Epistemic trust

Trust is a three-place relation: one person trusts another person (or herself) for some thing or end.¹ Trust involves relying on the trustee for the end in question. But trust is more than reliance, for you can rely on a person without trusting him.

This relationship has two aspects (see Dormandy 2020). First, it imposes certain norms on the truster and trustee alike (Jones 2017; Hawley 2014; Faulkner 2011; Hinchman 2017). For example, the trustee, insofar as she accepts trust, should do her best, within reason, to fulfill it; culpable failure to do so constitutes betrayal, or at least letting the truster down. As for the truster, he should allow the trustee a measure of discretion in fulfilling his trust, without nagging or micromanaging her efforts (Baier 1986).

Second, trust relationships have a characteristic psychology. The truster, for his part, works from the assumption that the trustee will respond positively to him or to the trust relationship; and the trustee — supposing that she accepts his trust — is responsive in this way. She might for instance care about the truster, be motivated by the fact that he is depending on her, aim to advance a common project, or be committed to coming through given that she has accepted his trust (Baier 1986; Jones 1996; Hinchman 2005; Faulkner 2011; Hawley 2014).

We trust people for various things, so many that trust is sometimes compared to the air we breathe — we notice it only when it is absent (Baier 1986; 234).This holds of our trust for epistemic aims.We gain a vast proportion of our knowledge by trusting people for it, ourselves as well as others.² We trust ourselves, for example, to perceive accurately, reason carefully, or to intuit cogently, and we trust others (parents, teachers, colleagues, friends, the media, scientists) to teach or inform us.

Epistemic trust can be effective or ineffective. Effective epistemic trust is trust in a trustwor­thy agent — that is, an agent disposed to deliver the knowledge that she is being trusted for. Ineffective trust is trust in someone who is not trustworthy, and is all the more ineffective if she is actively untrustworthy. Epistemic trustworthiness has two elements. One is willingness. This in turn has two components.The first is willingness to abide by the norms of the trust relationship: to be sincere, to do her reasonable best to provide the knowledge that she is being trusted for, and so forth. The second component is a willingness to enter into the characteristic psychology of trust: to experience the normative pull of commitment or the emotional pull of knowing that the truster is counting on her.These two aspects of willingness typically have a motivating effect: subjecting oneself to normative expectations encourages conformity to them, and responding to a truster's dependence typically involves feeling motivated to come through for him.

The second element of epistemic trustworthiness is competence to perform the epistemic tasks that accompany knowing and sharing one's knowledge. An epistemically trustworthy person is competent to form her own knowledge on the matter at issue: it is foolhardy to trust someone for knowledge if she is not competent to secure it. When the trustee is someone other than the truster himself (i.e., if it is not a case of self-trust), then competence has a second aspect: competence to communicate to the truster the knowledge that he needs in his context.This is important, for if a knower cannot do this, trusting her for knowledge will be of little benefit.

Epistemic untrustworthiness,³ by contrast, involves being unwilling or incompetent. Trust in an untrustworthy person is ineffective: such a person is not apt to come through for you. The fitting attitude toward her is thus distrust.This is more than simply declining to trust her, which you might do simply because you do not need anything from her.

Epistemic trust undoubtedly has a role in securing knowledge. But accounts of knowledge differ about what additional role, if any, epistemic trust has in constituting it. One account worth mentioning here is virtue responsibilism. On this view, knowledge is true belief formed by the exercise of epistemic character virtues (Code 1987; Kvanvig 1992; Montmarquet 1993; Zagzebski 1996; Baehr 2011) such as intellectual humility. If virtue responsibilism is the right account of knowledge, then exercising intellectual humility when you form a true belief on trust can yield knowledge trivially. But I will not discuss virtue responsibilism here. For I aim to show, instead, that intellectual humility is of great value to epistemic trust even if virtue responsibilism is false. The reason is that exhibiting intellectual humility, whether or not this helps constitute knowledge, can cause you, if you are a truster, to direct your epistemic trust in knowledge-yielding ways; and if you are a trustee it can help you be trustworthy in your supply­ing of knowledge. It is this causal role of intellectual humility in securing knowledge that I will explore here, whether or not intellectual humility also has any role in constituting it.

The next step is to give a (very general) sketch of intellectual humility.

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