Relationally Responsive Expert Trustworthiness

ABSTRACT

Social epistemologists often operationalize the task of indirectly assessing experts’ trustworthiness to identifying whose beliefs are more reliably true on matters in an area of expertise. Not only does this neglect the philosophically rich space between belief formation and testimonial utterances, it also reduces trustworthiness to reliability. In ethics of trust, by contrast, explicitly relational views of trust include things like good will and responsiveness. One might think that relational aspects can be safely set aside for social epistemology of trust in experts, that such considerations may be relevant for personal relationships but not for expert trustworthiness. Against these claims I argue for the social-epistemic relevance of relational aspects of trust in experts, and to that end I discuss three sorts of considerations – responsively positive, neutral, and negative factors – that can make a difference for expert trustworthiness.

KEYWORDS:

• Epistemic dependence
• expertise
• relationality
• trust

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Here I borrow the notion of operationalization from philosophy of science (see Bridgman 1927; for an initial defense and Chang 2019 for a survey of criticisms), where one reformulates an idea in terms of more straightforwardly measurable (and thus purportedly more properly meaningful) criteria. My thanks to this journal’s referee for pushing me to clarify this usage.

Additional information

Funding

There are no funding sources nor financial conflicts of interest to be disclosed.

Notes on contributors

Ben Almassi

Ben Almassi is an Associate Professor of Philosophy, Program Coordinator of Interdisciplinary Studies, and Affiliated Faculty in Gender & Sexuality Studies, Political and Social Justice Studies, and Restorative Justice at Governors State University. He can be reached at [email protected].