Caveat Auditor: Epistemic Trust and Conflicts of Interest

ABSTRACT

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

KEYWORDS:

• Testimony
• caveat emptor
• defeater
• interest
• trust

Acknowledgements

Dugald Owen and two anonymous referees provided helpful feedback on an early version of this paper. I’m also grateful to the audience at the Epistemic Autonomy Conference at the University of North Florida and to James Beebe and Jon Matheson in particular for the invitation. Michael Martin provided Latin expertise for the title. Gratias tibi ago.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. As McMyler (2011) puts it, testimonial knowledge is based on “taking another’s word for things,” “Taking things on another’s authority,” or “trusting another for the truth,” (6).

2. For an introduction to the contemporary debate about the limits of epistemic authority, see Zagzebski (2012).

3. For the contours of this debate, see Christensen (2009) and Matheson (2015).

4. For the contours of this debate, see Constantin and Grundmann (2020), Grundmann (2021), Jäger (2016), and Wright (2016).

5. Incentives and interests might even be constitutive for understanding objectivity; see Wilholt (2022) for a defense of this idea.

6. We could also make a three-dimensional version of this table that takes into account the importance of the topic. This would be a way to accommodate a kind of pragmatic encroachment for testimony. The basic idea is that a conflict of interest might matter more or less depending on the importance of believing truly in that case.

7. For simplicity’s sake, I leave aside entirely the issue of distrust where that’s a negative trust of some sort. In many cases, it’s not just that your trust in someone could be low, but you could have a positive reason to distrust them.