Trust

In conversation we trust others to communicate successfully, to understand us, etc. because they have the adequate skills to be competent in the linguistic domain. In other words, to be trustworthy regarding an activity is nothing but to have the appropriate skills required for the activity. In the linguistic case, this means that being trustworthy regarding conversation is nothing but to have the capacity of partaking as a responsible participant in linguistic conversation, which requires having the appropriate linguistic skills. Now, (...) to trust someone in conversation one better know that the person one trusts is trustworthy in the relevant sense, that is, one need to know that she has the relevant linguistic skills. Thus, in order to maintain mutual trust, participants in conversation must track not so much the linguistic successes of other participants, but their linguistic skills, i.e. they must be able to trace their successes to the agent and not to external circumstances. But lucky successes do not manifest skill and therefore show no evidence of the true capacities of performers and, therefore, are useless for building trust. This is as much true in the linguistic realm as outside of it. We care about successes because they provide us with defeasible evidence of skills, but this evidence is defeated if such successes cannot be attributed to the agent, but are instead the product of lucky. Therefore, if we care about trust, that is, if we care about agents and their skills, we need to be wary of lucky successes. (shrink)

This paper presents a structural definition of wokeism as a coercive moral doctrine that suppresses inquiry and reframes dialogue into a mechanism of belief enforcement through guilt and reputational threat. The definition offered is not based on polemic opposition, but on structural necessity. Academic institutions that enforce the behavioral norms of wokeism while refusing to define the doctrine create an epistemic closure loop. In such a system, critique is interpreted as harm, dissent as complicity, and dialogue becomes a performance of (...) moral loyalty rather than a search for truth. The paper proceeds by formally defining wokeism using the classical method of genus and differentia. It then analyzes institutional behavior to determine whether the doctrine, once embedded, behaves as the definition predicts. Through a series of six theorems, the paper shows that wokeism transforms the university from a space of inquiry into a system of enforcement. It insulates itself through semantic denial, collapses constitutional and logical coherence, and converts dissent into guilt without recourse to argument. Objections are addressed not as neutral critiques, but as defensive patterns within the structure itself. The analysis concludes that the institutional adoption of wokeism violates the foundational principles of American higher education. An institution that suppresses critique and enforces belief without accountability has broken the public trust that legitimizes its existence. What remains is not education, but doctrinal control under the appearance of virtue. Keywords: wokeism, epistemic closure, coercive moral doctrine, belief enforcement, academic institutions, philosophical inquiry, structural recursion, dialogue suppression, institutional authoritarianism, moral epistemology. (shrink)

There is a lot of data nowadays and a need to analyze this data ("this data"? we use data as a mass noun), so one can predict jobs in data analysis and people moving into these jobs. I heard that on an online video, a Youtube video probably, but I did not write down who said it. My apologies. I have also probably heard it in the flesh from two Russian speakers, one an economist and the other a statistician. (The (...) economist once told me "When in Rome do what the Romans do," and I heard no irony, but I inferred it later: a Russian saying that!) Similarly, in an age of epidemics, one can predict more jobs in medicine and more people taking up those jobs. But that is going to generate a problem of trust, I think. When there are just four doctors in a practice, people review all four and say words to the effect, "This is the only one who does the job properly." We know this from fiction and various conversations, involving people of various social classes. But when there are 100 medical doctors and they mostly would not be there but for economic incentives, many people will not look for the exception. They will form a stereotype of the doctor (a standard "image"), expressed in jokes, caricatures, and the like, and the exception will be tarred with it as well. It will be like jokes about lawyers and politicians. I RECOMMEND that the medical system anticipates a crisis of trust from "ordinary" people now (who starts the distrust though and who inflames it?) and works on the topic of trust. Philosophers I have read who work on this: Onora O'Neill, Andrew Kirton (one of my former students, also supervised by Joel Smith and Thomas H Smith), and a European philosopher in the politics discipline area of University of Manchester, or he used to be. (shrink)

This paper introduces TGC v2, a deterministic governance protocol that formalizes trust as a machine-verifiable object and models collective decision-making through structured, localized democratic processes. Unlike blockchain systems that treat trust as something to be eliminated (“trustless” computation), TGC conceptualizes trust as a relational and responsibility-bearing structure. The protocol encodes trust into discrete Trust Objects—formal entities with signature, weight, scope, and expiry—thereby transforming trust from a sociological intuition into an ontologically explicit and computationally actionable component. -/- The TGC framework is (...) built on a Root–Sub delegation graph in which all governance occurs strictly at Depth-1, reflecting the philosophical insight that legitimate authority emerges from immediate relational constituencies rather than abstract global majorities. Consensus is resolved through a 51% rule among direct dependents, with abstentions automatically recognized through time-bounded voting windows to guarantee liveness. Structural transitions—joining, merging, detaching—are governed not by coercion but by localized democratic authority and responsibility symmetry. This produces a novel form of computational legitimacy where power and responsibility are structurally inseparable. -/- TGC v2 contributes to political philosophy, social ontology, governance theory, and the philosophy of information by offering the first formal model in which trust, responsibility, and authority are expressed as deterministic state transitions rather than sociological metaphors. It provides a conceptual and computational alternative to traditional blockchain consensus, Liquid Democracy, and DPoS models, none of which capture the structural interplay of relational trust and democratic responsibility embodied in TGC. -/- Finally, the paper outlines how this deterministic trust layer becomes the foundation for TGC v3, a human–AI hybrid governance architecture. In v3, machine-verifiable trust structures (from v2) integrate with human oversight, ethical constraints, and meta-level rule formation. This connection demonstrates how objectified trust can bridge the gap between human governance and algorithmic authority, enabling autonomous systems that remain aligned with democratic principles. -/- Thus, TGC v2 is both a standalone theoretical contribution and the necessary substrate for next-generation AI-integrated governance systems. (shrink)

We argue that generative AI can degrade research by eroding the very practices through which scholarly judgement is formed and academic trust is built. As constitutive conditions for the production and validation of knowledge, these practices cannot be reduced to the final outputs of research, which is what AI so effectively simulate. Accordingly, when researchers delegate central tasks of inquiry to systems like Large Language Models (LLMs), they may stop enacting these practices and, with them, lose access to the formation (...) they provide. An individual research output generated by AI may even appear improved but the researcher behind it fails to develop. Against this risk, merely keeping humans "in the loop" as prompters or quality-checkers of AI outputs is insufficient to preserve research as a site of intellectual formation. What is needed instead is a renewed commitment to research as a lived practice in which judgement is formed gradually, often through frictions, and participation in a scholarly community. We defend it because it rests on four sources and warrants of research that cannot be automated: tacit knowledge, personal commitment, socialisation, and deep reading. This practice enacts what we call ‘second scholarship’, by which we understand the re-appropriation of scholarly craft, chosen out of a critical experience of what generative AI can and cannot do. What cannot and should not be delegated becomes what research communities must value and answer for. This is what is left for us. (shrink)

The advent of chatbot applications for LLMs like ChatGPT has led to a novel psychiatric phenomenon popularly called “AI psychosis”. Excessive LLM-use appears to trigger in the user the acquisition of delusions about the LLM, the user, or the world. More appropriately called AI-induced delusion, I argue that this phenomenon is not as novel as it appears. Rather, it parallels the already known phenomenon of folie à deux or induced delusion where a person with a delusion communicates and transmits their (...) delusion to another person in a close, isolated social relationship. A key social epistemological mechanism for folie à deux is the deep trust in these close relationships. There is a philosophical debate about whether trust in AI systems is even possible, given that they are no agents. The phenomenon of AI-induced delusion shows that trust in LLMs is indeed possible. However, these delusions result from a conflation of interpersonal and mere pragmatic trust. These and other harms resulting from the conflation of different senses of “trust” means that we should nevertheless stop talking of “trust” in the context of extant AI systems in order to avoid this harmful confusion. (shrink)

Trust in the scientific enterprise — in science as an institution — is arguably important to individuals’ and societies’ well-being. Although some measures of public trust in science exist, the recipients of that trust are often ambiguous between trusting individual scientists and the scientific community at large. We argue that more precision would be beneficial — specifically, targeting public trust of the scientific community at large — and describe the development and validation of such an instrument: the Scientific Community Trust (...) Index (SCTI). We show the results of initial field testing to establish instrument reliability and validity. We then demonstrate certain advantages of the SCTI against other measures of trust and deference, and present correlations between the SCTI and participant scores in two trust-in-science scenarios. Our results suggest that the SCTI is a useful and compact tool for measuring public trust in the scientific community. (shrink)

Corruption prevention can be more effective if it does not rely merely on legal enforcement. This theoretical review aimed to propose a hypothetical psychological model capable of explaining the behavior of corruption. Moral disengagement is a variable that is considered ontologically closest in “distance” to the variable of corruption behavior. Counterfeit self, implicit self-theory, ethical mindset and moral emotion are taken into account as the pivotal factors of the corruption behavior and its mechanism of moral disengagement. Counterfeit self along with (...) some moderating variables are regarded to “set” one’s future corrupt behavior based on his/her past/prior ethical or unethical behavior and moral emotions. This review discovered a conjectural-theoretical model of the corruption psychology. It can be used to design a social intervention and training for individuals to manage the mindset and emotion that can buffer counterfeit self effect. In addition, the users of these research findings are recommended to be aware of the surroundings that consist of groups of people with particular ethical mindset, moral emotion proneness and self-theory. (shrink)

This contribution presents an early stage of my research of "thinking trust with Hannah Arendt". It departs from the German term for credibility, "glaubwürdig", which literally means “worthy of belief” By highlihting a conceptual split between belief (Glauben) and what is considered worthy of belief (glaub-würdig) it aims to manifest the narrowness of debates on trust that reduces it to "credibility". The contribution develops the argument that judging something as credible(zum-Glauben-würdig) always-already presupposes a mediation between the object of judgment and (...) the self. Such mediation introduces a distance from the immediacy of belief and turns it into an object of selection and utility. The article further claims that this logic of belief-worthiness dissolves knowledge in belief and contributes to the fetishization of expertise today (whose 'expertise' lay people cannot just comprehend but "believe") and to the pluralization and politicization of "facts" (facts vs. alternative facts). Against both dogmatic foundations and purely empirical skepticism, it develops, with Arendt a conception of trust grounded in the experience of the same appearing world in the plurality of human experience. It concludes that the possibility of recognizing facts as facts ultimately depends on trust (and not on belief-worthiness) in a common experience of the world, and that overcoming contemporary distrust is primarily a political question concerning the appearance of a common world, rather than being a mere epistemological problem of objectivity. (shrink)

Few recent developments in information technology have been as hyped as blockchain, the first implementation of which was the cryptocurrency Bitcoin. Such hype furnishes ample reason to be skeptical about the promise of blockchain implementations, but I contend that there’s something to the hype. In particular, I think that certain blockchain implementations, in the right material, social, and political conditions, constitute excellent bases for common knowledge. As a case study, I focus on trust in election outcomes, where the ledger records (...) not financial transactions but vote tallies. I argue that blockchain implementations could foster warranted trust in vote tallies and thereby trust in the democratic process. Finally, I argue that if the promise of blockchain implementations as democratic infrastructure is to be realized, then democracies first need to ensure that these material, social, and political conditions obtain. (shrink)

In this chapter, we explore the prospects of epistemic minimax and related principles. Minimax is a well-known approach to choosing a strategy under conditions of risk and uncertainty. In individual cases, the minimax strategy selects the action that can lead to the least bad outcome for the agent, even if taking that action ensures that expected utility is not maximized and that best-case outcomes are impossible. In social cases, the minimax strategy selects the policy that maximizes the wellbeing of the (...) least-well-off members of the group, even if doing so ensures that the aggregate utility of the group is not maximized and that best-case social outcomes are impossible. While there are many criticisms of minimax at both the individual and the social level, it is a prominent and popular approach at the social level because it prioritizes those at the bottom of the ladder. This chapter focuses on the social case for epistemic minimax and related principles. We develop the notions of epistemic position and epistemic power, both of which are prima facie epistemic goods, and demonstrate that a minimax principle can come apart from principles that would promote aggregate or maximum epistemic position or power. We also point to empirical and computational work that shows that testimonial networks online tend to be characterized by extreme inequalities of epistemic power. Then we extend traditional arguments in favor of social minimax to show that they hold in the epistemic case as well. In light of these arguments, we contend that the epistemic minimax principle should be treated as a heuristic for network interventions in democratic communities, and that it may be attractive for other types of communities as well. We conclude by examining the idea that some communities—especially the scientific community—should probably adopt different principles. Communities vary along different dimensions, and these dimensions may favor or disfavor different epistemic policies and principles, showing the sensitivity of our arguments to particular circumstances. (shrink)

Many social media platforms enable (nearly) anyone to post (nearly) anything. One clear downside of this permissiveness is that many people appear bad at determining who to trust online. Hacks, quacks, climate change deniers, vaccine skeptics, and election deniers have all gained massive followings in these free markets of ideas, and many of their followers seem to genuinely trust them. At the same time, there are many cases in which people seem to reliably determine who to trust online. Consider, for (...) example, Do It Yourself (DIY) content about how to play guitar, bake, fix one’s plumbing, or repair one’s car. For these topics, those who have the largest accounts and the most popular content typically possess significant expertise. That is, social media users seem to reliably pick out DIY experts. We thus have a puzzle: why are social media users seemingly competent at identifying DIY experts, but not climate science or vaccine experts? In what follows, we solve this puzzle. We begin by identifying a novel wisdom of the crowds phenomenon: specifically we argue that the crowd (in combination with social media search and recommendation algorithms) reliably picks out DIY experts and serves as a credentialing institution for DIY content. Next, we argue that (a) there are five epistemic factors that determine whether the crowd can succeed at recognizing experts on social media platforms, and (b) while many of those factors are satisfied to a sufficiently high degree by DIY content, they are mostly lacking for content about climate change or vaccines. (shrink)

While deliberation has traditionally played a central role in philosophical and behavioral accounts of ethical decision-making, several recent studies challenge the value of deliberation. These studies find that deliberative thinking, such as considering divergent views or different perspectives, leads to less ethical decisions. We observe, however, that these studies do not address normative deliberation, in which decision-makers consider or apply a normative standard. We predict that normative deliberation improves ethical decision-making. Across six experiments, we examine the effects of non-normative deliberation (...) and normative deliberation on ethical decision-making. We find that normative deliberation improves ethical decision-making and, in contrast to recent studies, no form of deliberation harms ethical decision-making. (shrink)

This paper proposes a formal account of AI trustworthiness, connecting both intrinsic and perceived trustworthiness in an operational schematization. We argue that trustworthiness extends beyond the inherent capabilities of an AI system to include significant influences from observers' perceptions, such as perceived transparency, agency locus, and human oversight. While the concept of perceived trustworthiness is discussed in the literature, few attempts have been made to connect it with the intrinsic trustworthiness of AI systems. Our analysis introduces a novel schematization to (...) quantify trustworthiness by assessing the discrepancies between expected and observed behaviors and how these affect perceived uncertainty and trust. The paper provides a formalization for measuring trustworthiness, taking into account both perceived and intrinsic characteristics. By detailing the factors that influence trust, this study aims to foster more ethical and widely accepted AI technologies, ensuring they meet both functional and ethical criteria. (shrink)

This article examines the Evidence-Linked Account of Cognitive Experts, as endorsed by Grundmann in his instructive book “Expert Authority and the Limits of Critical Thinking.” We raise problems with the three necessary and jointly sufficient conditions that, according to the account, an expert must meet. Our discussion has both historical and systematic aspects. We challenge the condition that an expert possesses more relevant evidence than the majority. We then object to the condition that an expert has reasoning skills superior to (...) those of the majority. Finally, we disagree with the condition that an expert be “sufficiently powerfully reliable”, based on evidence and reasoning skills. In short, we argue that being superior to the majority does not suffice for being an expert. (shrink)

This paper reframes a long-standing interpretive debate over Analects 14.31 as a normative question in the ethics of trust: under conditions of informational insufficiency, should trust be adopted as a default stance? I argue that the passage does not support such a presumption, but reveals a virtue-based conditionality: trust is neither a pre-given moral requirement nor a passive response to external cues, but is a cultivated stance resting on moral discernment formed through gongfu. To substantiate this claim, I analyze how (...) interpretations of this passage have been mobilized across Confucian contexts to support competing normative accounts of trust. While rejecting trust as a universal default, this Confucian approach affirms its ethical weight as a morally significant stance under uncertainty and offers a critical and constructive alternative to contextual approaches by grounding trust in cultivated moral discernment rather than presumptive stance-taking. (shrink)

A great many important decisions we make in life depend on scientific information that we are not in a position to assess. So it seems we must defer to experts. By now there are a variety of criteria on offer by which non-experts can judge the trustworthiness of a scientist responsible for producing or promulgating this information. But science is, for the most part, a collective not an individual enterprise. This paper explores which of the criteria for judging the trustworthiness (...) of individual scientists can be amended for use in assessing the trustworthiness of scientific collectives. It also offers some new proposals specifically geared to assessing collective trustworthiness in science, notably, an analysis of where to apply the criteria (for example at the group or individual level) and additional criteria to assess group infrastructure and design. The paper ends with some practical suggestions for how to assist the non-expert in this task. (shrink)

This article develops two skeptical arguments targeting our inherently testimonial beliefs—beliefs we cannot confirm or disconfirm independently. I first examine a “mildly” skeptical argument introduced by Keith DeRose, which holds that I cannot know that the Bulls won last night from reading about it in the newspaper because I cannot know that the report is not mistaken. I argue that the most plausible response is that people are justified in trusting sources that are well-reputed in their community. However, this response (...) opens the way for a second, more radically skeptical argument: I cannot know much of what I take myself to know through testimony because I cannot know that I am not trapped in a community in which untrustworthy sources enjoy a good reputation and trustworthy ones do not. After critically examining three general strategies to resist this second argument, I argue that none succeeds and that the best reply is instead to reject epistemological individualism for epistemological communitarianism. According to communitarians, if an individual’s inherently testimonial beliefs amount at all to knowledge, it is only in a derivative sense—it is because they belong to a community whose shared evidence grounds knowledge that no individual member could possess independently. (shrink)

My thesis in this paper is that liberals should adopt a very strong presumption in favor of the rule of law during a public health emergency and should only turn to rule by experts under very narrow, and extremely rare, conditions. In addition to defending this thesis, this paper offers a general framework for when liberals should permit violations of the rule of law in favor of rule of experts during public health emergencies. -/- The paper proceeds as follows. In (...) section I, I define some thorny theoretical issues about the rule of law that will clarify what, precisely, I mean by rule of law and rule of experts in public health. In section II, I advance several arguments in favor of the rule of law in public health. These arguments will be the following: (1) the democracy argument, (2) the autonomy argument, (3) the respect for rational planning argument, and (4) the precedent argument. These arguments are intended to establish the claim that liberals should endorse a very strong presumption in favor of not violating the rule of law during a public health emergency. In section III, I ask when this very strong presumption in favor of the rule of law may be overridden in favor of rule by experts. I outline a narrow set of conditions that must obtain for this to be the case. My own view is that these conditions very rarely, if ever, obtain in the real world. But, if the reader disagrees with me on this point, the general framework is still useful. (shrink)

The relationship between far-right and science has gained increasing scholarly attention, yet existing analyses often rely on broad labels such as “anti-scientific” or “anti-intellectual” without sufficient conceptual precision. This lack of precision, in turn, commonly leads to an inadequate analysis of the discourse of figures such as Argentine President Javier Milei. This article attempts to overcome this limitation by applying to Milei’s case a novel theoretical framework that distinguishes between two complementary dimensions of anti-science attitudes: an epistemological axis and an (...) ethical–political axis. Empirically, the study draws on roughly 109 h of public statements produced by Milei between December 2023 and July 2025, analysed through a qualitative discourse approach inspired by grounded theory. The findings show that Milei selectively targets publicly funded intellectuals and institutions, framing them as corrupt, useless, or indoctrinating, while simultaneously praising market-oriented knowledge producers. Epistemologically, however, he does not reject science per se; instead, he frequently celebrates scientific progress and expert authority, except in specific cases such as climate change where his market fundamentalism overrides scientific consensus. We show that Milei’s discourse is better understood as a “war over science” – an attempt to appropriate science under neoliberal logics – rather than as wholesale anti-scientific rejection. (shrink)

In this chapter we discuss the role of free speech and its importance in countering lies and hate speech online. Free speech is necessary but by itself cannot counter the level of polarization and disinformation we see today. The leftist approach to this problem is governmental regulation of social media companies. We examine several proposed regulatory approaches and comment on them. Following this we look at the barriers to changing contemporary social media. A market-based solution is to structurally redesign these (...) platforms to incentive truth over hate and diversity of opinion over two-sidedness. Several experimental platforms have been tried, including Polis, Kialo, and Bluesky, whose features are described. This is followed by other cultural, economic and future-facing innovations. We conclude with a proposal for gameifying social media that can overcome some of the problematic issues associated with these platforms. (shrink)

El propósito de este trabajo es exponer una estrategia explicativa que está en el núcleo de A Spirit of Trust de Robert Brandom. Esta estrategia consiste, de acuerdo con nuestra lectura, en tratar la oposición epistemológica entre apariencias y realidad —y otras oposiciones conceptuales emparentadas— como una distinción interna, normativa e histórica. Mostraremos cómo Brandom hace funcionar esta estrategia apelando al procedimiento de la rememoración, que permite, al ubicar diferentes representaciones en una secuencia de desarrollo histórico, entender la distinción entre (...) apariencias y realidad como la distinción entre cómo nos representamos qué son las cosas y cómo deberíamos representárnoslas. (shrink)

It is commonly claimed, based in large part on survey data, that we now face a crisis of trust characterised in part by a lack of epistemic trust in experts and mainstream media institutions. Such claims have been met with competing data suggesting robust popular trust in scientists. I complicate both claims as to a crisis of trust and claims to the contrary by distinguishing between stated, introspected, and revealed epistemic trust. Drawing on these distinctions, I argue that survey data (...) concerning trust in experts are ambiguous between various interpretations. Understanding the crisis of trust, or indeed determining whether there is such a crisis, hence depends on more carefully distinguishing between these interpretations. (shrink)

In this paper, I address a fundamental challenge in the philosophy of trust: how to account for trustee discretion in scenarios that fall outside explicitly defined expectations. I argue that this challenge reveals vagueness as an inherent feature of trusting relationships, often leading to disagreements between trustors and trustees. To resolve this, I propose a novel account of trust grounded in rule-following, shifting the object of trust from particular actions to adherence to rules constitutive of relationships. By focusing on relationships (...) and their constitutive rules, I provide here a framework for understanding and minimizing disagreements through communication and engaged practice. Furthermore, I argue this framework sheds light on the dynamics of trust-related reactive attitudes, in particular, distinguishing between betrayal and mere disappointment. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that reactive feelings such as betrayal and personal disappointment are not inherent to the attitude of trust. Instead, such feelings are better understood as responses to impairments in relationships. Trust, I propose, is a fully doxastic mechanism that fundamentally consists of the belief that the trustee will follow through the norms constitutive of the relationship, such that a breach of trust directly calls only for an epistemic reassessment of the trustee’s trustworthiness. I further show that (...) what warrants reactive feelings is not the mere fact of trust being broken, but whether through the violation of trust, the person reveals a disregard for the relationship. (shrink)

This commentary draws critical attention to the ongoing commodification of trust in policy and scholarly discourses of artificial intelligence (AI) and society. Based on an assessment of publications discussing the implementation of AI in governmental and private services, our findings indicate that this discursive trend towards commodification is driven by the need for a trusting population of service users to harvest data at scale and leads to the discursive construction of trust as an essential good on a par with data (...) as raw material. This discursive commodification is marked by a decreasing emphasis on trust understood as the expected reliability of a trusted agent, and increased emphasis on instrumental and extractive framings of trust as a resource. This tendency, we argue, does an ultimate disservice to developers, users, and systems alike, insofar as it obscures the subtle mechanisms through which trust in AI systems might be built, making it less likely that it will be. (shrink)

A rift has opened between philosophical and non-philosophical perspectives on what kind of conceptual stance we can take towards artificial intelligence: are AI-powered machines the sort of things that can be trusted? Outside of philosophy, an ever-increasing body of research is looking at features of AI that promote trust and trustworthiness to understand how and why people “trust” AI. Within philosophy, this entire endeavor is widely seen as resting on a conceptual confusion about trust; trust requires the object of trust (...) having agential capacities that modern AI lacks, and so whatever this body of research is studying, it is not, properly speaking, “trust”. Who is right? To shed light on this question, we explore the extent to which people thought sentences involving trusting different sorts of things make sense. We find that people do think it makes sense to talk about trusting AI, although less than it makes sense to trust other humans – even if they do not think AI has the sort of agential capacities philosophers think are required to be the object of trust. We conclude that either trust does not require agency or that there are multiple senses of trust, and neither conclusion is consistent with “trustworthy AI” being a conceptual confusion. While this undermines one criticism of AI and AI-related stakeholders, it nonetheless does not entail that AI is worthy of our trust. (shrink)

Der Erfolg von Maßnahmen zur Eindämmung der COVID-19-Pandemie ist abhängig vom Vertrauen der Öffentlichkeit in wissenschaftliche Experten. Zwar ist Vertrauen als Einstellung gegenüber Experten im Zusammenhang mit der Pandemie bereits viel Aufmerksamkeit zuteilgeworden, allerdings meist in Bezug auf das Vertrauen, das Laien Äußerungen wie Behauptungen und Mitteilungen entgegenbringen, die ihnen das Wissen der Experten zugänglich machen sollen. Dieser Aufsatz stellt dagegen eine andere Art der Äußerung in den Mittelpunkt: die Empfehlung. Im Zusammenhang mit der Pandemie haben Forderungen gegenüber der Politik (...) wissenschaftsbasiert zu verfahren zugenommen. Gleichzeitig sind Politikerinnen und Politiker aber nicht das Sprachrohr der Wissenschaft, sondern übernehmen Verantwortung für eine wissenschaftsbasierte Gesundheitspolitik, unter anderem indem sie Bürgerinnen und Bürgern bestimmte Handlungen empfehlen. Damit erhebt die Politik allerdings den Anspruch, dass Bürgerinnen nicht nur glauben sollten, was ihnen von den Experten gesagt wird, sondern auch, dass sie tun sollten, was von ihnen im Rahmen der Maßnahmen verlangt wird. Ziel dieses Aufsatzes ist es daher zu zeigen, dass Empfehlungen eine Konzeption von Vertrauen erfordert, die sich vom Vertrauen im Kontext von Mitteilungen und Behauptungen stark unterscheidet. Es geht nicht nur darum, diese Art von Vertrauen genauer zu spezifizieren, sondern auch darum zu erklären, unter welchen Voraussetzungen es vernünftig ist, wissenschaftsbasierten Empfehlungen der Politik mit Vertrauen zu begegnen. Dazu gehe ich folgendermaßen vor: In Abschnitt 1 analysiere ich zunächst den Sprechakt des Empfehlens. Das dadurch gewonnene Grundverständnis von empfehlenden Sprechakten untersuche ich dann im Kontext von Empfehlungen wissenschaftlicher Experten während der Covid-19-Pandemie (Abschnitt 2) und plädiere dann dafür, dass eine Analyse der an eine breite Öffentlichkeit gerichteten Empfehlungen am besten bei Äußerungen von Politikern ansetzen muss, die sich auf das kompetente Urteil wissenschaftlicher Expertinnen und Experten beziehen (Abschnitt 3). In Abschnitt 4 diskutiere ich dann die Gründe, die ein Hörer haben könnte, eine solche Empfehlung anzunehmen, bevor ich in den Abschnitten 5 und 6 die für Empfehlungen relevante Form des Vertrauens herausarbeite. Abschnitt 7 diskutiert die Auffassung, dass Vertrauen in wissenschaftsbasierte Empfehlungen nur durch die Anerkennung der Sprecherin im Sinne einer guten Ratgeberin als rationale Einstellung ausgewiesen werden kann, bevor ich abschließend argumentiere, dass diese Rationalitätsbedingungen im Kontext der COVID-19-Pandemie nur schwer einzulösen waren. (shrink)

This paper is focused on the ways of expressing trust and distrust in financial institutions represented in the language and speech culture of the population of the Lipetsk region. Based on 55 semi-structured interviews of three generations (centennials, millennials, elder generations) living in rural and urban settlements, issues of understanding and interpretation of financial institutions, features of trust, positive and negative experiences of interaction with various financial institutions were analyzed. The use of the constructivism made it possible to interpret trust (...) as an internal component of the practices of an agent involved in the current financial situation. The study showed that in regions with an average standard of living, an average level of financial culture and the dominance of a conservative model of financial behaviour, the difference between generations is less noticeable against the backdrop of a significant difference between residents of rural and urban settlements. The analysis of interviews with three generations of residents of the region showed that the conservative model of financial behaviour continues to be reproduced in the speech culture of the informants, where banks and insurance organizations remain the most trustworthy. The images of financial institutions, represented in the language of the interviews, revealed a high level of resentment associated with the experience of past events (the collapse of the USSR, privatization). The content analysis revealed the image of the state as a “collector of payments”, and to a lesser extent, a “helper” supporting a person in his relationship with financial institutions. (shrink)

In combating the ongoing global health threat of the COVID-19 pandemic, decision-makers have to take actions based on a multitude of relevant health data with severe potential consequences for the affected patients. Because of their presumed advantages in handling and analyzing vast amounts of data, computer systems of algorithmic decision-making are implemented and substitute humans in decision-making processes. In this study, we focus on a specific application of ADM in contrast to human decision-making, namely the allocation of COVID-19 vaccines to (...) the public. In particular, we elaborate on the role of trust and social group preference on the legitimacy of vaccine allocation. We conducted a survey with a 2 × 2 randomized factorial design among n = 1602 German respondents, in which we utilized distinct decision-making agents and prioritization of a specific social group as design factors. Our findings show that general trust in ADM systems and preference for vaccination of a specific social group influence the legitimacy of vaccine allocation. However, contrary to our expectations, trust in the agent making the decision did not moderate the link between social group preference and legitimacy. Moreover, the effect was also not moderated by the type of decision-maker. We conclude that trustworthy ADM systems must not necessarily lead to the legitimacy of ADM systems. (shrink)

Scholars routinely appeal to trust as a signifier of successful interventions and markers of healthy classrooms. Teaching that fosters trust is celebrated, and teachers whom students trust, cherished. Despite the optimistic view of what trust can achieve in and for education, little has been said about what trust truly is, what it requires, how it operates, or what it takes to be considered trustworthy. One might argue that there does not need to be direct scholarship on trust in education, as (...) it is straightforward and easily understood. While it may be true that trust is a common term, far from being deemed academic jargon, overlooking the insightful questions that arise when one begins to contemplate trust and its role in education would be a mistake. This encyclopedia entry covers considerable philosophical ground within the study of trust and connects the scholarship to concerns in educational studies. It provides a historical overview of trust by first referencing appeals within prominent philosophical texts, then by exploring feminist philosophy and care ethics in the 1980s, and finally by showcasing several philosophers of education who have addressed the topic. The second section walks through a technical philosophical definition of trust, considering conflicting accounts of who is involved in trusting relationships and how to describe the act of trusting. In the third section, the entry examines a specific type of trust, namely interpersonal trust, and how this type of trust functions both vertically and horizontally in traditional educational settings. The fourth section outlines the requirements for being a trustworthy teacher and the consequences for students when teachers fail to meet these requirements. Ultimately, this entry serves as a starting point for those interested in what (primarily Western, analytic) philosophers have to say about the role of trust in education. (shrink)

In den letzten Jahrzehnten hat sich das wissenschaftliche Publizieren auch in der Philosophie vom gedruckten Werk hin zu überwiegend digitalen Formaten entwickelt. Warum aber sollte man sich in der Philosophie mit Fragen zur Infrastruktur an Universitäten befassen? Wieso sollte man als Vertreter:in dieses Faches kritisch über Prozesse des elektronischen Publizierens nachdenken? Was haben Philosoph:innen mit Bibliometrie zu tun und wie verändert das die philosophische Arbeit? Die Autor:innen des hier vorgelegten Bandes diskutieren diese Fragen kritisch und entwickeln Vorschläge für mehr Autonomie (...) in den Wissenschaften. (shrink)

On extant accounts of trust, it is not apt to trust someone who seems or actually is untrustworthy. It also does not seem apt, on such accounts, to morally demand trust and blame people for not trusting. Yet, there seem to be cases where it is plausible that trusting the untrustworthy might be apt or where we might aptly demand trust and blame people for not trusting. In this paper, we sketch out an account of trust according to which to (...) trust someone involves exercising a moral power which gives trustees permission or additional reasons to do as trusted. On this account, there can be moral reasons to trust other than the trustee’s reliability. This allows our account to better account for these cases than existing accounts of trust. (shrink)

Neurotechnologies such as brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) and deep brain stimulation (DBS) raise distinctive concerns about human agency. A recent proposal by Schönau et al. (2021) identifies four dimensions along which neurotechnologies may threaten agency: responsibility, privacy, authenticity, and trust. Schönau et al.’s framework valuably maps how neurotechnologies affect users and has inspired qualitative assessment tools. Yet although it acknowledges interconnections among the four dimensions, it does not explain what structurally unifies them. This represents a key gap in the view. Assessment (...) instruments modeled on the framework, such as their Qualitative Agentive Competency Tool (Q-ACT), evaluate each dimension independently, risking fragmented assessments that miss the integrated nature of agential harm. I argue that agential self-trust unifies these four dimensions. Each tracks a distinct way that neurotechnologies can erode the self-trust constitutive of planning agency: confidence in one’s control over action (responsibility), in the boundaries of one’s deliberative life (privacy), in one’s psychological continuity (authenticity), and in one’s sensory and evaluative capacities (trust). This carries concrete policy implications. Current informed consent procedures for neurotechnology trials enumerate risks along separate dimensions without flagging the cumulative threat to a user’s capacity for agential self-trust. Likewise, assessment instruments should include integrative measures that track agential self-trust across domains. As neurotechnology governance develops at the international level, a unified account of agential harm within this dimensional framework can guide both consent design and longitudinal monitoring. (shrink)

Invitation to submit abstracts to the new special issue PHILOSOPHICAL PERSPECTIVES ON TRUST AND DISTRUST IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIETIES to be published by Sats. Northern European Journal of Philosophy in spring 2024.

I present a puzzle about inquiry and discuss two potential solutions. The puzzle stems from two equally compelling sets of data suggesting that, on the one hand, there’s something epistemically defective with inquiring into questions that don’t have true answers. On the other hand, however, there can be scenarios in which we are epistemically permitted to inquire into questions that don’t have true answers. How is it that inquiries into questions that don’t have true answers can both be defective and (...) permissible from an epistemic point of view? The first solution I consider maintains that inquiries into questions that don’t have true answers are always impermissible but can be excusable. The second solution maintains that inquiries into questions that don’t have true answers are bad inquiries that can be conducted by inquirers we can legitimately trust. I argue against the former and in favor of the latter. -/- . (shrink)

According to epistemic ideology critics, a belief or set of beliefs is ideological when it: (a) empowers those responsible for disseminating these beliefs and (b) lacks compelling independent justification. In their view, beliefs satisfying these criteria are defective and ought to be debunked. I contest this claim by showing how, under conditions of political crisis, it is often both epistemically unwarranted and pragmatically inadvisable to debunk seemingly ideological beliefs. I examine the types of beliefs that constitute what are commonly called (...) “emergency frames.” An emergency frame is a system of beliefs concerning the nature of a severe collective threat and the best way to combat that threat. I argue that, due to the uncertainty inherent in many crisis situations, emergency frames often lack independent justification. Because this lack stems from unavoidable epistemic constraints, it should not be seen as a flaw warranting the debunking of any given emergency frame. I begin by outlining the notion of epistemic ideology critique (Section 1). In Section 2, I explore how, when this notion is applied to emergency frames, they often appear ideological and thus seem to warrant debunking. In Section 3, however, I show why it is sometimes epistemically unwarranted and pragmatically inadvisable to debunk such frames. I conclude that, in certain cases, when confronted with ostensibly ideological emergency frames, an attitude of political trust is more suitable than one of radical critique. (shrink)

Can AI developers be held epistemically responsible for the processing of their AI systems when these systems are epistemically opaque? And can explainable AI (XAI) provide public justificatory reasons for opaque AI systems’ outputs? Koskinen (2024) gives negative answers to both questions. Here, I respond to her and argue for affirmative answers. More generally, I suggest that when considering people’s uncertainty about the factors causally determining an opaque AI’s output, it might be worth keeping in mind that a degree of (...) uncertainty about conclusions is inevitable even in entirely human-based empirical science because in induction there’s always a risk of getting it wrong. Keeping this in mind may help appreciate that requiring full transparency from AI systems before epistemically trusting their outputs might be unusually (and potentially overly) demanding. (shrink)

Trust and trustworthiness are central concepts in contemporary discussions about the ethics of and qualities associated with artificial intelligence (AI) and the relationships between people, organisations and AI. In this article we develop an interdisciplinary approach, using socio-technical software engineering and design anthropological approaches, to investigate how trust and trustworthiness concepts are articulated and performed by AI software practitioners. We examine how trust and trustworthiness are defined in relation to AI across these disciplines, and investigate how AI, trust and trustworthiness (...) are conceptualised and experienced through an ethnographic study of the work practices of nine practitioners in the software industry. We present key implications of our findings for the generation of trust and trustworthiness and for the training and education of future software practitioners. (shrink)

Consensus about how best to analyse trust remains elusive. This paper presents a function-first strategy for understanding trust. By identifying a common functional core to trust, we can unify various forms of trust as forms of the same thing while respecting trust’s diversity. I explicate a function-first model of trust according to which the grounds of trust differentially dispose trustors to rely on trustees. After motivating and developing the model, I address three objections. I conclude by orienting a function-first account (...) of trust toward future trust research and considerations of well-placed trust. (shrink)

The ethics of belief is concerned with what we should believe. This paper is on the ethics of conspiracy belief: should we sometimes believe in conspiracy theories? In the first part, we discuss whether conspiracy theorists are responsible for their beliefs. We argue that they are. Conspiracy beliefs are subject to robust epistemic evaluations since they can be sufficiently responsive to epistemic reasons, thus differing from paradigmatic delusions. In the second part, we consider the epistemic rationality of conspiracy belief. We (...) claim that someone who has reasons to distrust existing authorities (members of marginalized groups are prime examples) can rationally believe in conspiracy theories. To defend this claim, we spell out a mechanism that leads from rational distrust to rational conspiracy belief. We build on insights about the nature of rationality, the social nature of knowledge, and knowledge from the internet. Finally, we consider specific epistemic harms of conspiracy theories. We argue that these harms can render conspiracy beliefs unjustified while not infringing on their rationality. This allows us to carve out an interesting subclass of beliefs in conspiracy theories that are worthy of philosophical and scientific attention: conspiracy beliefs that are rational yet unjustified. We thereby intend to push the debate to more epistemically nuanced evaluations. (shrink)

Neil Levy’s book Bad Beliefs defends a prima facie attractive approach to social epistemic policy – namely, an environmental approach, which prioritises the curation of a truth-conducive information environment above the inculcation of individual criti cal thinking abilities and epistemic virtues. However, Levy’s defence of this approach is grounded in a surprising and provocative claim about the rationality of deference. His claim is that it’s rational for people to unquestioningly defer to putative authorities, because these authorities hold expert status. As (...) friends of the environmental approach, we try to show why it will be better for that approach to not be argumentatively grounded in this revisionist claim about when and why deference is rational. We identify both theoretical and practical problems that this claim gives rise to. (shrink)

With the specific target being three-placed accounts of trust that are prominent within the philosophical literature. Towards the end of the paper, I pursue a particular challenge to the claim that we have irrational trust. I demonstrate that what the challenge shows is that either we can have irrational trust, or else that several views in the literature are false. I (tentatively) suggest that it's better to opt for the conclusion that we can have instances of irrational trust.

Philosophical argumentation appears minimally adversarial. The assessment of philosophical evidence and reasons we appeal to in our arguments is carried out by critical, reflective scrutiny via objections, challenges, and counterexamples. This critical feature of philosophy has been criticized by feminist and standpoint epistemologists as structurally conducive to epistemic injustice. To remedy this situation, a stance of default trust toward a marginalized philosopher’s arguments should be adopted. This paper objects to the proposal and offers an alternative account of how epistemic injustice (...) arises in philosophical argumentation. First, we argue that default trust is inapplicable in philosophical practice and argumentation, given the essentially dialogical and adversarial assessment of philosophical reasons. Second, rejecting adversariality altogether itself risks generating epistemic injustice. Default trust precludes earnest engagement with the reasons and arguments of marginalized subjects, preventing them from obtaining full credibility within the philosophical community. It is then argued that epistemic injustice in philosophical argumentation primarily arises when subjects are denied recognition as legitimate participants in philosophical assessment, rather than from minimal adversariality. Furthermore, adversariality itself can function as a weapon of resistance when marginalized subjects confront unfair audiences by denying them recognition as philosophically authoritative. (shrink)

Modern democratic states are increasingly adopting new information and communication technologies to enhance the efficiency and quality of public administration, public policy and services. However, there is substantial variation in the extent to which countries are successful in pursuing such public digitalization. This paper zooms in on the role of social trust as a possible account for the observed empirical pattern in the range and scope of public digitalization across countries. Our argument is that high social trust makes it easier (...) to digitalize the public sector to the benefit of overall society. We develop a simple game-theoretical model that specifies this positive externality from a high-trust culture and provide empirical evidence that a higher level of social trust is associated with a higher level of public digitalization. Of course, high-trust countries cannot do without the rule of law and some institutionalized mechanisms of control and accountability. However, from our argument, it follows that one future challenge could be that control crowds out trust, so that the balance is no longer optimal. If such overcontrol occurs, public digitalization win–win situations between citizens and government can be undermined, even in high-trust countries. (shrink)

No one describes a passionate night using the language of consent. Partners in long-term relationships rarely think of intimacy in terms of permission. If consent is absent precisely when things go well, why does it dominate sexual ethics? Critics have pressed this challenge, but they fail to explain why consent is irrelevant rather than merely unspoken. I argue that consent is a tool whose authority depends on three conditions: opacity of wills, risk of wrongful invasion, and the value of sovereignty. (...) In intimate relationships marked by trust, these conditions are altered. The operative norm shifts from consent-sensitivity to dissent-sensitivity—from "do not act without permission" to "you may act unless there is dissent." Trust does the moral work, and it is not consent in disguise; the two belong to different normative registers. Consent is a problem-solving device that presupposes a problem. In the ideal case, there is no problem to solve. (shrink)