapeutic” (Horsburgh 1960, 346; Faulkner 2007, 886): you might trust someone simply for the sake of encouraging her to grow in trustworthiness, even if you do not believe that she will come through. The classic example is of a father, aiming to cultivate trustworthiness in his teenage daughter; he goes away for the weekend, trusting her not to trash the house even though his confidence that she won’t is too low to constitute belief (Jones 2004, 5). These observations support the claim that if trust requires predictive expectations, the requirement is weak rather than strong.

The mere-predictive view of trust might posit either a strong or a weak requirement; what it insists on is that trust is constituted by predictive expectations alone, not normative ones. With this view, most commonly held in the social sciences, trusting someone is simply a matter of incorporating her anticipated actions into your plans. This view is argued to be insufficient to capture full-fledged trust (Baier 1986; Holton 1994; Nickel 2007; Ruokonen 2013; Kallestrup, this volume). The criticism is that making plans on the basis of a person’s predicted behavior, by itself, is not trust, but mere reliance. To see what this distinction amounts to, consider the oft-cited example of Kant, whose habits were allegedly so regular that his neighbors could set their clocks to the time at which he left his house each day. Kant’s neighbors could rely on him to be punctual, but they cannot be said to have trusted him for this. They would have no cause to feel betrayed, for example, should he have overslept one day (Baier 1986, 234). Yet trust legitimates such reactive attitudes: it is appropriate for the truster to feel grateful if the trustee comes through and to feel betrayed or let down if she does not (see Dormandy, this volume chapter 10, and Hinchman 2017 for discussions of betrayal).³ Trust, unlike mere reliance, comes with norms that make reactive attitudes appropriate.

A closer look reveals that trust comes with other norms too. One is that the trustee ought to clearly signal her acceptance of trust (Jones 2017) and do her reasonable best to come through for the truster. Another is that the truster ought not micromanage the trustee’s efforts (Baier 1991, 117). A third is that both parties ought to represent their intentions toward each other authentically (Frost-Arnold 2014a). None of these norms applies in the case of Kant’s neighbors timing their clocks to his movements. The difference is that Kant and his neighbors are not engaged in a cooperative relationship, so their actions swing free from obligation or responsiveness to each other. In a trust relationship, by contrast, each party must take the other into account, at least with respect to accomplishing the end being trusted for (Greco, this volume, discusses the relationship between cooperation and trust).

This due consideration of the other party that characterizes trust over mere reliance can be understood in terms of care (Baier 1986, 1991; Becker 1996; Jones 1996; Cogley 2012; Hinchman 2017; Grasswick 2018). It is not that one party is expected to feel caring toward the other, but rather that the actions normatively expected in trust are actions characteristic of care. Each party grants the other a measure of discretion as to how to best care for him: the truster leaves it to the trustee to determine when and how to come through, and the trustee exercises discernment in how best to come through for the truster in his context. For example, if your neighbor trusts you to water his plants while he is away, then he leaves it to you to decide how to fit this activity into your day. As for you, you might fulfill his trust by doing something beyond just watering his plants: for example, in the surprising event that you also discover his tap running, you turn it off. His explicit trust in you is for the plants, but there is an area of discretion surrounding this task that may sometimes extend to other things (Baier 1986; Hinchman 2017). The norms of trust, in summary, preside over a cooperative relationship of care.

If trust, as opposed to mere reliance, comes with special norms, then it surely constitutively involves normative expectations, whether or not it also involves predictive ones. If this is so, the mere-predictive account is mistaken. It may capture one phenomenon that we sometimes call “trust,” but it misses the normatively rich sort just described. The philosophical literature tends to reserve the term “trust” for the latter phenomenon. On this picture, the expectations of trust are characterized either by the combined account or the mere-normative one; as for the mere-predictive account, this is thought to describe mere reliance. I will follow this usage here.

But which of the two normative accounts is preferable? The only difference between them concerns whether they think that trust involves only normative expectations or predictive ones too. To adjudicate between them, let’s look more closely at the role of predictive expectations in trust. Recall that there are two alternative predictive-expectations requirements—strong and weak—and that if trust includes one of them, it is arguably the weak one, since trust seems compatible with greater doubt than full-fledged belief permits. However, it bears asking whether trust can withstand greater doubt still: perhaps it does not require any (positive) predictive expectations at all. This would suggest a mere-normative account over a combined one. Let’s consider what such an account might look like.

A mere-normative account might be mild or extreme. A mild version says that although trust does not require positive predictive expectations, it is incompatible with negative ones. That is, you can count as trusting someone even if you suspend judgment about whether she will come through, but not if you think her unlikely to. I won’t linger on this view here, because I want to explore the extreme form of the mere-normative account. This version says that trust is compatible with negative predictive expectations—that is, with the expectation that the trustee will let one down.

One might be tempted to reject this suggestion on conceptual grounds. The thought would be that the idea of trusting someone whom you think is more likely than not to fail you is incoherent. After all, isn’t the whole point of trust to obtain what you are trusting for? It is difficult to engage with this objection without simply trading intuitions. But let me spell out a scenario in which trust—or what I will provisionally call trust—is compatible with negative predictive expectations. It is a situation in which the point is not to obtain what the person is trusting for, but some extrinsic end.

The example I have in mind is therapeutic trust. Recall the father trusting his teenage daughter with the house for the weekend: we may imagine that his primary aim is not to preserve his house in one piece, but to cultivate trustworthiness in his daughter. And this is compatible with thinking her more likely than not to trash the house. He presumably hopes that she will take good care of the house, but he may judge that even if she trashes it, the exercise will still cultivate trustworthiness in the long run (say, through her processing her emotions of feeling sorry). Indeed, the father might judge that there is no more effective way to teach his daughter trustworthiness and that the risk to the house is therefore worth it. So the extreme version of the mere-normative account cannot so easily be rejected on the grounds that the point of trust is just to achieve what you are trusting for.

The objector might simply deny that the father trusts his daughter, as opposed to simply acting as if he does (Keren 2014, 2610–11). In cases of real trust, one might say, the purpose is to achieve what you are trusting for, and here you cannot count as trusting if you have a negative predictive expectation that the trustee will deliver. In response, we may envision another scenario that calls this stark conceptual claim into question: it is one in which you can trust—or do what I’ll provisionally call trusting—even if your sole aim is to obtain the thing that you are trusting for. This may happen if there is unfortunately no more effective way to obtain it. If I am dangling from a cliff, I might trust my bitterest enemy to hoist me up, knowing that the only alternative is plummeting to certain death. I may think it more probable than not that she will let me fall, but I may desperately trust her in the blind hope that she will be responsive either to my plight or at least to what is normatively expected of her. And this cannot be chalked up to mere reliance as long as there are norms in place and my attitude (albeit without much hope) presupposes them.

So the extreme version of the mere-normative view cannot be so easily dismissed (and thus nor, pres...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: An Overview of Trust and Some Key Epistemological Applications
• Section 1 The Value of Trust and Self-Trust
• Section 2 Trust in Testimony
• Section 3 Trust and Epistemic Responsibility
• Section 4 The Vulnerabilities of Trust
• Contributors
• Index