Trust and Trustworthiness and Their Implications for Testimony and Epistemic Authority

• Applicant: Dr. Nastasia Müller
• Subject Area: Theoretical Philosophy
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 552576003

Trust is a fundamental aspect of human relationships and social interactions and plays a crucial role in nearly all aspects of human life. Trust is especially important for epistemic testimony and epistemic authority. Without trust, we would attain little if any true beliefs or knowledge from the social world. Trust is ubiquitous and of fundamental importance for human life. But what exactly is trust, and when is an agent trustworthy? In the existing literature, the concepts of ‘trust’ and ‘trustworthiness’ are built upon a central assumption: trust and trustworthiness are intimately linked because trust is agent-directed. The two concepts are reciprocal: all else being equal, an agent should trust the trustworthy agent. Thus, most accounts assess trust and trustworthiness based on a normative requirement, and they treat trust and trustworthiness as two sides of the same coin. In contrast to these views, the foundation of my research project begins with the observation that trust and trustworthiness can come apart, both on the descriptive level and on the normative level. This suggests that we should be wary of treating them as intertwined and interdefinable. First, at a descriptive level, it is clear that agents can and do sometimes trust untrustworthy agents, and they may also fail to trust a trustworthy agent. At the normative level, it is arguably true that at least sometimes we should trust untrustworthy agents. This is because there is a ‘feedback-loop’ of trust: if I place trust in an agent, the agent is more likely to be trustworthy back. Furthermore, at least sometimes we should not trust the otherwise trustworthy agent. This is because trustworthiness is often domain- (or situation-) specific. Instead of conceptualizing trust and trustworthiness as two sides of the same coin, I propose that we need to first understand them descriptively, as distinct phenomena. By developing an accurate descriptive account of trust and trustworthiness that is based on recent findings in psychology, my aim is to provide a novel, empirically grounded metaphysical view of trust and trustworthiness. More precisely, I aim to provide a conceptual analysis of trust and trustworthiness and capture what we understand by ‘trust’ and ‘trustworthiness’. The metaphysical account seeks to capture what trust and trustworthiness really are, joint-carvingly, by identifying their essential characteristics and acknowledging the possibility that our current linguistic practices and concepts do not properly capture the two phenomena. While a metaphysical account cannot be derived solely from a descriptive account, an accurate descriptive account provides a job description for the properties one is hoping to find in the metaphysical account. Once both descriptive and metaphysical accounts have been established, we can then address the normative question of when an agent should trust another agent.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Co-Investigator: Professor Dr. Axel Gelfert