An analysis of bias and distrust in social hinge epistemology

ABSTRACT

Philosophical literature has focused on the concept of trust, but often considers distrust merely as an afterthought. Distrust however, because of its pervasive role in our everyday lives, can be quite damaging. Thus, understanding the rationality of distrust is crucial for understanding our testimonial practices. In this paper I analyze whether it is rational or irrational to distrust an informant on the basis of identity bias. My aim is to show that distrust is irrational when based on negative identity bias. First, I adopt Annalisa Coliva’s account of social hinge epistemology where it is rationally required to assume certain basic presuppositions, such that people are generally reliable informants, to obtain propositional justification and participate in the testimonial practice. Secondly, I show how distrust based on negative identity bias can spread across other domains of interaction and jeopardize the testimonial practice as we fail to assume that people are generally reliable informants. Thirdly, I argue that considering bias as a defeater is beneficial to maintain the claim that bias-based distrust is irrational, as it prevents the acquisition of propositional justification. Finally, I show that distrust is rational when based on evidence and reason that the speaker is not reliable or sincere.

KEYWORDS:

• Trust
• trustworthiness
• distrust
• testimonial knowledge
• identity bias
• hinge epistemology

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. The terminology I choose here to identify irrational distrust and rational distrust is meant to avoid confusion with the terminology in social psychology. Indeed, in a previous version of this paper I refer to the two kinds of distrust respectively as unmotivated distrust and motivated distrust. Thankfully, one anonymous reviewer made me notice that such terminology would have been confusing for readers familiar with the literature on motivated reasoning in social psychology, where this reasoning is the one based on non-epistemic reasons such as biases. Then motivated distrust would have been the irrational kind based on bias, while unmotivated distrust would have been the rational kind based on epistemic evidence. I decided to steer clear of any misunderstanding and I opted for a different option of illegitimate and legitimate distrust which reflect the normative rationality background as I use to ground my argument.

2. The classical argument about perceptual justification goes like this: I) I have the experience of having two hands, II) Here are two hands, III) There is an external world. The conservatives argue that to be justified in believing II) on the basis of I) we need additional evidence and reasons for III). Wright notices that if that was the case we would fall in circularity because we would presuppose additional epistemic reasons for the conclusion, we are set out to prove. Wright’s (2014) brand of conservatism claims that we are entitled to III), which gives us the epistemic right to move from I) to II).

3. Coliva argues that this local hinge “T is generally a reliable informant” is better than the more general one “People are generally reliable informants” as it avoids the problem of bootstrapping inferences and it does not lead to easy knowledge (2019, p. 63).

4. Normality could be intended in a statistical sense. However, I think normality in a statistical sense represents a measurement or an indicator that we then go on interpreting against the background of the norms that we already follow. In particular, this idea surfaces. when we think about some instances of normality that seem to be more fixed than others: seeing well as well as trusting others when learning a language. For instance, even if the majority of the population presented some kind of eye defect, our everyday practices would still be governed by the assumption that we are not sick or that we should be able to see (maybe with the help of glasses). As well, our social epistemic assumptions are governed by hinge trust, while distrust would pose a concerning threat.

5. We need to trust the members of our group in order to achieve a certain goal. Cases of wholesale faith in experts show that we sometimes cannot help but trust a certain category as we don’t have the tools to evaluate their operate or their opinions. The consequences of irrationally trusting someone can still be detrimental, in particular in cases of deep disagreement. Latest events of the global COVID-19 pandemic could provide an interesting case study on the effects of positive biases toward medical sciences and how this bias oscillates when the deep disagreement amongst experts becomes more evident to public opinion, and it constitutes a matter of political relevance.

6. Tamar S. Gendler (2008) explains this discrepancy by introducing the notion of belief discordant alief. Briefly, an alief is a mental state usually in tension with explicit beliefs, that presents representational, affective and behavioral content, and it is automatically activated either internally or environmentally. In this sense, and alief causes a belief-behavior mismatch. Coliva offers a different explanation of this synchronic intrapersonal disagreement (Coliva, 2015, 2019a), by arguing for a two-genus understanding of the concept of belief, as disposition and as commitment. Someone holding a belief and a conflicting distrusting attitude, is holding two different kinds of belief – a belief as a commitment with content that p and a belief as a disposition with a content incompatible with p.

7. It could seem that to re-earn trust would be in tension with the idea that hinge trust is basic, and thus being considered trustworthy is not something that should be earned. However, in this scenario hinge trust is violated by the defeater constituted by the racial bias which spreads across the domain of interaction. Therefore, while people of color should be considered trustworthy by default, they find themselves in a practice where the racial bias constitutes a quasi-permanent defeater which makes testimonial justification unavailable for those who hold it. To re-earn trust then is not in tension with hinge trust being basic, as it would be a practical move to make the defeater generated by the identity bias evident and thus to show how those who hold it are violating the mandate of social epistemic rationality.

8. Coliva clarifies that hinges can be considered truth-apt in a deflationary sense of truth. Hinges can be true in a minimal sense, as they can be semantically assessed as the content of proposition of acceptance or meaningful negation or of conditionals (Coliva and Palmira, 2020). The truth of hinges can be captured by the equivalence schema typical of deflationary truth (Horwich, 1998).

9. Boncompagni focuses on prejudices to clarify their normative import within cases of epistemic injustice. I take prejudice and biases here to be somewhat similar, as the differences are not relevant to my argument. However, we can distinguish prejudice from bias. Prejudice is a judgment that targets the speaker in her ability as a knower based on her social identity, identity bias is an inclination or preference dictated by the identity prejudice.

10. Boncompagni draws on the presence of local hinges in OC such as “No one has never been on the moon” (OC 286) or “A king can make rain (OC 132).