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ABSTRACT
Public discourse implicitly appeals to what we call the “Traumatic Untrustworthiness Argument” (TUA). To motivate, articulate, and assess the TUA, we appeal to Hawley’s (2019) commitment account of trust and trustworthiness. On Hawley’s account, being trustworthy consists in the successful avoidance of unfulfilled commitments and involves three components: the actual avoidance of unfulfilled commitments, sincerity in one’s taking on elective commitments, and competence in fulfilling commitments one has incurred. In contexts of testimony, what’s at issue is the speaker’s competence and sincere intention to speak truthfully. The TUA targets trauma victims’ competence rather than their sincerity. According to the TUA, empirical evidence shows that trauma undermines victims’ trustworthiness with regard to speaking truthfully about their trauma by undermining their competence to remember the relevant event. We argue that what the evidence shows is rather that remembering traumatic events involves a distinct “mode of manifesting” the competence to remember particular events from the personal past. Trauma victims are competent to speak truthfully about their trauma and ought to be trusted at least with regard to the central details of the event. By suggesting otherwise, the TUA threatens an insidious form of epistemic injustice which Hawley’s account helps us locate.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Rebecca Dreier for her contributions to earlier drafts of this manuscript. We would also like to thank attendees of the 2022 bi-annual PSA meeting, the IPM3, and the 2022 SPP/ESPP joint session for excellent comments and questions. Finally, we would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their excellent feedback.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. See Walsh (Citationn.d.) on the phenomenology of traumatic memory as itself a traumatizing being “stuck in time.”
2. Leigh Gilmore, Tainted Witnesses: Why we doubt what women say about their lives (Gilmore, Citation2018); The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony (Gilmore, Citation2001).
3. This seems to be especially prevalent in two kinds of cases: (i) when the victim is BIPOC, and (ii) when the victim is a woman, the crime sexual or domestic in nature, and the accused is a cisgender white man.
4. That said, the TUA is not just concerned with the factual details of a traumatic memory. Its scope is wide and concerns the victim’s overall experience of the event, her first-order affective response(s) to the event, her second-order affective responses to the emotionally valenced content of the memory, and its overall significance (especially for her self-narrative).
5. For an example of this sort of sentiment as relayed by a sexual violence researcher, see Tsanchz (Citation2021: 22:15.57, 40:30.17). https://www.meghantschanz.com/episode-161-her-research-shows-that-some-men-use-sexual-assault-allegations-to-their-benefit/
6. We remain neutral on whether memory is factive (Bernecker, Citation2017), on whether declarative memories for particular events from the personal past must be appropriately causally connected to those events (Martin & Deutscher, Citation1966; cf. ; De Brigard, Citation2014; Michaelian, Citation2016), and on whether episodic memories, as such, present themselves as representing past experiences, that is, represent themselves as authentic (Bernecker, Citation2010, Citation2015).
7. Recall of particular events from the personal past tends to be episodic. However, these memories lose experiential or imaginstic content the more they are recalled as part of a process sometimes called “semanticization” (Irish & Piguet, Citation2013; Aronowitz, Citationforthcoming). Moreover, it’s possible to recall an event from one’s personal past without ever entertaining any experiential or imagistic content.
8. It’s worth noting that the TUA is not restricted to memories formed on the basis of experiencing a particular kind of traumatic event. Rather, its scope includes traumatic memories that result from experiencing a natural disaster, experiencing or witnessing violence, experiencing or witnessing sexual or physical assault, witnessing or receiving news of the death of a loved one or caretaker, and so on. Given the wideness of scope of the TUA with respect to mnemic content, memory type, and type of traumatic event, its plausibility depends in part on the caution it recommends being limited and contextual. For instance, the TUA might not caution against trusting victims of sexual assault with respect to their (first- or second-order) affective response to the event or with respect to the significance that they draw from the event. But, as the examples we use throughout suggest, it is a common experience of victims of assault to be treated with some measure of distrust regarding their portrayal of particular factual details of the event.
9. Our argument here expands on work done in Springle et al. (Citation2023) showing that empirical evidence of the veridicality of recall of traumatic memory suggests that traumatic memory is as reliable as non-traumatic memory, contra the TUA.
10. We grant the possibility that the TUA or parts thereof can be made explicit in cases where (dis)trust of trauma victims is made salient in public discourse, either as an earnest attempt to reconstruct the argument or merely as cover for prejudicial, e.g., racist, sexist, transphobic, ableist, etc., attitudes.
11. Hawley does not give a full account of commitments. Moreover, while commitments typically give us obligations and obligations (nearly always) give us commitments, Hawley elects to distinguish the two and to keep commitments central to the account rather than obligations (Hawley, Citation2019, p. 11). Finally, commitments can be incurred and fulfilled explicitly, as in cases of issuing a verbal promise, or implicitly, as in cases where one’s role in an institution, e.g., one’s being a professor, brings with it certain commitments.
12. Going forward, we use “speaker” and “testifier” interchangeably.
13. Going forward, we drop mention of the fact that the relevant capacity to speak truthfully is memory-based and concerns the traumatic event, except where clarity dictates.
14. In fact, a purported cause of Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) is severe physical or sexual abuse. DID patients suffer dissociative amnesia concerning significant stretches of their past and, when remembering, describe the event(s) of abuse as not having happened to them but as having happened to another person (American Psychiatric Association, Citation2013, pp. 291–307).
15. We take second-order affective responses to include chronic affective responses to trauma including Major Depressive Disorder as well as Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Unfortunately, due to considerations of space, we hold off addressing this issue for another occasion. We would like to thank an anonymous reviewer for pressing us to clarify this.
16. Distracting oneself during the traumatic experience may explain why memories of the beginning of a traumatic event are especially vivid and veridical while memories of the middle or end of the event may be less so as well as why memories of such events may be fragmented. This is consistent with victims remembering the central facts about the full event (Haskell & Randall, Citation2019, p. 21).
17. We use these examples because they are simple and the kinds of emotions that the mind and biological sciences have spent more time studying. We do not endorse a reductive view of human emotions, many of which are complex, diverse, culturally specific, normatively laden, etc. where the value of such features cannot be (or at least cannot easily be) reduced to their contribution to biological fitness.
18. In addition to eliciting memories of sensory details, there are more embodied methods of triggering victims’ memories, e.g., reenactments. We hope to explore implications of embodied accounts of memory (e.g., Rowlands, Citation2010, Citation2015, Citation2017) for understanding issues of epistemic justice in the context of traumatic memory in future work.
19. It may be advantageous to take several reports at later intervals to see which details are retained as central. Changes in the report over time (including loss of detail) and during semanticization occur for non-traumatic memories and should not by themselves be seen as undermining the veracity of the memory.
20. It doesn’t follow from these studies that victims of trauma are always worse at remembering neutral or positive content. Also, the content used in these studies were completely independent from the trauma—the results might be different if we ask for the non-traumatic content of events occurring before the trauma.