An epistemic agent A is a false epistemic authority for others iff they falsely believe A to be in a position to help them accomplish their epistemic ends. A major divide exists between what I call "epistemic quacks", who falsely believe themselves to be relevantly competent, and "epistemic charlatans", i.e., false authorities who believe or even know that they are incompetent. Both types of false authority do not cover what Lackey (2021) calls "predatory experts": experts who systematically misuse their social-epistemic (...) status as a cover for predatory behavior. Qua experts, predatory experts are competent and thus could (and maybe sometimes do) help their clients. But should we count them as genuine epistemic authorities? No, I argue, they are false epistemic authorities because, in addition to their practical and moral misconduct, such experts systematically deceive their clients, thereby thwarting the clients’ epistemic ends. (shrink)

In the social epistemology of scientific knowledge, it is largely accepted that relationships of trust, not just reliance, are necessary in contemporary collaborative science characterised by relationships of opaque epistemic dependence. Such relationships of trust are taken to be possible only between agents who can be held accountable for their actions. But today, knowledge production in many fields makes use of AI applications that are epistemically opaque in an essential manner. This creates a problem for the social epistemology of scientific (...) knowledge, as scientists are now epistemically dependent on AI applications that are not agents, and therefore not appropriate candidates for trust. (shrink)

Should we be worried that the concept of trust is increasingly used when we assess non-human agents and artefacts, say robots and AI systems? Whilst some authors have developed explanations of the concept of trust with a view to accounting for trust in AI systems and other non-agents, others have rejected the idea that we should extend trust in this way. The article advances this debate by bringing insights from conceptual engineering to bear on this issue. After setting up a (...) target concept of trust in terms of four functional desiderata (trust-reliance distinction, explanatory strength, tracking affective responses, and accounting for distrust), I analyze how agential vs. non-agential accounts can satisfy these. A final section investigates how ‘non-ideal’ circumstances—that is, circumstances where the manifest and operative concept use diverge amongst concept users—affect our choice about which rendering of trust is to be preferred. I suggest that some prominent arguments against extending the language of trust to non-agents are not decisive and reflect on an important oversight in the current debate, namely a failure to address how narrower, agent-centred accounts curtail our ability to distrust non-agents. (shrink)

Trusting relationships are both valuable and risky. Where the risks are high and the fears of betrayal are also high, it might seem rational to try to mitigate the risks, while still enjoying the benefits of the trusting relationship, by forming a contingency plan. A contingency plan—in the sense I am interested in—involves contingent punishments for defection, which are primarily meant to encourage the trusted partner to act trustworthily. I argue, however, that such contingency plans suffer from an internal tension (...) wherein the contingency planner both seeks and undermines a particular level (or kind) of trust. There are two problems in particular, either of which is sufficient to undermine trusting relationships: one, the planner fails to see the trusted partner as sincerely engaged in the trusting relationship, and two, the planner separates herself out from the trusting relationship by seeing her flourishing as separate from her partner’s (or, even worse, as dependent on her partner’s harm). Continency plans, then, are not just about the future; they cast a moral shadow on what we are doing now. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Justin Tosi and Brandon Warmke argue that virtue signalling – saying things in order to improve or protect your moral reputation – has a range of bad consequences and that as such there is a strong moral presumption against engaging in it. I argue that virtue signalling also has a range of good consequences, and that as such there is no default presumption either for or against engaging in it. Following from this, I argue that given that virtue signalling (...) is sometimes bad and sometimes good, we should avoid virtue signalling when we can be confident that the consequences will be bad, and we should press on with signalling when we can be confident that the consequences will be good. For the most part, I focus on three good consequences that are related to trusting dispositions: signalling trustworthiness, avoiding distrust, and scaffolding self-trust. I also highlight some additional positive consequences that are unrelated to trust. (shrink)

While artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly applied for decision-making processes, ethical decisions pose challenges for AI applications. Given that humans cannot always agree on the right thing to do, how would ethical decision-making by AI systems be perceived and how would responsibility be ascribed in human-AI collaboration? In this study, we investigate how the expert type (human vs. AI) and level of expert autonomy (adviser vs. decider) influence trust, perceived responsibility, and reliance. We find that participants consider humans to be (...) more morally trustworthy but less capable than their AI equivalent. This shows in participants’ reliance on AI: AI recommendations and decisions are accepted more often than the human expert’s. However, AI team experts are perceived to be less responsible than humans, while programmers and sellers of AI systems are deemed partially responsible instead. (shrink)

I argue that while every betrayal is a breach of trust, not every breach of trust is a betrayal. I defend a conception of trust as primarily a feature of behaviour (i.e. trusting behaviour) and only secondarily a feature of a mental attitude. So it is possible to have the attitude of distrust towards someone while still trusting them in the way you behave. This makes sense of the possibility of Judas Iscariot breaching Jesus’ trust, and so betraying him, even (...) though Jesus presumably knew that Judas would do just that. This conception of trust may be spelt out in terms of making oneself reliant on somebody in a collaboration with them. Such collaborations include relationships like friendships and love affairs, as well as political activities or defending one’s country against aggression. I argue that only when these collaborations involve a commitment to loyalty is a breach of trust a betrayal. And loyalty is a feature of those collaborations or relationships that exclude others – us/them collaborations. (shrink)

If you love someone, is it good to believe better of her than epistemic norms allow? The partiality view says that it is: love, on this view, issues norms of belief that clash with epistemic norms. The partiality view is supposedly supported by an analogy between beliefs and actions, by the phenomenology of love, and by the idea that love commits us to the loved one’s good character. I argue that the partiality view is false, and defend what I call (...) the epistemic view. On the epistemic view, love also issues norms of belief. But these say simply that you should adhere to epistemic norms in forming and maintaining beliefs about loved ones. I offer two arguments for the epistemic view. The first appeals to the emotional responses of love, which, when sensitive to what the loved one is really like, can make love great and be morally transformative. The second is a new argument for why caring for a loved one requires true beliefs about him. We see that there may be some boundaries, such as stuffy traditions, that love is right to defy, but that epistemic boundaries are not among them. (shrink)

Much of what we know we know through testimony, and knowing on the basis of testimony requires some degree of trust in speakers. Trust is therefore very valuable. But in trusting, we expose ourselves to risks of harm and betrayal. It is therefore important to trust well. In this paper, I discuss two recent cases of the betrayal of trust in (broadly) academic contexts: one involving hoax submissions to journals, the other faking an identity on social media. I consider whether (...) these betrayals suggest that we ought to be less trusting in contexts like these. I argue that we should not: the acquisition of knowledge is dependent on trust, and we cannot intentionally reduce the extent to which we trust in these kinds of contexts without risking destroying it utterly. Instead, we must trust in our epistemic networks and the way they work to filter out deception. (shrink)

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Volume 104, Issue 1, Page 150-170, January 2022.

When blame is understood to be emotion-based or affective, its emotional tone is standardly identified as one of anger. We argue that this conception of affective blame is overly restrictive. By attending to cases of blame that emerge against a background of a particular kind of hope invested in others, we identify a blaming response characterized not by anger but by sadness: reactive disappointment. We develop an account of reactive disappointment as affective blame, maintaining that while angry blame and disappointed (...) blame are both condemnatory responses, they have distinct evaluative foci and occupy different but complementary roles in our accountability practices. (shrink)

This chapter asks two questions about the ethics of expectations: one about the nature of expectations, and one about the wrongs of expectations. On the first question, expectations involve a rich constellation of attitudes ranging from beliefs to also include imaginings, hopes, fears, and dreams. As a result, sometimes expectations act like predictions, like your expectation of rain tomorrow, sometimes prescriptions, like the expectation that your students will do the reading, sometimes like proleptic reasons like the hope that your mentee (...) will flourish, and sometimes expectations are peremptory in that they carry the force of moral law. Turning to the second question, given the multiple roles played by expectations it shouldn’t be surprising that there are also multiple ways expectations can be wrong to hold. Sometimes they wrong as beliefs do, e.g., doxastic wronging, and sometimes they result in alienation because of who holds that expectation of us. The upshot of this chapter is that getting clear on these potential ways expectations can wrong not only delivers an ethics of expectations that mirrors familiar discussions of the ethics of belief, but an ethics of expectations further opens the door for taking seriously an ethics of mental attitudes more generally. (shrink)

We explore our role as researchers and witnesses in the context of an emerging partnership with the Penelakut Tribe, the aim of which is to locate the unmarked graves of children who died while attending the notorious Kuper Island Indian Residential School on their territory (southwest British Columbia). This relationship is in the process of taking shape, so we focus on understanding conditions for developing trust, and the interactional expertise necessary to work well together, with a good heart. We suggest (...) that, in some respects, this may be usefully understood as a practice of witnessing on several dimensions. (shrink)

I propose an account of how our forward-looking moral and epistemic responsibility practices arose, how they related to backward-looking responsibility practices, and what makes them stable. This account differs in several ways from prominent theories already in the literature. Traditionally, forward-looking accounts of responsibility are framed third-personally in terms of social control and neglect the perspective and agency of the responsible person. The account I develop allows that there are third-personal, control-based aspects of our responsibility practices, but it also makes (...) room for the first-personal perspective of the responsible agent and emphasizes the role of partner choice and cooperative planning and action. Whereas existing research focuses on forward-looking accounts of the practice of holding others responsible, I offer an account of forward-looking practices of taking responsibility and assigning responsibility. I hope thereby to provide a richer and more plausible framework in which to think about responsibility and our practices related to it. (shrink)

It is argued that trust is a performative kind and that the evaluative normativity of trust is a special case of the evaluative normativity of performances generally. The view is shown to have advantages over competitor views, e.g., according to which good trusting is principally a matter of good believing (e.g., Hieronymi, 2008; McMyler, 2011), or good affect (e.g., Baier, 1986; Jones, 1996), or good conation (e.g., Holton, 1994). Moreover, the view can be easily extended to explain good (and bad) (...) distrust, where the latter is understood as aimed (narrow-scoped) forbearance from trusting. The overarching framework—which assimilates the evaluative norms of trusting (and distrusting) to performance-theoretic norms—supplies us with an entirely new lens to view traditional philosophical problems about what is involved in trusting and distrusting well and badly, and thus, places our capacity to make progress on problems in this area on a new footing. (shrink)

This chapter aims to illuminate ways in which hope was significant in the philosophy of classical Greece. Although ancient Greek philosophies contain few dedicated and systematic expositions on the nature of hope, they nevertheless include important remarks relating hope to the good life, to reason and deliberation, and to psychological phenomena such as memory, imagination, fear, motivation, and pleasure. After an introductory discussion of Hesiod and Heraclitus, the chapter focuses on Plato and Aristotle. Consideration is given both to Plato’s direct (...) comments on hope and to the narrative contexts of his dialogues, with analysis of Plato’s positive and negative representations of hope, hope’s relationship to reason, and Plato’s more psychological approach in the Philebus, where hope finds a place among memory, recollection, pleasure, and pain. The chapter then reviews Aristotle’s discussions of confidence, hope, and courage, observing that although Aristotle does not mention hope as a virtue, he does note its importance to human agency and deliberation and as a foundation for the further development of virtue. The chapter concludes that discussions surrounding hope in ancient Greek philosophy are rich and challenging and can serve as a lively stimulus to further exploration of the concept of hope. (shrink)

This paper explores the epistemology and moral psychology of “therapeutic trust,” in which one trusts with the aim of inspiring greater trust-responsiveness in the trusted. Theorists have appealed to alleged cases of rational therapeutic trust to show that trust can be adopted for broadly moral or practical reasons and to motivate accounts of trust that do not involve belief or confidence in someone’s trustworthiness. Some conclude from the cases that trust consists in having normative expectations and adopting vulnerabilities with respect (...) to the trusted; others that trust involves accepting that someone will prove trustworthy. Although there are, I argue, some genuine cases of rational therapeutic trust, some prominent examples confuse trusting with entrusting and are actually counterexamples to the adopted vulnerabilities and acceptance accounts they have been taken to support. An alternative account, which construes trust in terms of being confident enough to take salient risks on someone’s trustworthiness, makes better sense of therapeutic trust. (shrink)

One of the main difficulties in assessing artificial intelligence (AI) is the tendency for people to anthropomorphise it. This becomes particularly problematic when we attach human moral activities to AI. For example, the European Commission’s High-level Expert Group on AI (HLEG) have adopted the position that we should establish a relationship of trust with AI and should cultivate trustworthy AI (HLEG AI Ethics guidelines for trustworthy AI, 2019, p. 35). Trust is one of the most important and defining activities in (...) human relationships, so proposing that AI should be trusted, is a very serious claim. This paper will show that AI cannot be something that has the capacity to be trusted according to the most prevalent definitions of trust because it does not possess emotive states or can be held responsible for their actions—requirements of the affective and normative accounts of trust. While AI meets all of the requirements of the rational account of trust, it will be shown that this is not actually a type of trust at all, but is instead, a form of reliance. Ultimately, even complex machines such as AI should not be viewed as trustworthy as this undermines the value of interpersonal trust, anthropomorphises AI, and diverts responsibility from those developing and using them. (shrink)

I challenge the common view that trust is characteristically risky compared to distrust by drawing attention to the moral and epistemic risks of distrust. Distrust that is based in real fear yet fails to target ill will, lack of integrity, or incompetence, serves to marginalize and exclude individuals who have done nothing that would justify their marginalization or exclusion. I begin with a characterization of the suite of behaviors characteristic of trust and distrust. I then survey the epistemic and moral (...) hazards of distrust, in particular, distrust’s propensity to bias interpretation, to perpetuate itself, to confirm itself, to dishonor, and to insult. Taking seriously these moral and epistemic hazards requires taking affirmative measures to respond to them. I elaborate one such response: “humble trust”. The practice of humble trust issues from skepticism about the warrant of one’s own felt attitudes of trust and distrust, curiosity about who might be unexpectedly responsive to trust and in which contexts, and commitment to abjure and to avoid distrust of the trustworthy. Humble trust enables individuals to trust that they will be trusted. (shrink)

In this article, I explore the role of affective feedback loops in creating and sustaining trust and distrust. Some emotions, such as fear and contempt, drive out trust; others, such as esteem and empathy, drive out distrust. The mechanism here is causal, but not merely causal: affective looping works through changing how the agent interprets the words, deeds, and motives of the other, thus making trust or distrust appear justified. Looping influences not only dyadic trust, but also climates, and networks (...) of trust and distrust. Not all trust-entrenching looping is virtuous, nor all distrust-entrenching looping vicious, but distrust looping is a powerful way to justify xenophobic public policy. I explore options for remedy. (shrink)

Open-source communities that focus on content rely squarely on the contributions of invisible strangers in cyberspace. How do such communities handle the problem of trusting that strangers have good intentions and adequate competence? This question is explored in relation to communities in which such trust is a vital issue: peer production of software (FreeBSD and Mozilla in particular) and encyclopaedia entries (Wikipedia in particular). In the context of open-source software, it is argued that trust was inferred from an underlying ‘hacker (...) ethic’, which already existed. The Wikipedian project, by contrast, had to create an appropriate ethic along the way. In the interim, the assumption simply had to be that potential contributors were trustworthy; they were granted ‘substantial trust’. Subsequently, projects from both communities introduced rules and regulations which partly substituted for the need to perceive contributors as trustworthy. They faced a design choice in the continuum between a high-discretion design (granting a large amount of trust to contributors) and a low-discretion design (leaving only a small amount of trust to contributors). It is found that open-source designs for software and encyclopaedias are likely to converge in the future towards a mid-level of discretion. In such a design the anonymous user is no longer invested with unquestioning trust. (shrink)

Trust is central to our social lives in both epistemic and practical ways. Often, it is rational only given evidence for trustworthiness, and with that evidence is made available by communication. New technologies are changing our practices of communication, enabling increasing rich and diverse ways of ‘being there’, but at a distance. This paper asks: how does telepresent communication support evidence-constrained trust? In answering it, I reply to the leading pessimists about the possibility of the digital mediation of trust, Philip (...) Pettit and Hubert Dreyfus. I also rebut Media Richness Theory, which proposes a linear relationship between the volume of mediated information and the quality of communication. Positively, I develop a speech-act theory of digitally mediated communication, drawing on Austen’s identification of the illocutionary act. The choice of a particular technology of communication constitutes part of what is communicated, including a setting of the social ‘frame’, and thus the possibilities for trust to be sustained or eroded. How something is said is part of what it is that is said. (shrink)

Ignorance of one’s privileges and prejudices is an epistemic problem. While the sources of ignorance of privilege and prejudice are increasingly understood, less clarity exists about how to remedy ignorance. In fact, the various causes of ignorance can seem so powerful, various, and mutually reinforcing that studying the epistemology of ignorance can inspire pessimism about combatting socially constructed ignorance. I argue that this pessimism is unwarranted. The testimony of members of oppressed groups can often help members of privileged groups overcome (...) their ignorance. This paper argues that a particular type of speaker’s trust—hopeful trust—can motivate hearers to become cognizant of their privilege and prejudice. I argue that hopeful trust is a powerful way of eliciting trust-responsiveness that can be an effective mechanism for challenging privilege and prejudice. To make this case, I draw on case studies of online attempts to challenge ignorance. While the problems of testimonial injustice, defensi... (shrink)

Roy Sorensen introduced the concept of an epistemic blindspot in the 1980s. A proposition is an epistemic blindspot for some individual at some time if and only if that proposition is consistent but unknowable by that individual at that time. In the first half of this paper, I extend Sorensen work on blindspots by arguing that there exist blindspots that essentially involve hopes. In the second half, I show how such blindspots can contribute to and impair different pursuits of self-understanding. (...) My arguments throughout this paper draw on Luc Bovens’s account of hope. (shrink)

In this paper, I describe some of what I take to be the more interesting features of friendship, then explore the extent to which other virtues can be reconstructed as sharing those features. I use trustworthiness as my example throughout, but I think that other virtues such as generosity & gratitude, pride & respect, and the producer’s & consumer’s sense of humor can also be analyzed with this model. The aim of the paper is not to demonstrate that all moral (...) virtues are exactly like friendship in all important respects, but rather to articulate a fruitful model in which to explore the virtues. Section 2 explores the relational nature of friendship, drawing on Aristotle’s discussion of friendship in the Nicomachean Ethics. Section 3 catalogues four motivations for taking seriously the friendship model of virtue. Section 4 applies the friendship model in depth to the virtue of trustworthiness. (shrink)

In this dissertation I defend five claims about trust: 1) trusting and trustworthiness are conceptually but not causally connected; 2) trust is risky; 3) trust requires good will; 4) trust is a two-part relation; and 5) trust is an interpretative framework. A concern for trust often appears in discussions about testimony and the expectation of truthfulness; Bentley Glass, John Hardwig, and Jonathan Adler each address the role of trust in science while assuming a necessary connection between trusting and trustworthiness. I (...) argue that this conception is untenable because a justification for one fails to suffice as a justification of the other. I show, instead, that it is our assessment that links trustworthiness to trusting. My second claim, that trust involves risk, is contentious. I argue that the common understanding of risk as harm, which is held by Russell Hardin, contains the more technical understanding of risk as uncertainty, which is suggested by Niklas Luhman. Trust is risky precisely because it is inherently uncertain. Annette Baier argues that failing to recognize a distinction between trusting and action associated with that trust leads us to accept accounts of trust that are too broad. I argue that trust is to believe that another is concerned with your well-being, has good will, because she is concerned about you and not that it will necessarily benefit her in some way. Seeing trust as good will allows me to advance my fourth claim, that trust is a two-part relation, because trust is the assessment of another's good will towards me. Trusting another is believing that the other's good judgment will include concern and consideration for my interests because they are my interests. My fifth point follows naturally once trust is understood to be a risky, two-part relation requiring good will: it is an interpretive framework. Our trust in another sets the tone for understanding her behavior such that we take her actions as either supporting or blocking our interests. This account takes the capacity to trust to be the foundation for, rather than merely an outgrowth of, our judgments. (shrink)

Open-content communities that focus on co-creation without requirements for entry have to face the issue of institutional trust in contributors. This research investigates the various ways in which these communities manage this issue. It is shown that communities of open-source software—continue to—rely mainly on hierarchy (reserving write-access for higher echelons), which substitutes (the need for) trust. Encyclopedic communities, though, largely avoid this solution. In the particular case of Wikipedia, which is confronted with persistent vandalism, another arrangement has been pioneered instead. (...) Trust (i.e. full write-access) is ‘backgrounded’ by means of a permanent mobilization of Wikipedians to monitor incoming edits. Computational approaches have been developed for the purpose, yielding both sophisticated monitoring tools that are used by human patrollers, and bots that operate autonomously. Measures of reputation are also under investigation within Wikipedia; their incorporation in monitoring efforts, as an indicator of the trustworthiness of editors, is envisaged. These collective monitoring efforts are interpreted as focusing on avoiding possible damage being inflicted on Wikipedian spaces, thereby being allowed to keep the discretionary powers of editing intact for all users. Further, the essential differences between backgrounding and substituting trust are elaborated. Finally it is argued that the Wikipedian monitoring of new edits, especially by its heavy reliance on computational tools, raises a number of moral questions that need to be answered urgently. (shrink)

In The Revenge of Gaia, James Lovelock provides a memorable description of what the future might hold for us in a world severely blighted by climate change. In this scenario the human population has been pushed to the high Northern latitudes: Meanwhile in the hot arid world survivors gather for the journey to the new Arctic centres of civilization; I see them in the desert as the dawn breaks and the sun throws its piercing gaze across the horizon at the (...) camp. The cool fresh night air lingers for a while and then, like smoke, dissipates as the heat takes charge. Their camel wakes, blinks and slowly rises on her haunches. The few remaining members of the tribe mount. She belches, and sets off on the long .. (shrink)

I outline a number of parallels between trust and distrust, emphasising the significance of situations in which both trust and distrust would be an imposition upon the (dis)trustee. I develop an account of both trust and distrust in terms of commitment, and argue that this enables us to understand the nature of trustworthiness. Note that this article is available open access on the journal website.

I provide an account of the cognitive attitude of trust that explains the role trust plays in the planning of rational agents. Many authors have dismissed choosing to trust as either impossible or irrational; however, this fails to account for the role of trust in practical reasoning. A can have therapeutic, coping, or corrective reasons to trust B to ${\phi}$ , even in the absence of evidence that B will ${\phi}$ . One can choose to engage in therapeutic trust to (...) inspire trustworthiness, coping trust to simplify one’s planning, or corrective trust to avoid doing a testimonial injustice. To accommodate such types of trust, without accepting doxastic voluntarism, requires an account of the cognitive attitude of trust broader than belief alone. I argue that trust involves taking the proposition that someone will do something as a premise in one’s practical reasoning, which can be a matter of believing or accepting the proposition. I defend this account against objections that it (i) provides insufficient rational constraints on trust, (ii) conflates trust and pretense of trust, and (iii) cannot account for the rationality of back-up planning. (shrink)

Sustaining hope in patients is an important element of health care, allowing improvement in patient welfare and quality of life. However in the palliative care context, with patients who are terminally ill, it might seem that in order to maintain hope the palliative care practitioner would sometimes have to deceive the patient about the full nature or prospects of their condition by providing a ‘false hope’. This possibility creates an ethical tension in palliative practice, where the beneficent desire to improve (...) patient welfare through sustaining hope appears to be in conflict with an autonomy-based requirement not to deceive patients about their condition. In order to resolve this ethical tension, we provide an analysis of the concept of hope and argue that there is at least one conception – the ‘absolute’ conception of hope – which when properly understood allows practitioners to foster hope in terminally-ill patients while avoiding any need to deceive them about their condition. Practitioners therefore do not need to shy away from using the language of hope in the palliative setting, as on this understanding of hope it can be used in a way that both promotes patient welfare and respects patient autonomy. (shrink)

Open-source communities that focus on content rely squarely on the contributions of invisible strangers in cyberspace. How do such communities handle the problem of trusting that strangers have good intentions and adequate competence? This question is explored in relation to communities in which such trust is a vital issue: peer production of software (FreeBSD and Mozilla in particular) and encyclopaedia entries (Wikipedia in particular). In the context of open-source software, it is argued that trust was inferred from an underlying ‘hacker (...) ethic’, which already existed. The Wikipedian project, by contrast, had to create an appropriate ethic along the way. In the interim, the assumption simply had to be that potential contributors were trustworthy; they were granted ‘substantial trust’. Subsequently, projects from both communities introduced rules and regulations which partly substituted for the need to perceive contributors as trustworthy. They faced a design choice in the continuum between a high-discretion design (granting a large amount of trust to contributors) and a low-discretion design (leaving only a small amount of trust to contributors). It is found that open-source designs for software and encyclopaedias are likely to converge in the future towards a mid-level of discretion. In such a design the anonymous user is no longer invested with unquestioning trust. (shrink)

A summary of the philosophical literature on trust.

In this article I argue that often propositional knowledge is acquired and retained by extensive reliance on physical and social scaffolds that create an environment or niche conducive to knowledge. It is incumbent on epistemologists to subject these aids to epistemic assessments. I show that several of the activities involved in the creation of niches within which inquiry can thrive are carried out by whole cultures. New generations benefit from inheriting these niches whilst being able to improve upon them to (...) the advantage of their descendants. Finally, I highlight that the growth of human epistemic achievements is often due to increased outsourcing of cognitive effort and epistemic powers onto impersonal physical and social structures so that human beings can succeed more by contributing less to the solution of problems. (shrink)

In most testimonial transactions between adults, the hearer’s obligation is to accord the speaker a level of credibility that matches the evidence that what she is saying is true. When the speaker...

In times of a prevailing sense of crisis and disorder in modern politics, there is a growing sentiment that anger, despair or resignation are more appropriate attitudes to navigate the world than hope. Political philosophers have long shared this suspicion and shied away from theorising hope more systematically. The aim of this article is to resist this tendency by showing that hope constitutes an integral part of democratic politics in particular. In making this argument I draw on Kant’s conceptualisation of (...) hope as a psychological condition on action under circumstances where the chances of making a difference are dim. Given that the Kantian agent avoids the threat of despair in the pursuit of political goals by placing trust in her fellow citizens, hope has the potential to positively transform democratic practices. (shrink)

A few years ago, it was common for philosophers to begin inquiry into hope by noting that the subject has received little attention in the philosophical literature. But our ability to make this claim is quickly coming to an end; hope has been earning increasing recognition in the discipline, with philosophers exploring important questions related to the nature of hope, what makes hope rational, and how hope is connected to human wellbeing and agency. Despite this recent interest, however, there remains (...) very little discussion of the social and political dimensions of hope. My aim in this paper is to demonstrate the importance of a feminist perspective in bringing these dimensions into fuller view. I argue that feminist insights into the relational nature of the self, which call attention to where selves are socially situated in relation to others, enable a richer understanding of the nature and value of hope. (shrink)

Trust features prominently in a number of policy documents that have been issued in recent years to facilitate data sharing and international collaboration in medical research. However, it often remains unclear what is meant by ‘trust’. By exploring a concrete international collaboration between Denmark and Pakistan, we develop a way of unpacking trust that shifts focus from what trust ‘is’ to what people invest in relationships and what references to trust do for them in these relationships. Based on interviews in (...) both Pakistan and Denmark with people who provide blood samples and health data for the same laboratory, we find that when participants discuss trust they are trying to shape their relationship to researchers while simultaneously communicating important hopes, fears and expectations. The types of trust people talk about are never unconditional, but involve awareness of uncertainties and risks. There are different things at stake for people in different contexts, and therefore it is not the same to trust researchers in Pakistan as it is in Denmark, even when participants donate to the same laboratory. We conclude that casual references to ‘trust’ in policy documents risk glossing over important local differences and contribute to a de-politicization of basic inequalities in access to healthcare. (shrink)

This paper treats two questions about the relation between trust and the will. One question, about trust, is whether you can trust ‘at will.’ Can you trust despite acknowledging that you lack evidence of the trustee’s worthiness of your trust? Another question, about the will, is whether you can exercise your will at all without trust – at least, in yourself. I treat the second question as a guide to the first, arguing that the role of trust in the will (...) reveals how you can trust at will. The key lies in distinguishing two ways of being responsive to evidence. On the one hand, you cannot trust someone – whether another person or your own earlier self – whom you judge unworthy of your trust. On the other hand, trust does not require a positive assessment of trustworthiness. I thus take issue with Pamela Hieronymi’s analysis of trust as a “commitment-constituted attitude.” Your trust is indeed constrained by your responsiveness to evidence of untrustworthiness, but you need undertake no commitment akin to or involving a judgment that the trustee is trustworthy. We can see why trust is not a commitment-constituted attitude by seeing how trust itself plays a role in forming a commitment. (shrink)

Several influential characterizations of paternalism or its distinctive wrongness emphasize a belief or judgement that it typically involves—namely, 10 the judgement that the paternalized is likely to act irrationally, or some such. But it's not clear what about such a belief can be morally objectionable if it has the right epistemic credentials (if it is true, say, and is best supported by the evidence). In this paper, I elaborate on this point, placing it in the context of the relevant epistemological (...) discussions. I explain how 15 evidentialism is opposed to such thoughts; I show that possible ways of rejecting evidentialism (along lines analogous to those of pragmatic encroachment) won't work; and I sketch an account of the wrongness of paternalism that doesn't depend on any flaw in the belief about others' likely behaviour. (shrink)

I develop an account of the nature and value of being supportive in interpersonal relationships. In particular, I argue that the virtue of being supportive, construed as a modally demanding value, facilitates the autonomy of one's intimate and promotes a sense of unity in one's relationship. Moreover, the practice of being supportive plays an important role with regard to the familiar need to reconcile the normative demands of one's own projects with one's responsibilities to intimates.

Many virtual communities that rely on user-generated content (such as social news sites, citizen journals, and encyclopedias in particular) offer unrestricted and immediate ‘write access’ to every contributor. It is argued that these communities do not just assume that the trust granted by that policy is well-placed; they have developed extensive mechanisms that underpin the trust involved (‘backgrounding’). These target contributors (stipulating legal terms of use and developing etiquette, both underscored by sanctions) as well as the contents contributed by them (...) (patrolling for illegal and/or vandalist content, variously performed by humans and bots; voting schemes). Backgrounding trust is argued to be important since it facilitates the avoidance of bureaucratic measures that may easily cause unrest among community members and chase them away. (shrink)

Just as testimony is affected by unjust social relations, so too is intellectual self-trust. I defend an account of intellectual self-trust that explains both why it is properly thought of as trust and why it is directed at the self, and explore its relationship to social power. Intellectual self-trust is neither a matter of having dispositions to rely on one?s epistemic methods and mechanisms, nor having a set of beliefs about which ones are reliable. Instead, it is a stance that (...) an agent takes towards her own cognitive methods and mechanisms, comprising both cognitive and affective elements. Our intellectual self-trust is created and sustained socially and is thus porous to social power. Unjust social relations cause epistemic injustice, which undermines self-trust among the underprivileged; unjust social relations cause excessive self-trust among the privileged, which perpetuates epistemic injustice, which further undermines the self-trust of the disadvantaged in a vicious feedback loop. I conclude by exploring ways in which socially distorted intellectual self-trust can become better calibrated. (shrink)

This article deals with hope – and its importance – by analysing the little-known analysis of hope found in Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard present hope as essential to moral agency, arguingthat hope should never be given up, even if it is not supported by experience. This articlegives an interpretation of the strong claims about the necessity of hope found in Kierkegaardwhich tries to reconstruct some of Kierkegaard’s central claims, arguing that Kierkegaard can be used to sketch a distinction between justified and unjustified (...) hope. (shrink)

It is a commonplace in both the popular imagination and the philosophical literature that hope has a special kind of motivational force. This commonplace underwrites the conviction that hope alone is capable of bolstering us in despairinducing circumstances, as well as the strategy of appealing to hope in the political realm. In section 1, I argue that, to the contrary, hope’s motivational essence is not special or unique—it is simply that of an endorsed desire. The commonplace is not entirely mistaken, (...) however, because standard ways of expressing hope do have motivational influence that is different in kind from that of desire. In sections 2 through 4, I examine one of these ways of expressing hope, fantasizing, and argue that fantasies can present us with reasons to modify our goals and projects in multiple ways. (shrink)