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ABSTRACT
Word-taking has both an epistemic and an ethical dimension. I argue that we have no good way of understanding how both ethical and epistemic considerations can be brought to bear when someone makes up her mind to take another at her word, even as we recognize that they must. This difficulty runs deep, and takes the familiar form of a sceptical problem. It originates in an otherwise powerful and compelling way of thinking about what distinguishes theoretical from practical reason. But that picture breaks down, especially in hard cases, where we find ourselves pulled in opposed directions by our ethical and epistemic responsibilities. My primary interest is in diagnosing the problem, to which I do not see any easy solution. However, at the end of the paper, I suggest three issues that deserve more attention in thinking about how the problem might be solved.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 The details of the example in the text can be hard to nail down. Baker is also concerned with the rationality of exhibiting bias in favour of your friend’s good character, independently of any verbal assurance. For illuminating discussion, see Stroud [Citation2006]. At crucial points (e.g. [1987: 4]), Baker discusses a version that involves word-taking. I focus throughout on that version. More generally, my reconstruction takes certain liberties in the name of charity. As with many groundbreaking discussions, multiple things are going on in Baker’s paper, and it is not always clear how to separate different strands. The paper resists any simple statement of its leading ideas as an ‘account’ or ‘theory’ of the subject matter (I regard this as a virtue). In obvious respects, the paper has been very influential: it is frequently cited in the literature that it helped to spawn. Nevertheless, I believe that its depth is not always appreciated. As will become clear, I read Baker as posing a deep sceptical problem. My ascription to her of those commitments that generate the problem is, I believe, well-supported by the text, although she does not state all of them explicitly.
2 Subsequent literature about which type of attitude trust is, most fundamentally, tends to classify Baker as a ‘non-cognitivist’. See, for example, Jones [Citation1996: 15] and McMyler [Citation2011: 132]. As I read her, Baker is not a cognitivist, but also not a non-cognitivist.
3 In similar vein, Michael Bratman [Citation1992] discusses holding certain facts fixed in the cognitive background for planning, even when we lack grounds for belief. He offers [ibid.: 8] an example similar to Baker’s as one illustration. He does not, however, weigh in on the question of whether this would constitute trust, or of whether belief itself might be called for ethically.
4 Ideas similar to those defended by Ross and Moran have recently been expressed in terms of issuing second-personal [McMyler Citation2011; Simpson Citation2018] or perhaps exclusionary/pre-emptory reasons for belief [Keren Citation2014]. I am generally sympathetic to the idea that word-givers issue a special kind of reason for belief, and defend similar ideas elsewhere [2017; manuscript]. As is hopefully clear by now, the problem is not with the idea that there are such reasons, but rather with comprehending the condition(s) of their possibility.
5 ‘Inalienable’ might seem in tension with the speaker’s assuming responsibility: why not a ‘transfer’ or ‘shift’ of responsibility? But consider letting a babysitter assume responsibility for your child. You dispatch your own responsibility by trusting another with the child’s care. We cannot divest ourselves of many responsibilities, although we might sometimes be able to let others assume responsibility to us, counting on them to ensure that our own responsibilities are met. So it seems with believing on another’s authority—a bit like letting another person babysit a piece of your mind.
6 Some might disagree. Annette Baier famously writes that ‘trust is a fragile plant, which may not endure inspection of its roots, even when they were, before inspection quite healthy’ [Citation1986: 260]. Read in context, however, trust with ‘healthy’ roots might still not be rational, or moral, trust, and Baier is certainly interested in evaluating trust in these ways.
7 Baker’s example cleverly exploits the relation between espionage and perfidy. If your friend is guilty, she is the sort of person who is adept at deceiving. Presumably, this must occur to you.
8 Moran [Citation2005: 16] also suggests that, even if the rational significance of someone’s word is non-evidential, the question of her trustworthiness might still turn on evidence about her. Similarly, McMyler [2011: 167] claims that testimonial reasons are second-personal, but that an epistemic agent is ‘rationally responsible for assessing the competence of the speaker’ to determine if she should be treated as an epistemic authority, where this appears to mean considering one’s evidence that she is trustworthy. As I am about argue, the idea is problematic. Faulkner [Citation2007: 878–9] likewise notes the problem, and instead grounds testimonial belief in an affective form of trust. This invites the same charge of reflective instability as Holton’s view, however.
9 I give the distinction a (neo)-Kantian spin. Others draw the boundary in different terms: direction of fit, conative vs cognitive attitudes, syllogisms that conclude with action vs judgment, etc.
10 The famous expression was Gould’s way of reconciling the conflict between science and religion. Its use in this context is suggested by Selim Berker [Citationforthcoming].
11 Elsewhere [2017], I discuss this idea with regard to belief in promises, and also [2018] concerning special obligations that we have to believe what others tell us in the context of friendship.
12 See Baker’s own discussion of scepticism [1987: 7].
13 The pragmatist program of assimilating the theoretical to the practical is more familiar, but one finds the opposite tendency in the conception of the practical in eighteenth-century rational intuitionists like Clarke and Wollaston. See Schapiro [Citation2001] for discussion.
14 I take them to be sceptical solutions. A sceptical solution (originally Hume’s label) to a sceptical problem is contrasted with what Saul Kripke [Citation1982: 66] calls a straight solution.
15 This suggests that taking another’s word is something that you might try yet fail to do. This seems right. Word-taking may be thought of as a skill, which must be learned and cultivated. Even for a skilled word-taker, sustaining conviction in a case like Baker’s will be challenging.
16 See Rawls’s [Citation1971: 416–24] discussion of deliberative rationality.
17 As Bernard Williams [Citation1976] famously argued. Williams notes the connection between moral luck and epistemic luck, as does Nagel [Citation1976] in his reply.
18 I benefited from presenting earlier versions of this paper to audiences at the University of California Los Angeles, Auburn University, the University of Vermont, and the University of California Santa Barbara. In addition to my gratitude to the members of these audiences, I owe special thanks for both encouragement and criticism to R. Lanier Anderson, Selim Berker, Michael Bratman, Tyler Doggett, Pamela Hieronymi, David Hills, Ram Neta, David Plunkett, Seana Shiffrin, Sarah Stroud, and two anonymous referees.