The Social Indicators of the Reputation of an Expert

ABSTRACT

A notion that comes from the toolbox of social sciences, trust has become a mainstream epistemological concept in the last 15 years. The notion of epistemic trust has been distinguished from the notion of moral and social trust, the former involves kinds of inferences about the others that are rationally justifiable. If I trust a scientist about the efficacy of a vaccine against COVID-19, I must have an epistemic justification. I am therefore rationally justified in trusting her because I have an epistemic reason to justify my belief. I will challenge the distinction between epistemic and moral and social trust by pointing to several social indicators that contribute to our trustful attitudes in a reasonable way. Social indicators of reputation, values and moral commitments to values are indispensable strategies to come to trust in a rational way, an attitude that is different from merely believing the truth. I also point out the fragility of trusting experts’ reputations and stress the importance of avoiding biases in trusting other people’s reputations to make our deference to experts more robust.

KEYWORDS:

• Trust
• reputation
• experts
• social indicators

Disclosure Statement

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

Notes

1. For an analysis of the Tegnell case see: https://www.newyorker.com/news/dispatch/swedens-pandemic-experiment. For an exhaustive analysis of scientific advice in Sweden during the pandemic, see (Brusselaers et al. 2022).

2. See this interview on the Financial Times, September 11^th, 2020 : https://www.ft.com/content/5cc92d45-fbdb-43b7-9c66-26501693a371.

Additional information

Funding

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 870883. The information and opinions are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of the European Commission.

Notes on contributors

Gloria Origgi

Gloria Origgi is a Paris-based Italian philosopher who works mainly in social and political epistemology. She is Research Director at the CNRS (Institut Nicod) where she leads the team “Epistemic Norms”. Among her recent publications: Reputation (2018, Princeton University Press); Passions (2019, Presses Universitaires de France).