19. Epistemic vigilance

Elucidations: Prev Next

• 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.