I’ve been thinking about the concept of trust lately. It started the other day when I was expressing my general cynicism about politics. I think the most frustrating thing about politics for me is that the whole enterprise of campaign politics and public relations management seems designed to impede the transmission of truth. The goal of a campaign isn’t to disclose the truth about a candidate but to project a carefully constructed image that will appeal to some targeted segment of the public. Because of this, I feel like I can’t trust anything that I hear when it comes to politics and that disturbs and frustrates me.
My response to this frustration has been to reflect on the nature of trust and the role that trust plays in the formation of our beliefs and the transmission of knowledge. In this post I want to examine a series of questions. First, what is trust? What does it mean to say that we trust someone and what does it mean for us to say that someone is trustworthy? Second, why and how does trust play a role in our day-to-day formation of beliefs? Third, how is knowledge based on trust different from knowledge that is not based on trust? Through the exploration of these questions I hope to demonstrate the significance and importance of trust and trustworthiness as it relates to the search for truth.
What is trust?
There are different ways that trust could be characterized and different contexts in which it might take on slightly different meanings. For instance, it might mean one thing for you to trust your friend, another for you to trust yourself, and another for you to trust your church. Despite these varied contexts, there are still some commonalities among all these usages of trust and the concept of interpersonal trust seems to be the most foundational. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on trust says: “Although some philosophers write about trust that is not interpersonal… most would agree that these forms of “trust” are coherent only if they share important features of (i.e. can be modeled on) interpersonal trust. Hence, I assume that the dominant paradigm is interpersonal.” The article then goes on to present a working definition of trust and trustworthiness. I will paraphrase the key components of that definition here and then move on to my own analysis in the following sections. (The full encyclopedia article is here.)
When we trust another person we are doing at least two important things. First, we are making ourselves vulnerable. We are entrusting something to another person and counting on them to act in a particular way. This puts us at risk of disappointment, betrayal, and the loss of what we entrust to them. Second, because of the risk involved, trust requires an attitude of optimism about a person’s trustworthiness. We have to believe that the person we trust is both competent and committed to act in the way that we hope they will act. We have to believe that they are trustworthy.
Because trust requires vulnerability and optimism about another person, it is both an action and an attitude. Trustworthiness, on the other hand, is a property that stands independently of anyone’s attitudes or beliefs about it. (There are philosophers who argue that trustworthiness is a virtue, but I won’t get into the distinction between a property and a virtue at this time. For the purposes of this post, they are the same thing.) If a person possesses trustworthiness in a particular instance, then they are in fact competent and committed to act in the way we hope that they will act. This is true regardless of whether or not we decide to trust them. We might mistakenly judge a trustworthy person to be untrustworthy and, therefore, decide not to trust them, and vice versa.
Why and how does trust play a role in our day-to-day formation of beliefs?
Every time we take someone’s word for something, we form a belief on the basis of trust. We do this all the time when we form an opinion based on a news story; when we go to the doctor for a diagnosis and follow the doctor’s recommendation; when we look at the weather forecast and plan our day around it; when we ask our biologist friend to identify a tree for us; when we consult Wikipedia for a quick answer to a question we have. In all of these instances our beliefs are a product of trust.
The reason that we engage in this kind of activity is that there are constraints on what we can know as individuals. These constraints could be internal to us. For instance, some people are not (and perhaps never could be) competent enough to investigate the truth claims made by nuclear physicists, mathematicians, and doctors. Even if we were theoretically capable, we might still be constrained externally by resources and time. A person who is suffering from a life-threatening respiratory condition doesn’t have time to go to medical school in order to find out for herself exactly what her ailment is and how to treat it. She needs an answer fast and she can't supply it on her own, so she goes to see a doctor. Sometimes we are constrained by geographical location, as in the case of world events. We count on news agencies to bring us stories from the other side of the globe. These examples illustrate that when we want to know more than our constraints allow us to know on our own, then we have to trust outside sources if we are going to make any progress in knowledge.
Our working definition of trust states that it involves vulnerability and optimism about another’s trustworthiness. In the case of trusting an outside source of knowledge we should be able to say both how the person who trusts is vulnerable and also what it is that makes a source trustworthy. The vulnerability seems to be deception or misinformation. When we trust an outside source we risk acquiring a false belief. Because of this risk, there are at least two major characteristics that make a source of knowledge trustworthy. First (if we assume that the source is a person) the source should be competent enough to judge when he knows something or not. If a person thinks he knows something when he really doesn't, then he will only lead us astray if we trust him. Secondly, the source needs to be honest about what they know. If a person is in the habit of lying to us, then we can't count on what he tells us to be true.
How is knowledge based on trust different from knowledge that is not based on trust?
In the field of epistemology (the study of knowledge) knowledge is minimally defined as true justified belief. In other words, to know something means that you hold a belief about it, that this belief is in fact true, and that you have some justification for holding this belief. (Each of these components is the subject of debate and the definition is not quite adequate as it is, but it's a good starting point.)
With this definition in mind, I want to make a distinction between what I will call first-hand and second-hand knowledge. Intuitively, first-hand knowledge is knowledge that is known without needing to trust an outside source. Everyone has first-hand knowledge about their own life. For example, I know that I exists, I know where I live, I know where I go to work, I know that I like ice cream, etc. I don't need to take anyone's word for it. I can supply my own justification for these beliefs. When it comes to things like my beliefs about other people, however, then my knowledge is second-hand. When my friend tells me that they work for Company X that is located in Town Y, I take their word for it. Now of course, I could go to the trouble of secretly following them to work in the morning and observing whether or not they go to Town Y and do in fact work at Company X. Then my second-hand knowledge would become first-hand. But we simply can't achieve first-hand knowledge of everything that we might want to know because of the constraints mentioned earlier. So we count on second-hand knowledge where it isn't possible or practical or desirable to acquire first-hand knowledge.
The defining difference between first-hand and second-hand knowledge is the way in which beliefs are justified. First-hand knowledge is justified directly, as it were. My justification for believing that I rent a house is that I have a lease filed in my desk with my and my landlord's signature on it, I have been occupying the house described in the lease for over a year, and I pay rent to my landlord every month. I don't have to take anyone's word for it that I rent a house. In the same way, physicists have first-hand knowledge of the laws of physics. Their belief that E=mc^2 is justified on the basis of experiments and observations that they are able to understand and access because of their training. For the majority of us, however, our belief that E=mc^2 will always remain an article of second-hand knowledge that is justified indirectly through trust. We do not fully understand the justification given in support of the equation for ourselves. At some level we have to trust the physicists who claim that they have first-hand knowledge.
First-hand knowledge is a consequence of understanding, whereas second-hand knowledge is a consequence of trust. Therefore, the trustworthiness or untrustworthiness of our sources of knowledge greatly affects our ability to search for truth beyond our constraints. When the sources available to us are not trustworthy, the scope of what we can know is radically diminished or, equivalently, our search for truth will be fruitless beyond what we can know first-hand. By the same token, when the sources available to us are trustworthy, our search for truth will flourish and the scope of what we can know will be greatly extended into matters that we would otherwise know nothing about.
The trustworthiness of other people is not something that we can control. We do, however, have control over whether or not we will be trustworthy sources of knowledge. The first step in becoming trustworthy is making sure that we do not claim either more (or, I suppose, less) knowledge than we actually possess. We must develop the competence and honesty to evaluate our beliefs and judge what we know. The second step is to be honest in communicating our knowledge. If we follow these steps our trustworthiness will nurture an atmosphere in which truth may readily be found.
-David
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