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.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
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).
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.
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).
References
Asch, S.E. 1965. Social psychology. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall.
Astuti, R. (2007). Weaving together culture and cognition: an illustration from Madagascar. Intellectica 46–47.
Astuti, R., and S. Carey. 2004. Constraints on conceptual development: reply. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development 69(3): 153–161.
Astuti, R., Solomon, G., & Carey, S. 2004. Constraints on Conceptual Development: A Case Study of the Acquisition of Folkbiological and Folksociological Knowledge in Madagascar. Wiley-Blackwell.
Atran, S., and D. Sperber. 1991. Learning without teaching: Its place in culture. In Culture, schooling, and development, ed. L.T. Landsmann, 39–55. Norwood: Ablex Publishing corporation.
Birch, S.A.J., S.A. Vauthier, and P. Bloom. 2008. Three- and four-year-olds spontaneously use others’ past performance to guide their learning. Cognition 107: 1018–1034.
Boesch, C., and M. Tomasello. 1998. Chimpanzee and human cultures. Current Anthropology 39(5): 591–614.
Boyer, P. 1994. The naturalness of religious ideas: a cognitive theory of religion. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Boyer, P. 2002. Religion explained. New York: Basic Books.
Burge, T. 1979. Individualism and the mental. Midwest Studies in Philosophy 4(1): 73–121.
Burge, T. 1993. Content preservation. Philosophical Review 102(4): 457–488.
Byrne, R.W., and A. Whiten. 1988. Machiavellian intelligence: social expertise and the evolution of intellect in monkeys, apes, and humans. Oxford: Clarendon.
Clément, F., M. Koenig, and P. Harris. 2004. The ontogenesis of trust. Mind & Language 19(4): 360–379.
Coady, C.A.J. 1995. Testimony: a philosophical study. USA: Oxford University Press.
Corriveau, K., and P.L. Harris. 2009a. Choosing your informants: weighing familiarity and recent accuracy. Developmental Science 12(3): 426–437.
Corriveau, K., and P.L. Harris. 2009b. Preschoolers continue to trust a more accurate informant 1 week after exposure to accuracy information. Developmental Science 12(1): 188–193.
Corriveau, K., K. Meints, and P. Harris. 2009a. Early tracking of informant accuracy and inaccuracy. British Journal of Developmental Psychology 27(2): 331–342.
Corriveau, K.H., M. Fusaro, and P.L. Harris. 2009b. Going with the flow: preschoolers prefer nondissenters as informants. Psychological 20(3): 372–377.
Cosmides, L., and J. Tooby. 1989. Evolutionary psychology and the generation of culture. Case study: a computational theory of social exchange. Ethology and Sociobiology 10: 51–97.
Cosmides, L., J. Tooby, L. Fiddick, and G.A. Bryant. 2005. Detecting cheaters. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 9(11): 505–506. author reply 508-10.
Fricker, E. 1987. The epistemology of testimony. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 61: 57–83.
Fricker, E. 1995. Telling and trusting: reductionism and anti-reductionism in the epistemology of testimony. Mind 104(414): 393–411.
Fricker, E. 2006. Testimony and epistemic autonomy. In The epistemology of testimony, ed. E. Sosa and J. Lackey. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Fusaro, M., and P.L. Harris. 2008. Children assess informant reliability using bystanders’ non-verbal cues. Developmental Science 11(5): 771–777.
Gilbert, D.T. 1991. How mental systems believe. American Psychologist 46(2): 107–119.
Gilbert, D.T. 1993. The assent of man: Mental representation and the control of belief. In Handbook of mental control, ed. D.M. Wegner and J.W. Pennebakers, 57–87. Englewood Cliff: Prentice-Hall.
Goldman, A.I. 1999. Knowledge in a social world. USA: Oxford University Press.
Goldman, A. 2006. Social Epistemology. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/epistemology-social/
Gopnik, A., and P. Graf. 1988. Knowing how you know: young children’s ability to identify and remember the sources of their beliefs. Child Development 59(5): 1366–1371.
Gopnik, A., and H.J. Wellman. 1992. Why the child’s theory of mind really is a theory. Mind and Langage VII(1–2): 145–171.
Gopnik, A., and Meltzoff, A.N. 1998. Words, thoughts, and theories (learning, development, and conceptual change). The MIT Press.
Harris, P.L. 2001. The veridicality assumption. Mind & Language 16(3): 247–262.
Harris, P.L. 2002. What do children learn from testimony? In Cognitive bases of science, ed. P. Carruthers, M. Siegal, and S. Stich. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Harris, P.L. 2007. Trust. Developmental Science 10(1): 135–138.
Harris, P., and M. Gimenez. 2005. Children’s acceptance of conflicting testimony: the case of death. Journal of Cognition and Culture 5(1–2): 143–164.
Harris, P.L., and M.A. Koenig. 2006. Trust in testimony: how children learn about science and religion. Child Development 77(3): 505–524.
Harris, P.L., E.S. Pasquini, S. Duke, J.J. Asscher, and F. Pons. 2006. Germs and angels: the role of testimony in young children’s ontology. Developmental Science 9(1): 76–96.
Hume, T. (1975). In: Enquiries concerning human understanding and concerning the principles of morals, ed. P.H. Nidditch. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Jaswal, V.K. 2004. Don’t believe everything you hear: preschoolers’ sensitivity to speaker intent in category induction. Child Development 75(6): 1871–1885.
Jaswal, V.K., and L.A. Neely. 2006. Adults don’t always know best: preschoolers use past reliability over age when learning new words. Psychological Science 17(9): 757–758.
Jaswal, V.K., and P.S. Malone. 2007. Turning believers into skeptics: 3-year-olds’ sensitivity to cues to speaker credibility. Journal of Cognition and Development 8(3): 263–283.
Jaswal, V.K., and E.M. Markman. 2007. Looks aren’t everything: 24-month-olds’willingness to accept unexpected labels. Journal of Cognition and Development 8(1): 93–111.
Kitcher, P. 1995. The advancement of science: science without legend, objectivity without illusions. USA: Oxford University Press.
Koenig, M.A., and C.H. Echols. 2003. Infants’ understanding of false labeling events: the referential roles of words and the speakers who use them. Cognition 87(3): 179–208.
Koenig, M.A., and P.L. Harris. 2005a. Preschoolers mistrust ignorant and inaccurate speakers. Child Development 76(6): 1261–1277.
Koenig, M.A., and P.L. Harris. 2005b. The role of social cognition in early trust. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 9(10): 457–459.
Koenig, M.A., F. Clément, and P.L. Harris. 2004. Trust in testimony: children’s use of true and false statements. Psychological Science 15(10): 694–698.
Krebs, J.R., and R. Dawkins. 1984. Animal signals: Mind-reading and manipulation, 2 edn, Blackwell, Oxford. In Behavioral ecology, 2nd ed, ed. J.R. Krebs and N.B. Davies. Sunderland: Sinauer Associates.
Lackey, J. 2005. Testimony and the infant/child objection. Philosophical Studies 126: 163–190.
Lackey, J. 2007. Why we don’t deserve credit for everything we know. Synthese 158: 345–361.
Latour, B. 1988. Science in action: How to follow scientists and engineers through society. Harvard University Press.
Latour, B., and Woolgar, S. 1986. Laboratory life. Princeton University Press.
Lutz, D., and F. Keil. 2002. Early understanding of the division of cognitive labor. Child Development 73(4): 1073–1084.
Mascaro, O., and D. Sperber. 2009. The moral, epistemic, and mindreading components of children’s vigilance towards deception. Cognition 112: 367–380.
Millikan, R. 1998. A common structure for concepts of individuals, stuffs, and real kinds: more mamma, more milk, and more mouse. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 21: 55–100.
Mills, C.M., and F.C. Keil. 2005. The development of cynicism. Psychological Science 16(5): 285–290.
Mitchell, P., E.J. Robinson, R.M. Nye, and J.E. Isaacs. 1997. When speech conflicts with seeing: young children’s understanding of informational priority. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 64(2): 276–294.
Moscovici, S., and W. Doise. 1994. Conflict and consensus:A general theory of collective decisions. London: Sage Publications.
Nurmsoo, E., and E. Robinson. 2009. Children’s trust in previously inaccurate informants who were well or poorly informed: when past errors can be excused. Child development 80(1): 23–27.
Onishi, K.H., and R. Baillargeon. 2005. Do 15-month-old infants understand false beliefs? Science 308: 255–258.
Origgi, G. 2004. Is trust an epistemological notion? Episteme, 61–72.
Pasquini, E.S., K.H. Corriveau, M. Koenig, and P.L. Harris. 2007. Preschoolers monitor the relative accuracy of informants. Developmental Psychology 43(5): 1216–1226.
Pea, R.D. 1982. Origins of verbal logic: spontaneous denials by two- and three-years olds. Journal of Child Language 9: 597–626.
Perner, J. 1991. Understanding the representational mind. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Pinker, S. 1996. The language instinct: How the mind creates language. New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics.
Principe, G.F., T. Kanaya, S.J. Ceci, and M. Singh. 2006. Believing is Seeing. How rumors can engender false memories in preschoolers. Psychological Science 17(3): 243–248.
Reid, T. 1983. Philosophical works. Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag.
Repacholi, B.M., and A.N. Meltzoff. 2007. Emotional eavesdropping: infants selectively respond to indirect emotional signals. Child Development 78(2): 503–521.
Richerson, P., and R. Boyd. 2005. Not by genes alone: How culture transformed human evolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Robinson, E.J., and E.L. Whitcombe. 2003. Children’s suggestibility in relation to their understanding about sources of knowledge. Child Development 74(1): 48–62.
Robinson, E.J., H. Champion, and P. Mitchell. 1999. Children’s ability to infer utterance veracity from speaker informedness. Developmental Psychology 35(2): 535–546.
Robinson, E.J., S.N. Haigh, and J.E. Pendle. 2008a. Children’s working understanding of the knowledge gained from seeing and feeling. Developmental Science 11(2): 299–305.
Robinson, E.J., S.N. Haigh, and E. Nurmsoo. 2008b. Children’s working understanding of knowledge sources: confidence in knowledge gained from testimony. Cognitive Development 23: 105–118.
Rogoff, B. 1990. Barbara Rogoff apprenticeship in thinking: Cognitive development in social context. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Ruffman, T., D.R. Olson, T. Ash, and T. Keenan. 1993. The ABCs of deception: do young children understand deception in the same way as adults? [References]. Developmental Psychology 29(1): 74–87.
Sabbagh, M.A., and D.A. Baldwin. 2001. Learning words from knowledgeable versus ignorant speakers: links between preschoolers’ theory of mind and semantic development. Child Development 72(4): 1054–1070.
Shapin, S. 1995. A social history of truth: Civility and science in seventeenth-century england (science and its conceptual foundations series). University Of Chicago Press.
Shapin, S., and Schaffer, S. 1989. Leviathan and the air-pump. Princeton University Press.
Sperber, D. 1982. Apparently irrational beliefs. In Rationality and relativism, ed. M. Hollis and S. Lukes, 149–180. Oxford: Blackwell.
Sperber, D. 1985. Anthropology and psychology: towards an epidemiology of representations. Man 20(1): 73–89.
Sperber, D. 1996. Explaining culture: A naturalistic approach. Oxford: Blackwell.
Sperber, D. 1997. Intuitive and reflective beliefs. Mind & Language 12(1): 67–83.
Sperber, D. 2000. Metarepresentations in an evolutionary perspective. In Metarepresentations, ed. D. Sperber, 117–138. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Sperber, D. 2001. An Evolutionary perspective on testimony and argumentation. Philosophical Topics 29: 401–413.
Surian, L., S. Caldi, and D. Sperber. 2007. Attribution of beliefs by 13-month-old infants. Psychological Science 18(7): 580–586.
Sosa, E. 1994. Testimony and coherence. In Knowing from words, ed. B.K. Matilal and A. Chakrabarti, 59–67. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Tooby, J., and L. Cosmides. 1992. The psychological foundation of culture. In The adapted mind. Evolutionary psychology and the generation of culture, ed. L. Cosmides, J. Tooby, and J.H. Barkow, 19–136. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Van Schaik, C.P., M. Ancrenaz, G. Borgen, B. Galdikas, C.D. Knott, I. Singleton, et al. 2003. Orangutan cultures and the evolution of material culture. Science 299(5603): 102–105.
Weiner, M. 2003. Accepting testimony. Philosophical Quarterly 54(211): 256–264.
Wittgenstein, L. 1969. On certainty. Oxford: Blackwell.
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).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
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
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-010-0022-3