Epistemic trust and authority

Introduction Chapter 1 The rejection of epistemic authority 1. Authority, equality, and self-reliance in the epistemic realm 2. The epistemological case for epistemic self-reliance 2.1 Mistrust of taking beliefs from others 2.2 Self-reliance and the nature of knowledge: Plato and Locke 2.3 Self-reliance and Cartesian doubt 3. The case from ethics: self-reliance and autonomy 4. Authority and autonomy in the intellectual domain 5. The value of reflective self-consciousness Chapter 2 Epistemic self-trust 1. The natural authority of the self 2. The natural desire for truth and the pre-reflective self 3. The desire for truth and the reflective self 4. Self-trust and the alternatives 5. The conscientious believer and the nature of reasons Chapter 3 Epistemic trust in others 1. Epistemic egoism 2. The need for trust in others 2.1. Why epistemic egoism is unreasonable 2.2. Epistemic egocentrism 3. Trust in others and the two kinds of reasons 3.1 The distinction between deliberative and theoretical reasons 3.2 The two kinds of reasons and parity between self and others 4. Epistemic universalism and common consent arguments Chapter 4 Trust in emotions 1. The rational inescapability of emotional self-trust 2. Trustworthy and untrustworthy emotions 3. Admiration and trust in exemplars 4. Trust in the emotions of others 5. Expanding the range of trust Chapter 5 Trust and epistemic authority 1. Authority in the realm of belief 2. The contours of epistemic authority: the principles of Joseph Raz 3. Pre-emption and evidence 4. The value of truth vs. the value of self-reliance Chapter 6 The authority of testimony 1. Conscientious testimony 2. Testimony and deliberative vs. theoretical reasons 3. Principles of the authority of testimony 4. Testimony as evidence and the authority of testimony 5. The parallel between epistemic and practical authority Chapter 7 Epistemic authority in communities 1. Epistemic authority and the limits of the political model 2. Authority in small communities 2.1 Justifying authority in small communities 2.2 Justifying epistemic authority in small communities 3. Communal epistemic authority 4. The epistemology of imperfection Chapter 8 Moral authority 1. The prima facie case for moral epistemic authority 2. Skepticism about moral authority 2.1 Skepticism about moral truth 2.2 Moral egalitarianism 2.3 Autonomy 3. Moral authority and the limits of testimony 3.1 Emotion and moral belief 3.2 Moral authority and understanding 4. Communal moral authority and conscience Chapter 9 Religious authority 1. Religious epistemic egoism 2. Religious epistemic universalism 3. Believing divine testimony 3.1 Faith and believing persons 3.2 Models of revelation 4. Conscientious belief and religious authority Chapter 10 Trust and disagreement 1. The antinomy of reasonable disagreement 2. Disagreement and deliberative vs. theoretical reasons 3. Self-trust and resolving disagreement 4. Communal epistemic egoism and disagreement between communities Chapter 11 Autonomy 1. The autonomous self 1.1 The norm of conscientious self-reflection 1.2 Autonomy from the inside and the outside 2. Attacks on the possibility of autonomy: Debunking self-trust 3. Epistemic authority from the outside 4. Self-fulfillment Bibliography Index

Agenda-setting is a central communicative task for professionals and a joint activity of all participants particularly at the onset of helping interactions such as coaching. Agreeing on goal(s) and assigning tasks alongside establishing a trustful bond prepare the ground for the success of the interaction. The professional agent initiates and sets the agenda as part of their professional role and responsibility, i.e., based on their professional epistemic and deontic authority. Concurrently, by orienting to clients' epistemic authority and by yielding power, control, and agency to clients to co-manage the ensuing interaction, agenda-setting is the first opportunity for client-centeredness, which is a central characteristic and success factor for the working alliance in coaching. We take first steps in filling a research gap by providing a first analysis of the interactional unfolding of agenda-setting in coaching and by showcasing that and how agenda-setting as a joint activity of coach and client contributes to their working alliance. More precisely, we investigate agenda-management practices in five first sessions of business coaching to (1) document and analyze how the joint activity 'agenda-setting' is implemented via various (coach-initiated) social actions, (2) detail their contribution to establishing the working alliance, and (3) to interpret the emerging practices of agenda-management against the concept of 'client-centeredness'. For the analysis, we draw on conceptual and methodological resources from interactional linguistics alongside linguistic pragmatics and conversation analysis. We found 117 instances of 'agenda-setting' in our data which can be assigned to the seven social actions "Delivering Agenda Information", "Requesting Agenda Information", "Requesting Agenda Agreement", "Requesting Agenda Action", "Suggesting Agenda Action", "Offering Agenda Action" and "Proposing Agenda Action". The social actions display that agenda-setting serves to establish a common ground regarding goals, tasks and the relational bond of coach and client, and (after this has been achieved) to negotiate future coaching actions. Thus, the joint activity of 'doing' agenda-setting can be shown to be 'doing' working alliance at the same time.

Distinguishing two types of epistemic authority, narrative and eyewitness, illuminates their distinct contributions to journalistic authority and reveals how journalism constructs an order of authorized knowers in local television news. Quantitative content analysis of local television news shows how different sources, such as public officials, civil authorities and citizens, are assigned epistemic authority both in terms of how frequently they appear in news and what journalists empower them to say. The basis of sources’ epistemic authority and the type of story they appear in shapes the knowledge about social reality they are discursively permitted to create. Citizens uniquely contribute to journalistic authority by imparting eyewitness authority to news. They take more speaking turns than other sources, but the epistemic authority their eyewitnessing creates is commonly coopted by elite sources whose status-derived narrative authority lets them characterize social reality without claiming to have witnessed it. Citizens appear in few government stories and take relatively few speaking turns in them, although most of their turns characterize social reality. Citizens take more speaking turns than authorities in crime stories, but their relatively even mix of characterizing and witnessing undermines their narrative authority relative to officials who take few witnessing turns. Demographics matter: White women citizens take more witnessing turns than all other citizen race and gender categories combined. Connecting social status with the authority to characterize social reality maintains structures of inequality, and authorities telling average people how to make sense of their experiences can be seen as dismissive of citizens’ judgment.

Much of our knowledge of the world comes not from direct sensory experience, but from reliance on epistemic authorities: individuals or institutions that tell us what we ought to believe. For example, what most of us believe about natural selection, climate change, or the Holocaust comes from our reliance on epistemic authorities (scientists, historians). Sustaining epistemic authority depends, crucially, on social institutions that inculcate reliable second-order norms about whom to believe about what. The traditional media were crucial, in the age of mass democracy, with promulgating and sustaining such norms. The internet has obliterated the intermediaries who made that possible, and, in the process, undermined the epistemic standing of actual experts. This essay considers some possible changes to existing free speech doctrine to remedy the epistemological crisis brought about by the internet.

Thomas Hobbes is widely acknowledged as one of the first theorists to put forward a view of rights that is recognizably modern. The primary way that his thought is identified as characteristically “modern” is through the postulation that right is antecedent to the formation of civil society and government, that is, that government derives its legitimacy (or rights) from the original consent of the governed. In Hobbes’ way of speaking, this equates to the view that “right is prior to law,” or “jus is prior to lex.” Hobbes’ thoughts on right are nascent by our standards, and not what we would think of as crisp and precise. They are complex and often confused, but much richer for that complexity and the struggles he undergoes to put forth a new way of looking at politics and morality. The points around which Hobbes struggles contain profound insights and provide fecund ground for our own understanding of the nature rights and the evolution our thoughts on this topic over the centuries. I am specifically interested in exploring the link in Hobbes’ thought between reasoning, judgments, epistemic authority, and rightness or rights. In this paper I lay out Hobbes’ complex views on the nature of right(s), and then address several of my favorite aspects of Hobbes work, specifically, the relationship between the sovereign and the individual, and Hobbes’ views on what I call “having the right to be wrong.” The latter is one of the more interesting pieces of Hobbes’ work, and what places him squarely in the camp of liberalism as opposed to authoritarianism. One important reason to grapple with Hobbes’ views on right and rights is its tremendous relevance to our current thought and the long tradition which has influenced it. Since the work of Hobbes and Grotius, liberal thought everywhere has placed a heavy focus on the rights of individuals as being antecedent to and at times superior to the needs of a civil political body. Yet this view is acknowledged to have problems, to the extent that numerous thinkers have dismissed the idea of natural rights altogether. Margaret MacDonald is one such thinker, arguing that the idea that intangible “things” called rights could “attach” to people is absurd. I want to rescue Hobbes’ thought from this perception, as his views of natural rights fall nowhere within MacDonald’s description. Grasping Hobbes’ view of natural rights (and civil rights, for that matter) helps dispel the increasingly more common view that rights theories and their justifications are untenable.

Patient epistemic authority acknowledges respect for a patient's knowledge claims, an important manifestation of patient autonomy that facilitates shared decision making in medicine. Given the scarcity of deceased donor organs, transplantation programs state that patient promises of compliance cannot be taken at face value and exclude candidates deemed untrustworthy. This article argues that transplant programs frequently lack the data to make this utilitarian calculation accurately, with the result that, in practice, the psychosocial evaluation of potential transplant candidates is discriminatory and unfair. Historically excluded candidates, such as patients suffering from alcohol use, have turned out to benefit highly from transplantation. Transplant programs should tend to trust patients when they claim to be good potential organ stewards, thereby respecting patient autonomy, advancing justice, and saving more lives.

Propaganda, ideology, and democracy: A review of Jason Stanley, <i>How Propaganda Works</i>

Where there is trust, there is also vulnerability, and vulnerability can be exploited. Epistemic trust is no exception. This chapter maps the phenomenon of the exploitation of epistemic trust. Dormandy starts with a discussion of how trust in general can be exploited; a key observation is that trust incurs vulnerabilities not just for the party doing the trusting but also for the trustee (after all, trust can be burdensome), so either party can exploit the other. She applies these considerations to epistemic trust, specifically in testimonial relationships. There, we standardly think of a hearer trusting a speaker. But we miss an important aspect of this relationship unless we consider too that the speaker standardly trusts the hearer. Given this mutual trust, and given that both trustees and trusters can exploit each other, we have four possibilities for exploitation in epistemic-trust relationships: a speaker exploiting a hearer (a) by accepting his trust or (b) by imposing her trust on him, and a hearer exploiting a speaker (c) by accepting her trust or (d) by imposing his trust on her. One result is that you do not need to betray someone to exploit him—you can exploit him just as easily by doing what he trusts you for.

Chapter 2, framed by the crises in austerity Greece and Europe’s fraught struggle to respond to the claims of refugees, argues that solidarity must aspire to more than mutually agreed forbearance and respect for a set of shared legal rules. While theorists of European integration have long conceived postnational civic bonds to be mediated by such forms of legal agreement, these cases have troublingly seen a punitive use of legalism to deny solidaristic politics. The reasons for this failure lie in reification: the process by which a legal rule abstracts from and mystifies social and historical relationships and thus misleads us about the problems it aims to regulate. The chapter illuminates the mechanisms of reification by bringing debates over Habermasian constitutional theory to bear on a specific policy context: the application of the principle of ‘mutual trust’ in the EU’s Area of Freedom, Security, and Justice (AFSJ) and in European asylum law. Scholars have criticized Habermasian ‘constitutional patriotism’ for its formalistic renderings of political recognition. This critique clarifies why and how ‘mutual trust’ creates structural disparities in both the protection of individual rights and the equality of Member States. Such disparities are due to Habermas’s mistaken acceptance in his mature legal theory of what his earlier social theory wisely took pains to reject: juridification, or the reification of value through legal process.

Viewpoint: How to avoid a dichotomy between autonomy and beneficence: from liberalism to communitarianism and beyond

To place epistemic trust in someone is to take their word for something. Much of the existing literature on epistemic trust concerns epistemic authorities. But as important as authority is to epistemic trust, it pales in comparison to the epistemic importance of conflicts of interests. In economics, we say that buyers shouldn’t take the word of sellers. Caveat emptor: let the buyer beware. I argue for a similar principle in epistemology. Caveat auditor: let the hearer beware. Others often have incentives to testify in ways that are odds with our epistemic goals. Given this, our epistemic trust in others should be calibrated to reflect the epistemically virtuous and perverse incentives of ourselves and others. This basic principle explains the need for epistemic caution in a wide range of applied topics from politics to product reviews to fake news.

According to the sociologist Niklas Luhman trust represents a ‘confidence in one’s own expectation to another person’s behavior. With such understanding of the etymology of the term “trust”, its position in the everyday life has paramount importance in the social interaction of humans. Therefore, the understanding of the term ‘mutual trust’ must be derived from its definition as a basic fact of social life and a component of human behavior. This term has reached new level of meaning in Europe with the creation of the European Union. The whole apparatus of crossborder cooperation in criminal and civil matters in the EU is centered around the principle of “mutual trust” and its influence regarding “mutual recognition”. In this article the authors will address these aspects from different point of views: cross-border cooperation in criminal matters and in civil matters in order to determine whether “mutual trust” really exist between the designated stakeholders in criminal and in civil matters, and try to identify the reasons for the drawbacks. Having in mind that these two fields are completely different, the authors will try to find common ground in the actual effective implementation of the principle of ‘mutual trust’ and understand the functioning of the principle in these two fields. Alternatively, their proposition is that the main stakeholders in the EU should use their resources in building a long term ‘actual trust’ instead of politically motivated ‘mutual trust’ that creates notable difficulties in the functioning of the ‘mutual recognition’ in the EU.

Storskrubb analyses trust between national legal systems in the context of the European Union’s policy for judicial cooperation in civil matters. The overarching and challenging question that arises is whether protection of individual rights can be sacrificed for a presumption of trust. The answer, according to the author, has implications for the broader legitimacy of the Union. Given the time it takes for legal cultures to establish confidence among institutions and actors, trust in the EU will corrode if confidence in mutual recognition is simply presumed to exist. In Storskrubb’s view, member states are not yet ready for a full harmonisation of legal procedures. Nevertheless, mutual trust would benefit from a dialogue on best practices to achieve effective legal systems.

Since mutual recognition of decisions in criminal proceedings, as the basis for international cooperation in criminal matters in the European Union, is unthinkable without mutual trust between the member states, and mutual trust is inextricably linked to the state's belief that its citizens are protected in another Member State, in the sense that they are guaranteed the same level of protection of basic procedural rights in criminal proceedings, it became clear and possible, after the entry into force of the Lisbon Treaty on the European Union, that it is necessary to regulate the procedural rights of the defendant at the supranational level. The individual rights of the defendant in criminal proceedings, as elements of the right to defense, are governed in the law of the European Union by a set of directives that have been adopted with the aim of strengthening procedural guarantees of the right to defense by imposing minimum rules.

The increased mobility of people and trade across European Union (EU) internal and external borders has compounded the intergovernmental preoccupation with security, producing a response which threatens individual rights. The mutual recognition of criminal decisions, for example, directly exposes individuals to criminal justice systems other than their own, raising questions about the sufficiency of existing human rights protection throughout the EU. Fair trial standards contained in the European Convention on Human Rights are reflected in the EU’s Charter of Fundamental Rights, but this basic level of protection is neither uniformly transposed nor consistently enforced. This has undermined a model of criminal cooperation built on ‘mutual trust’ between Member States. The EU’s response has been the creation of EU-specific standards in the form of Directives issued in pursuance of the Roadmap for strengthening procedural rights of suspected or accused persons in criminal proceedings. This article evaluates whether they enhance fair trial rights.