January 12, 2011.
Information given to us via testimony vs sense experience
There are many situations where we trust and others where we distrust
Need to be able to benefit from communication with others.
Reductionist: Must have a reason to trust.
Anti-reductionist: We can trust testimony unless we have reason to distrust.
Counterpoint:
Our senses work to serve our interests. Others have their own interests.
One communicates with another to have an effect on them. Maybe this is benevolent, maybe it’s hostile.
Vigilance: on guard for interlocutors who don’t have our best interest at heart.
Analogy: we walk in a crowd without issue because everyone is vigiliant.
This would not be possible if we thought every stranger would completely ignore us.
So we need trust, but we are not paralyzed by consciously distrusting-by-default each stranger. The community vigilance is the solution.
How do we trust people without vigilance:
It’s possible, after all children do it.
However, at some point it will be in someone’s interest to deceive.
Communication is valuable because others are vigilant
There exist social costs to miscommunication / deception / cheating.
Descriptive questions too (not just normative)
What we do is close to the reductionist’s norm
Experimental psychology experiments
People encounter a new face and instantly look for trustworthiness
there is the least variation in ‘trustworthiness score’ (among other properties) when you vary the amount of time a subject has exposed to the picture
Children as young as 3 will trust the information from a ‘nice agent’ over a ’mean agent
However maybe life would be better if everyone trusted a littlee more (even if there were slight higher personal risks). Collective action problem.
Multiple independent sources of some belief reinforce strength of that belief.
Peer review system reflective of epistemic vigilance norms.