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To Trust or not to Trust? Children’s Social Epistemology

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Abstract

Philosophers agree that an important part of our knowledge is acquired via testimony. One of the main objectives of social epistemology is therefore to specify the conditions under which a hearer is justified in accepting a proposition stated by a source. Non-reductionists, who think that testimony could be considered as an a priori source of knowledge, as well as reductionists, who think that another type of justification has to be added to testimony, share a common conception about children development. Non-reductionists believe that infants and children are fundamentally gullible and their gullibility could be seen as an example for justifying testimony, while reductionists believe that this gullibility is merely an exception that should be taken into account. The objective of this paper is to review contemporary literature in developmental psychology providing empirical grounds likely to clarify this philosophical debate. What emerges from current research is a more elaborated vision of children’s attitude toward testimony. Even at a very young age, children do not blindly swallow information coming from testimony; doubtful or contradictory information is automatically screened by their cognitive system. Even if they are unable to give positive reasons for the acceptance of a given testimony, young children are not gullible. Such empirical findings tend to call into question the radical opposition between reductionism and non-reductionism.

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Notes

  1. An interesting exception is Goldberg (2008), although this demonstrates the complexity of interdisciplinary work. One problem is that psychological studies are interpreted with specific theoretical lenses that tend to twist the results. For example, Goldberg recruits one of our studies (Clément et al. 2004) to illustrate his conception of the cognitive immaturity of children. For him, «children exhibit simple (uncritical) trust in the so-say of others» (2008, p. 1). In this context, our results would prove that, before 3 to 4 years of age, «children exhibit a high degree of “indiscriminate trust”» (2008, p. 2). But, in our paper, «indiscriminate trust» means that younger children were not able to discriminate between the more reliable of two sources in order to acquire new information. Contrary to Goldberg’s opinion, in this paper we will demonstrate that research in developmental psychology does not show that children systematically demonstrate uncritical trust—in fact, we believe the opposite is closer to the truth. Beside this, Goldberg proposes an interesting hypothesis about the role of the social environment of children who live in a «pre-screened environment,» with «pro-active monitoring» by their caregivers. This is an interesting idea, although based on a rather questionable western middle class image of the ideal family. (For a more realistic and cross-cultural perspective, see Rogoff 1990).

  2. In another scenario, an electronic audio speaker replaced the human false labeler. This time, children did not show a similar behavior of paying more attention to a speaker that falsely labeled an object, indicating that information obtained from people is processed differently than information that just happens to be available.

  3. Note that this Sperberian account tends to consider partially understood concepts as somewhat cognitively undermined. Tyler Burge considers that partial understanding is a pervasive and inevitable phenomenon and that many of our concepts, as adults, are never completely understood (Burge 1979).

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Paul Harris, Melissa Koenig, Luc Faucher, and Christophe Heintz for their very helpful comments, as well as two anonymous reviewers. This work was supported by a grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation (PP0011-114842).

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Clément, F. To Trust or not to Trust? Children’s Social Epistemology. Rev.Phil.Psych. 1, 531–549 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-010-0022-3

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