Trust and Reliance in Testimony

Professor Ishani Maitra (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor)

Abstract: Much of what we know we learn through others telling us. Several philosophers have thought that trust plays some crucial epistemic role in our coming to know via others’ testimony. In this paper, I distinguish some different epistemic roles that trust might be thought to play here: for example, trust (in the teller) might be thought to be necessary for coming to know via telling; or trust might be thought to provide some extra epistemic oomph that wouldn’t be available without trust. Then, I use the well-known distinction between trusting someone and merely relying on them to argue that trust does not play the epistemic roles distinguished above. Finally, I consider some important consequences of this conclusion for the epistemology of testimony.