Can Trust Work Epistemic Magic?

Abstract

ABSTRACT:I develop a thin account of trust as trust-based reliance on an occasion. I argue that this thin notion describes the trust a recipient of testimony has in a speaker when she forms belief on his say-so. This basis for trusting belief in what one is told is also available to those who overhear and correctly understand the teller's speech act. I contrast my account of trusting testimonial uptake with an alternative account that invokes a thicker notion: reciprocal trust. This involves mutual awareness of their trusting relation between truster and trustee, and so is not available to mere overhearers of an utterance. Reciprocal trust involves norms to be trusting, and to be trustworthy. I explore how these second-personal norms make visible the possibility of an epistemology of testimony that includes second-personal reasons to trust a speaker's testimony, ones that hold only for the addressee. Crucially, if the account of trust is a non-doxastic one—that is to say, trust does not analytically entail belief in trustworthiness—then this possibility arises without prior rejection of a core canon of mainstream epistemology: that only evidence can serve as grounds for belief. We find that non-doxastic testimonial trust has the potential to work epistemic magic: to enable one to reach justified beliefs that are not reachable except via second-personal trust in what one is told. But this result obtains only if trust is not only analytically possible without belief in trustworthiness, but can be justified by norms of trust when the latter would not be. My own account rejects this thesis, at least in the case of trusting a speaker as regards her utterance. But my analysis makes sense of the idea of second-personal reasons for testimonial belief, as posited by so-called 'assurance theorists' of testimony, and allows that debate to proceed further.