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Decision-Making and Credibility, David Coady

Jim Collier —  July 10, 2012 — 2 Comments

Author Information: David Coady, University of Tasmania, Australia, david.coady@utas.edu.au

Coady, David. 2012. Decision-making and credibility. Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 1 (8): 13-15

The PDF of the article gives specific page numbers. Shortlink: http://wp.me/p1Bfg0-pq

Professor Wayne Riggs has made a generous and thoughtful response to my comments on his article. I would like to offer some further comments on the matter, which I hope will be constructive.

Both Riggs and Fricker claimed that the fictional character Herbert Greenleaf was not culpable for the epistemic harm he did Marge Sherwood. They both argued that since Greenleaf could not reasonably be expected to know better (and so avoid causing the harm), he is not to blame. I responded that this argument lets Greenleaf (and others like him) off too lightly. One can reasonably expect (i.e. predict) that people will do bad things (or fail to do good things), and still rightly hold them responsible for what they do (or fail to do). Riggs responds to my objection by noting an ambiguity in the word “expect”:

I was not using the word “expect” in a merely predictive sense. Rather, I was using it in a somewhat normative sense. The condition is meant to express the idea that a negligent person should have been aware of the relevant facts whether or not she was and whether or not it was predictable in advance that she would be. (original emphasis, 17-18)

I think that Riggs is right that there is an ambiguity between predictive and normative uses of the word “expect”. Notice, however, that once Riggs’s position is clarified in this way, his claim that Greenleaf could not reasonably be expected to know better appears to be equivalent to the denial that he should have known better. Once this is made explicit, the argument that he is not culpable looks much weaker. Riggs acknowledges that Greenleaf could have known better, i.e. it was not impossible for him to acquire the relevant knowledge, nonetheless Riggs does not seem to think this alone is enough to establish his culpability, saying that “much hangs on just how difficult it would have been to accomplish this” (18). My own view is that difficulty reduces culpability, but does not eliminate it. As I read the novel, Greenleaf is culpable, albeit less culpable than someone in a better epistemic situation, who did the same thing, would have been.

My second disagreement with Riggs concerns his characterization of epistemic injustice as a form of negligence. In the following passage, I argued that some cases of epistemic injustice are not merely negligent, they are active and intentional:

People are sometimes culpable, not merely for failing to act to compensate for (or eliminate) their objectionable prejudices, but also for actively and intentionally seeking evidence to confirm them, as well as actively and intentionally interpreting evidence in ways that seem to confirm them. (5)

Riggs responds in the following passage:

[S]uch activity is not, strictly speaking, possible on the part of psychologically normal agents. Belief is peculiar in that to hold a belief is to take it to be true. Hence, we generally cannot come to hold genuine beliefs on the basis of what present themselves to us as merely practical, rather than evidential, reasons. (18)

It seems to me that this account of the psychology of belief formation is mistaken. Consider the words of another fictional character, Ben, from Woody Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanors:

It’s a fundamental difference in the way we see the world. You see it as harsh and empty of values and pitiless. And I couldn’t go on living if I didn’t feel with all my heart a moral structure, with real meaning and … forgiveness. And some kind of higher power. Otherwise there’s no basis to know how to live.

Now whatever you think of Ben’s reasoning here, it seems clear that his belief in a higher power is based on “practical, rather than evidential, reasons”. What is more, it seems clear that that is how these reasons present themselves to him (after all that’s how he presents them to his interlocutor). Finally, it seems clear that there is nothing psychologically abnormal about Ben or his reasoning. When I say that Ben’s reasoning is “psychologically normal”, I am not, of course, endorsing it. On the contrary, I am sympathetic with W. K. Clifford’s view that it is (at least prima facie) wrong to hold beliefs on the basis of practical rather than evidential reasons. But that does not mean it is impossible. On the contrary, the existence of a norm condemning the practice implies that it is possible to engage in it.

On the more general question of the extent to which our beliefs are under our control, Riggs has the following to say:

I (and I assume Fricker as well) think that we have a fair bit of control over our beliefs, and are often properly praised or blamed for them. But this control does not primarily come in the moment of belief, at which point we are more or less at the mercy of how things seem to us, together with our epistemic temperaments and habits. (19)

This seems to be an overly passive account of what goes on at “the moment of belief”. I don’t think we are (even more or less) at the mercy of “how things seem to us”, because how things seem to us is very often up to us. Consider, for example, the duck-rabbit picture, which we can choose to see as a duck or as a rabbit pretty much at will.

It is true that the extent to which our beliefs are under our direct control can appear vanishingly small if we take into account enough facts about ourselves and our environment. But this seems to be an instance of a general truth, which has nothing in particular to do with belief. The extent to which anything is under our direct control can appear vanishingly small if we take into account enough facts about ourselves and our environment, but we don’t, I think, want to conclude that we have little direct control over anything. In particular, we don’t want to conclude that we have little direct control over our actions. If I am right, belief is a kind of action and believing is a kind of acting, and just as many, though not all, of our actions are intentional, many, though not all, of our beliefs (including those which are epistemically unjust) are intentional. Hence, not all cases of epistemic injustice should be classified as cases of negligence, as this would imply wrongly that epistemic injustice can never be intentional.

Riggs’s position and mine are not terribly far apart. Our disagreement about whether the fictional character Herbert Greenleaf is culpable for his beliefs about Marge Sherwood seem to be at least as much about interpretation of the novel as about philosophical theory. Our disagreement about the general issue of whether epistemic injustice is a form of negligence may not be as significant as it first looks either. In a brief discussion of To Kill a Mockingbird, Riggs draws our attention to some of the ways in which an instance of epistemic injustice can lead to further injustices, which are not merely negligent but intentional and malicious. An epistemic injustice done to the character Tom Robinson (the failure to give his testimony the appropriate amount of credibility) causes the prosecutor to humiliate him intentionally and maliciously. Whether this further injustice is appropriately characterised as “epistemic” is a semantic question, which may not matter very much. We can all agree that Tom Robinson has been treated unjustly, and that at least one aspect of that injustice is not merely negligent, but malicious. But Riggs and I still (I think) disagree. We disagree about how intention (and malice) comes into the story in the first place. He says that “whereas one cannot choose to believe whether or not someone is credible, one certainly can choose to publicly humiliate that person” (original emphasis, 20). I don’t accept this contrast. I submit that we are constantly making decisions (i.e. choices) about whether or not to believe people are credible. Readers of this article will have to decide for themselves whether or not to believe me.

References

Coady, David. 2012. Critical reply to “Culpability for Epistemic Injustice: Deontic or Aretetic?” by Wayne Riggs. Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 1 (5): 3-6.

Crimes and Misdemeanors. Directed by Woody Allen. 1989. United States, Orion Pictures, running time 104 minutes.

Riggs, Wayne. 2012. Culpability for epistemic injustice: Deontic or aretetic? Social Epistemology 26 (2): 149-162.

Riggs, Wayne. 2012. Response to David Coady. Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 1 (7): 17-20.

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Bohman on Domination and Epistemic Injustice, Simon Căbulea May

Jim Collier —  July 10, 2012 — 2 Comments

Author Information: Simon Căbulea May, Florida State University, smay@fsu.edu

May, Simon Căbulea. 2012. Bohman on domination and epistemic injustice. Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 1 (8): 7-12

The PDF of the article gives specific page numbers. Shortlink: http://wp.me/p1Bfg0-p9

Please refer to:

Miranda Fricker (2007) claims that an individual suffers an epistemic injustice when she is wronged in her capacity as a knower. Fricker identifies two main forms of epistemic injustice. Testimonial injustice occurs when an individual’s credibility is diminished because her audience holds an identity prejudice against people like her. Hermeneutical injustice occurs when an individual cannot properly articulate her experiences or interests insofar as the interpretive resources available in the social environment are oriented towards the experiences and interests of others. In both cases, the individual is harmed as a contributor to the collective production and dissemination of knowledge. Virtuous epistemic agents manifest epistemic justice by detecting and correcting identity prejudices and by being alert to the presence and effects of hermeneutical impoverishment.

James Bohman (2012) proposes a republican conception of epistemic injustice as an alternative to Fricker’s virtue theoretical account. The key element in Bohman’s approach is the concept of domination, one of the central concepts in republican political theory more generally. He claims that all cases of epistemic injustice involve forms of domination (2012: 182-83), and that institutional mechanisms of non-domination are accordingly necessary to remedy epistemic injustice. In essence, Fricker’s account needs a more robust political dimension, one that republican thought stands ready to provide. I agree with Bohman that there are important connections between domination and epistemic injustice. Nevertheless, I am not persuaded by his characterisation of these connections. In what follows, I briefly set out Bohman’s account of domination and then critically discuss three interpretations of the relationship between domination and epistemic injustice suggested by his discussion:

(1) Epistemic injustice is to be explained by domination.
(2) Epistemic injustice itself constitutes a form of domination.
(3) Epistemic injustice contributes to domination.

I. Domination and Authority

Bohman shares with Philip Pettit (1997) the belief that to be dominated is to be subject to the arbitrary will of others. However, whereas Pettit views domination as the capacity for arbitrary interference in a person’s life, Bohman follows Henry Richardson (2002) in seeing it as an inherently normative relation: a dominator can arbitrarily exercise a normative power to change the normative position of the dominated, e.g., by imposing a duty on her or depriving her of a right (Bohman 2012: 180). To be dominated is therefore not simply to be vulnerable to a certain kind of interference, as one might be vulnerable to an infectious disease, but to lack normative status as a full participant in the exercise and contestation of some or other governing authority.

Bohman’s account implies that domination is a complex phenomenon in at least two ways. First, since there are many normative domains, a person could in principle be dominated in one respect but not another (2012: 182). How an individual’s status in one domain affects or illuminates her status in other spheres of social activity is an open question. Second, relations of domination may be informal and diffuse (2012: 185): an individual might experience domination in virtue of her diminished status relative to some set of social norms without it being the case that she is dominated by any one particular agent, such as a corrupt judge or sweatshop boss. The normative power to change an individual’s standing as a member of a community could instead be exercised by the whispering crowd en masse.

II. The Explanatory Thesis

Bohman claims that identity prejudice cannot explain the systematic nature of epistemic injustice (2012: 181). In Fricker’s example of the trial of Tom Robinson in To Kill a Mockingbird, the white jurors’ racist attitudes prevent them from taking his testimony as credible. But these psychological attitudes do not adequately explain the injustice that occurs in the trial. The wrong inflicted on Tom is the consequence of a broader regime of racial oppression, and not simply of the racist biases of twelve flawed individuals. Although identity prejudice may often be the proximate cause of testimonial injustice, Bohman sees it as just one of many possible mechanisms. A similar point holds for examples of hermeneutical marginalisation, such as that caused by the absence of a concept of sexual harassment. In both kinds of epistemic injustice, the underlying engine of exclusion is the complex background system of (e.g., racial or gender) inequality and domination (2012: 177).

Two points can be made in response. First, as I understand Fricker’s account, identity prejudice is offered primarily as a substantive criterion of testimonial injustice rather than as explanation for its existence. Fricker claims that not every credibility deficit is unjust; some may simply involve morally innocuous error. She claims that the “ethical poison of testimonial injustice must derive from some ethical poison in the judgement of the hearer,” and that identity prejudice is precisely this poison (Fricker 2007: 22). This means that Fricker is not advancing an “attitudinal solution to the problem of systematicity” (Bohman 2012: 181), but an attitudinal solution to the problem of differentiating genuine instances of testimonial injustice from cases of morally unobjectionable credibility deficit. Whether this solution is adequate is an open question. Ishani Maitra (2010) offers compelling arguments that it is both too broad and too narrow. But it is not inadequate because something else must explain whatever systematic connections may exist between identity prejudice and other forms of social injustice.

Second, there are plausible examples of epistemic injustice that cannot be explained by appeal to any independent system of domination. For instance, atheists may systematically experience unjust credibility deficits because of the identity prejudice of their religious neighbours without this prejudice existing because atheists are already dominated in other domains. Instead, the widespread bigotry may have some quite different basis in the peculiarities of the religion’s doctrines about trustworthiness and rationality, or suchlike. In this case, there need not be any underlying system of religious domination at all analogous to the racial domination of Harper Lee’s Alabama that can be invoked to perform any interesting explanatory work.

III. The Constitutive Thesis

Bohman also claims that epistemic injustice itself constitutes a form of domination (2012: 177, 181). There are two main elements in this analysis, as I understand it. First, those who experience epistemic injustice do not simply suffer a capability inequality relative to their peers. Instead, they are excluded from epistemic status (i.e., the standing to participate in the collective project of pooling knowledge) and even communicative status (i.e., the standing to address and be addressed by others). Second, Bohman claims that this “exclusion operates through the exercise of dominating epistemic authority” (2012: 178). For instance, in Fricker’s example from The Talented Mr Ripley, the identity power that enables patriarch Herbert Greenleaf to dismiss Marge Sherwood’s suspicions as mere women’s intuition involves control over the terms and conduct of their joint epistemic project, i.e., unravelling the mystery of Dickie Greenleaf’s disappearance. Marge’s standing in this project is subject to Herbert’s arbitrary will, and his “identity power is thus a species of dominating power” (2012: 183).

It is plausible to characterise some examples of epistemic injustice as instances of a distinctive kind of domination, at least insofar as a normative account of domination is to be accepted. Consider two kinds of social norms at work in collective epistemic contexts. First, there is a distinction between what a number of individuals might all believe and what is nevertheless to be collectively taken as true within their group. The latter is subject to the governance of social norms to a much greater extent than the former. In at least one interpretation of the Hans Christian Andersen tale, none of the emperor’s subjects has any mistaken beliefs about his state of dress, but what is to be taken as true is that his new clothes are very fine indeed. Similarly, no Roman actually believes that a horse can be a senator, but all are to act on the shared assumption that it could. Second, social norms can confer unequal rights over what is to be taken as true within a particular context. An emperor is entitled to dictate what is to pass as reality at will. To question this purported reality is not simply to flout a convention, but to refuse to render to Caesar his due. In such cases, imperial tyranny extends beyond the legal and political realm, where it might otherwise be contained, to the epistemic domain, i.e., to the society’s very ability to sift fact from fiction. This, then, is epistemic domination in its most obvious form.

The same normative elements appear in less despotic cases. The lord of the manor has the social right, in accordance with the respect due his station, that his account of events be taken at face value, whereas the scullery maid does not. Yet no one need ever have any illusions about why her child comes to bear a striking resemblance to her former employer. She is morally wronged as a subject of knowledge, not because anyone actually doubts her testimony, but because it is arbitrarily deprived of the normative weight in the web of socially accepted propositions that its credibility warrants. The endemic hypocrisy of class society is in this way somewhat akin to Caligula’s epistemic perversion of Rome, despite the profound legal and political differences between the cases. Tom Robinson’s predicament is arguably of a similar form. The jurors’ moral duty is not simply to believe him, as Atticus Finch beseeches, but to allow believing him to matter in their collective deliberations, just as a white defendant would have the right that they do.

Despite such plausible examples, it is unclear whether all cases of systematic epistemic injustice constitute domination. In particular, it is unclear whether they all involve the arbitrary exercise of a normative power over individuals who lack normative standing as full participants in the collective pursuit of knowledge. If members of different social groups have an unequal capability to cause their audiences to believe their testimony, this need not be because of any widespread social norm as such. On Fricker’s view, identity prejudice may instead function as a non-normative psychological disposition: members of one group are simply perceived as more credible than others, without any implicit assumption that they are at all entitled to greater deference in virtue of their identity. For instance, sexism can originally inhere in the epistemic norms of a society (if it is considered quite foolish to take a woman as a reliable witness) but may at some point be evident only in the society’s epistemic habits (if, as a matter of empirical fact, men’s testimony tends to be accepted more often than women’s). Epistemic injustice plausibly endures in this society, but not because men generally continue to have any obvious normative authority that women lack. Whether their identity power is best understood as a species of dominating power depends on further considerations about how the sexist disproportion in perceived credibility affects the rights of women to participate in the collective pursuit of knowledge. Much as unjust capability inequalities in general do not always involve the arbitrary exercise of a normative power, unjust epistemic capability inequalities need not invariably constitute epistemic domination.

IV. The Contributory Thesis

A third interpretation of the relationship between domination and epistemic injustice is suggested by Bohman’s discussion. Epistemic injustice can contribute to domination insofar as it makes it more difficult for individuals to contest the exercise of a governing authority, where one exists. Whether or not epistemic injustice should be explained by or in itself constitutes domination, it can have a profound secondary effects, as Fricker discusses, or spillover into other domains (2012: 186). In the sexual harassment case, the inability of a female worker to communicate the nature of her employer’s behaviour only deepens her vulnerability to his sexual whims. Part of what makes the boss’s authority over her arbitrary is the inadequacy of existing workplace rules to govern his relationship with his staff. Given the existing hermeneutical state of the society, he can harass her with impunity.

As a claim about the potential impact of epistemic injustice, the contributory thesis is both true and important. However, I believe it supports a somewhat different way of understanding the relationship between the epistemic virtues Fricker identifies and the republican ideal of non-domination. Whereas Bohman claims that a “republican political theory should make the epistemic consequences of domination much more fundamental” (2012: 187; my emphasis), the contributory thesis highlights the need for republican political theory to identify the epistemic sources of domination. In essence, republicanism needs a robust social epistemic dimension, one that an account like Fricker’s might well provide. The key point here is that the existence of epistemic injustice supports a measured scepticism about the adequacy of institutional responses to the injustice of domination.

Bohman claims that “institutional mechanisms that protect people from fundamental inequalities and exclusions … do not bring about non-domination causally, but are rather constitutive of non-domination” (2012: 186; his emphasis). For instance, the right to vote in a democratic election and the right to appear as a party in a lawsuit are constitutive of political non-domination, and not simply useful tools for individuals to protect their freedom. Both rights are part of what it means for political authorities to be accountable to those they govern. But they are clearly not by themselves sufficient. Elections and lawsuits are collective deliberative exercises. How they are conducted depends not only on the institutional rights of the various parties, but also on the parties’ relative epistemic standing and capabilities. Political power is arbitrary unless it can be effectively contested (Bohman 2004), but it cannot be effectively contested unless the participants are appropriately responsive to the contributions of marginalised groups, i.e., until the participants generally possess epistemic virtues to some reasonable degree.

Reforming institutional arrangements might have a beneficial effect on a society’s epistemic culture. Implementing new policies might pre-empt some damaging effects of racial or gender prejudice. Nevertheless, institutions can never be constitutive of the epistemic virtues that a free republic requires if its citizens are to be genuinely governed by the rule of law, and not by the arbitrary whims of those in authority. No set of political, legal, or social rules can by itself be sufficient to eliminate the psychological hold of identity prejudice or to rectify the impact of hermeneutical impoverishment. Bohman does not deny this point. “The remedy” for domination of the kind experienced by Tom Robinson and Marge Sherwood is “not just to correct for one’s own epistemic injustices, but to create institutions that would address their structural consequences” (Bohman 2012: 182; my emphasis). Nevertheless, the contributory thesis suggests that his contrast between a republican conception of epistemic injustice and Fricker’s virtue theoretical account risks exaggeration. The republican political tradition is notable for its emphasis on the importance of civic virtues: the police officer must have the character to resist the bribe, the politician should look to the common good and not just the immediate interests of her party, and so on. There is no reason why this existing virtue theoretical component of republicanism should not also incorporate a robust set of progressive social epistemic virtues as essential to the ideal of political non-domination.

References

Bohman, James. 2004. Republican cosmopolitanism. Journal of Political Philosophy 12 (3): 336-52.

Bohman, James. 2012. Domination, epistemic injustice and republican epistemology. Social Epistemology 26 (2): 175-87.

Fricker, Miranda. 2007. Epistemic injustice: power and the ethics of knowing. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Maitra, Ishani. 2010. The nature of epistemic injustice. Philosophical Books 51: 195-211.

Pettit, Philip. 1997. Republicanism: a theory of freedom and government. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Richardson, Henry. 2002. Democratic autonomy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Trust and the Assessment of Credibility, Paul Faulkner

Jim Collier —  July 3, 2012 — 1 Comment

Author Information: Paul Faulkner, University of Sheffield, paul.faulkner@sheffield.ac.uk

Faulkner, Paul. 2012. Trust and the assessment of credibility. Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 1 (8): 1-6.

The PDF of the article gives specific page numbers. Shortlink: http://wp.me/p1Bfg0-oN

Please refer to:

Epistemic failings can be ethical failings. This insight is owed to Miranda Fricker who explores this idea in developing a theory of epistemic injustice. [1] A central type of epistemic injustice is testimonial injustice, where there are two components to this. A knower suffers a testimonial injustice when she is not given due credit and is thereby prevented from doing what is fundamental to being a knower, which is inform others of what she knows. This is the first component, which is epistemic: a testimonial injustice starts with a misjudgement of a knower’s credibility; it starts, in Fricker’s terms, with the knower suffering a credibility deficit. The second, ethical, component is the explanation of this credibility deficit. There is a testimonial injustice when the cause of this credibility deficit is not innocent error but some form of prejudice. Here Fricker wants to draw our attention to one pervasive prejudice, which she calls identity prejudice. [2] This is the prejudice that attaches to a person by virtue of their social identity and which thereby tracks that person through the multitude of social activities, economic, political and so on. Thus the paradigm case of testimonial injustice is identity-prejudicial credibility deficit. [3]

The stated objective of Gloria Origgi’s paper “Epistemic Injustice and Epistemic Trust” is:

to broaden her [Fricker’s] analysis in two ways: first, I will argue that the ways in which credibility judgments are biased go far beyond the central case of identity prejudice; and, second, I will try to detail some of the mechanisms that control our ways of making testimonial injustices to the speakers [sic]. [4]

In accordance with the first objective, Origgi’s paper proceeds to give different explanations of our credibility judgements. The mechanisms that underlie these judgements often go awry and result in credibility deficit. However, this suffices for testimonial injustice only if some kind of identity prejudice feeds into the mechanisms Origgi describes and explain why it is that they go awry. [5] This is to say that Origgi’s second stated objective cannot follow on from the first, as Origgi takes it to do, given Fricker’s understanding of testimonial injustice. What Origgi’s two stated objectives require is rather the following assumption: a testimonial injustice arises simply when a speaker suffers a credibility deficit. Given this assumption, Fricker then provides one explanation of testimonial injustice (our pervasive identity prejudices) and Origgi “broaden[s] her analysis” by outlining further explanations. However, Fricker rejects this assumption, and I will follow her in this. [6]

However, there is a further significant but unstated objective of Origgi’s paper, which is to introduce and define a notion of epistemic trust. It is then through outlining the various grounds that we have for epistemic trust that the stated objectives are achieved: what becomes clear is that our grounds for epistemic trust are fallible in ways that have a regular result credibility misjudgement and so credibility deficit (or testimonial injustice on the rejected assumption). This comment on Origgi’s paper will then consider these two ambitions: the presentation of a theory of epistemic trust; and an account of our grounds for this trust.

As I understand it, trust is a three-place relation: a trusting party T trusts someone (or something) D to do something φ. The trusting party T’s attitude is one of trust when T depends on D φing and has some positive expectation that D will φ. In my view, there are two key ways this positive expectation can be grounded, where each implies a different kind of expectation and with the result that ‘trust’ names two distinct attitudes. The positive expectation can be the expectation that D will φ; that is, it can just be a belief and grounded in all the ways that a belief may be grounded. And the positive expectation can be an expectation of D, namely that D will view things a certain way and be sensitive to certain reasons; in particular, T’s expectation of D can be that D will see T’s depending on his φing as a reason to φ. The positivity of trust in this case comes with the presumption that D will be moved by this reason, and so will φ. Thus, I have suggested, that one’s attitude of trust can be predictive or affective depending on the nature of the expectation it embodies. [7] Both attitudes of trust could be classed as ‘epistemic’ in the sense that either could be one’s reason for believing a piece of testimony.

It is Origgi’s view that our testimonial beliefs are based upon, what she calls, epistemic trust, which she then defines as follows.

I define epistemic trust as an attitude with two basic components: a default trust, which is the minimal trust we need to allocate to our interlocutors in order for any act of communication to succeed; and a vigilant trust, which is the complex of cognitive mechanisms, emotional dispositions, inherited norms, reputational cues we put at work while filtering the information we receive. [8]

If trust is an attitude, it cannot have as a more basic component the attitude of trust. Either default trust and vigilant trust are distinct attitudes of trust, and ‘epistemic trust’ is not properly described as an attitude of trust; or epistemic trust is an attitude of trust and ‘default trust’ and ‘vigilant trust’ are not properly described as attitudes of trust. It is the second option, I think, that is Origgi’s intention. With respect to ‘default trust’, what is required for an act of communication will differ depending on the act, but what is required for any act can only be understanding; and what is required for the success of any purportedly informative communicative act is acceptance, where this falls short of belief. [9] With respect to ‘vigilant trust’, vigilance then seems to be an assessment of what is communicatively accepted such that it becomes belief only if it passes this assessment. On this reading, Origgi proposes the following definition of epistemic trust:

An audience D epistemically trusts a speaker T iff

1) D understands and accepts what T communicates to him, and

2) D believes what T communicates to him on the basis of assessing that it is likely to be true given T’s communication.

Here 1) is the ‘default trust’ condition and 2) the ‘vigilant trust’ condition (where I shall hereafter call these the default position and vigilance requirement). On this understanding, there is some reason for Origgi to claim the following.

I do not see the relation between default trust and vigilant trust as an opposition between a Reidian (non-reductionist) attitude towards testimonial information and a Humean (reductionist) attitude. [10]

Contrary to the non-reductive position, there is a vigilance requirement on belief, which is not, as such, default entitled. (This requirement of vigilance has also been stated as the requirement that a speaker ‘monitor’, where ‘monitoring’ requires more than being on the look out for defeaters. [11]) Contrary to the reductive position, successful communication does instantiate a default position, and the process of assessment starts from this point, but it is not belief that is the default but an attitude that falls short of this, namely acceptance. (Or to put it slightly gnostically using Origgi’s terminology: the ‘default trust’ is not yet trust.)

However, Origgi’s statement of why her distinction between the default position and vigilance requirement does not map onto the reductive and non-reductive theoretical positions is cryptic.

Default trust and vigilant trust are deeply related: in most epistemic situations we do not choose to trust: we just do not have the choice. Thus, a default trustful attitude towards communicated information is possible in so far as there exist cognitive mechanisms, emotional dispositions, inherited norms, and so forth, that make us epistemically vigilant. [12]

The ‘Thus’ in this quote is, I think, misleading. It seems as if there are two arguments here not one. The first seems to be an argument against ‘default trust’ being the non-reductive ‘default’ attitude, where this is an attitude that is open to defeat. The point being that this is not the case with ‘default trust’: we have no control over whether we understand what someone communicates, and our acceptance of what is communicated is similarly compelled. That is, we can cause considerable affront to a speaker if we refuse to accept what is told.[13] So there can be a compulsion to accept what others say; as Origgi says, often ‘we just do not have the choice’. But this, of course, is not a problem if the default position is one of acceptance rather than belief.

The second argument then adds that even this default position presupposes epistemic grounds that allow for vigilance, i.e. a meaningful assessment of the truth of the testimony accepted. Suppose this is true; I do not think this truth carries the implication that Origgi intends: namely that epistemic trust, as she understands it, fits into neither the reductive nor non-reductive camp. Insofar as we are interested in belief, and not acceptance, what we are interested in is the grounds for belief. What Origgi then describes is the grounds that we can have for belief, where these are the grounds for ‘vigilant trust’, to wit, the cognitive mechanisms etc. The requirement of vigilance is then the reductive requirement that belief be based on some assessment of truth. As such, let me introduce my own terminology. Origgi’s epistemic trust is essentially predictive trust, as I define it, applied to the testimonial domain: it is the attitude of believing what someone says because one judges that what is said is likely to be true given their saying it. What Origgi then supplies is a sophisticated statement of the kinds of ground we have for this judgement.

In outline, the grounds Origgi identifies are as follows.

What does make us trust? I will detail here seven different sources of trust that we may monitor in ourselves and in others when we trust or present ourselves as a trustworthy source of information.

1. Inference on the speaker’s reliability

2. Inference on the content’s reliability

3. Internalized social norms of complying to authority (“He is my master, thus I believe what he says …”)

4. Socially distributed reputational cues.

5. Robust signals

6. Emotional reactions.

7. Moral commitments. [14]

The second half the paper then consists in Origgi running through these different ‘sources of trust’, or better: explanatory grounds of trust. These grounds are not singular in that an inference to the truth of a piece of testimony could be based on the following distinct grounds: ‘contextual signs of reliability’, ‘previous beliefs’, and ‘acknowledged expertise’. Origgi’s description here, of the extent of the grounds that we have for belief, then makes a positive contribution to the development of a reductive theory. In doing so it continues a tradition of arguing (contrary to Reid and after him Coady) that the reductive position is far from hopeless in this regard. [15] Since my sympathies are in line with Origgi’s here and I find her account excellent, I confine myself to three concluding observations.

First, a distinction needs to be drawn, and which Origgi does not draw, between grounds that explain trust and the grounds that justify trust. For example ‘contextual signs of reliability’ can be the basis of an ‘inference on the speaker’s reliability’ and so a ground for trusting a speaker. But do these grounds actually pick out speakers who are trustworthy, or is it merely that we believe that these grounds do so? In all likelihood it will probably be that some things we take to be contextual signs do in indicate reliability whereas some do not. If the vigilance condition is then merely that our trust have grounds and does not further require good grounds, then a credibility deficit or excess is consistent with vigilance.

Second, irrespective of whether vigilance requires grounds or good grounds, some statement needs to be given, and Origgi does not give one, of what makes grounds good or justifying. There seem to be two distinct possibilities here. One possibility is that justification is fundamentally social, such that trust is justified when the speaker is appropriately sensitive to those grounds that would be regarded in the community as good grounds for belief. To use Fricker’s term: epistemic trust would then be justified when it makes ‘routine discursive moves’. [16] The other possibility is that justification is fundamentally epistemic, such that trust is justified when the speaker is appropriately sensitive to grounds that are in fact good grounds — i.e. truth conducive grounds — for belief, where this might require, in Fricker’s terms ‘exceptional discursive moves’. [17] If the latter option is taken, then credibility misjudgements will be associated with trust being unjustified. And if vigilance requires good grounds, any credibility misjudgement would ordinarily imply a failure of vigilance. Of course, the fallibility Origgi identifies should not make one sanguine about this option.

Third, it would be good to have some explanation of the fallibility of the grounds that Origgi identifies. It would be good not merely in the sense that this would be an interesting further statement, but also in the sense that this is needed if Origgi’s account is to develop Fricker’s. In characterizing testimonial injustice Fricker offers an explanation of our credibility misjudgements — and particularly our assigning credibility deficits: our judgements are informed by identity prejudice. An explanation of these credibility misjudgements, on Origgi’s account, would then consist in an explanation of why the grounds of trust identified are fallible. Such an account is, I think, possible but it is one that Origgi leaves to the reader.

References

Coady, C.A.J. 1992. Testimony: A philosophical study. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Cohen, Laurence J. 1992. An essay on acceptance and belief. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Faulkner, Paul. 2011. Knowledge on trust. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Fricker, Elizabeth. 1994. Against gullibility. In Knowing from words, edited by B. K. Matilal, 125-161. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

Fricker, Miranda. 1998. Rational authority and social power: Towards a truly social epistemology. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 98 (2): 159-177.

Fricker, Miranda. 2007. Epistemic injustice: Power and the ethics of knowing. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Goldberg, Sanford and David Henderson. 2007. Monitoring and anti-reductionism in the epistemology of testimony. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 72 (3): 576-93.

Moran, Richrd. 2005. Getting told and being believed. Philosophers’ Imprint 5 (5): 1-29.

Origgi, Gloria. 2012. Epistemic injustice and epistemic trust. Social Epistemology 26 (2): 221-235.

[1] See Fricker (1998) and Fricker (2007).

[2] Fricker (2007), p. 27.

[3] Fricker (2007), p. 28.

[4] Origgi (2012), pp. 221-2.

[5] Origgi (2012), pp. 221-2. This requires qualification. Testimonial injustices are produced by prejudices that systematically track subjects through different social domains and, Fricker observes, “[t]he main type (the only type?) of prejudice that tracks people in this way is [identity] prejudice” (p. 22). So the qualification is: if there were another form of prejudice that were systemic in the way that identity prejudice is and which were equally a prejudice — i.e. were ethically bad — then this necessary condition would not hold. But Origgi does not identify any other such prejudice in outlining the mechanisms that result in credibility deficit.

[6] Fricker (2007), p. 22.

[7] Fricker (2007), p. 22.

[8] Origgi (2012), p. 224 (original emphasis).

[9] See Cohen (1992).

[10] Origgi (2012), p. 224 (original emphasis).

[11] See Fricker (1994) and Goldberg and Henderson (2007).

[12] Origgi (2012), p.224 (original emphasis).

[13] This is a point that assurance theories have been most sensitive to. See Moran (2005) and Faulkner (2011), ch. 6.

[14] Origgi (2012), p .227.

[15] See Coady (1992) and Faulkner (2011), ch. 2.

[16] Fricker (2007), p. 104.

[17] Fricker (2007), p.105.

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