Abstract
Rumors, for better or worse, are an important element of public discourse. The present paper focuses on rumors as an epistemic phenomenon rather than as a social or political problem. In particular, it investigates the relation between the mode of transmission and the reliability, if any, of rumors as a source of knowledge. It does so by comparing rumor with two forms of epistemic dependence that have recently received attention in the philosophical literature: our dependence on the testimony of others, and our dependence on what has been called the ‘coverage-reliability’ of our social environment (Goldberg 2010). According to the latter, an environment is ‘coverage-reliable’ if, across a wide range of beliefs and given certain conditions, it supports the following conditional: If ~p were true I would have heard about it by now. However, in information-deprived social environments with little coverage-reliability, rumors may transmit information that could not otherwise be had. This suggests that a trade-off exists between levels of trust in the coverage-reliability of official sources and (warranted) trust in rumor as a source of information.
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Notes
Quoted after Gottschalk (2006: 90).
This is a more direct, and somewhat more liberal, definition than can be found in Hardwig’s original paper, where he describes H’s belief as ‘epistemically grounded in an appeal to the authority of A and A’s belief’ (1985: 336), thus leaving open the nature of the grounding relation and the precise role of the appeal to authority. At the same time, ‘epistemic dependence’ as defined here is more specific than Goldberg’s notion of ‘epistemic reliance’ (2010: 92), in that the former always involves dependence on others, whereas the latter also includes reliance on our own cognitive capacities, e.g. on memorial beliefs.
Indeed, Goldberg formulates the truth-to-testimony conditional directly in terms of p rather than its negation.
This is Goldberg’s definition of a source A’s being coverage-reliable in a given domain D (Goldberg 2010: 159).
There are also obvious restrictions on what kinds of statements the truth-to-testimony conditional can be reasonably expected to cover. When it comes to certain necessary truths (e.g., an—as yet undiscovered—mathematical truth) or universally quantified statements, appealing to the truth-to-testimony conditional will be of limited use.
On this point, see (Goldberg 2010: 157).
Since talk of ‘official sources’ might conjure up the mental image of legions of paper-pushing bureaucrats, possibly toeing the government line at the expense of truth, it is worth emphasizing that there are many clear-cut cases where officialdom and epistemic authoritativeness generally coincide—as in the case of national standards organizations (e.g. the National Bureau of Standards), intergovernmental bodies such as the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), or various national scientific academies.
I am grateful to an anonymous referee for suggesting this example to me as a way of disaggregating the different senses of authority involved.
As I will argue in the next section, certain features of the network through which information is likely to have travelled will have a bearing on whether information thus received is likely to be epistemically authoritative.
Miranda Fricker shares this assessment when she writes that epistemic practice ‘is intrinsically prone to’ mismatches between epistemic authority and social power, thus leading to the ‘ever-present risk that the norm of credibility will be socially manifested in a discriminatory manner’ (Fricker 1998: 176).
See (Packer 2006).
See (Webster 1954: 14).
Importantly, reliability here refers not merely to the faithful reproduction of an original claim (as will be discussed in the case of serial transmission, below), but to the epistemic standing of the claim itself: it is, after all, the epistemic qualities of an information source that we are concerned with.
Caplow (1947: 301) argues that, given the right circumstances and sufficient time, ‘[t]his re-circulation tends to eliminate variation’ in the content of a rumor; instead of disintegrating, the content of a rumor may thus become more stable over time, regardless of the rumor’s truthfulness.
A recent example would be the ‘birther’ movement in the United States, which—egged on by Conservative talk show hosts—demanded proof that Barack Obama was, in fact, born in the United States and which thrived both on doubts about Obama’s commitment to ‘American values’ and a shared sense of identity among (otherwise socially disconnected) ‘birthers’.
I am grateful to Sandy Goldberg for pointing out to me the relevance of this case.
See (Coady 2006b: 47).
To mention just one possible criticism, Coady’s choice of wartime rumors as an example is a highly specialized one. In times of war, when one’s own survival, and possibly that of one’s community, is at stake—in other words, when ego-involvement is high and the action-guiding role of rumor dominates—any pressure towards truthfulness and accuracy of second-hand reports is likely to be greater than during less trying times.
An example would be ideologically motivated rumor-mongers, who often make it their ‘mission’ to seek out new audiences, thereby offsetting any filtering that might occur within stable audiences.
On this point see (DiFonzo and Bordia 2002: 5).
Indeed, it seems incumbent to mention that the ‘we’ should be understood in the exclusive sense; after all, to this day, many people around the world continue to live in restrictive epistemic environments, with little access to education, a free press, or diverse sources of information.
Results of the study, which was conducted by Daniel Cassino and Peter Woolley as part of Fairleigh Dickinson University’s PublicMind project, are summarized in a press release (‘Some News Leaves People Knowing Less’, 21 November 2011), available online at <http://publicmind.fdu.edu/2011/knowless/final.pdf>, accessed on 10 January 2012.
This passage was written in April 2011; the discovery of the Higgs boson was first announced on 4 July 2012. Timeliness and epistemic penetration would have been of special significance at the intermediate stage, when information about the discovery had not yet spread beyond the initial circle of experts.
Nature’s current embargo policy mandates that ‘[m]aterial submitted to Nature must not be discussed with the media, except in the case of accepted contributions, which can be discussed with the media no more than a week before the publication date’. See <http://www.nature.com/nature/authors/policy/embargo.html>, accessed on 23 May 2011.
Or, strictly speaking, ‘fails to meet her subjective expectations of timeliness’.
Take the example of rumors about the private lives of politicians, which typically expose the affairs and secrets of those who, in the past, have appeared to be squeaky-clean. What would be the novelty in reporting the transgressions of known philanderers?
Also, highlighting the figure of ‘the rumor-monger’ risks overstating the significance of ‘character’. After all, perfectly normal people pass on rumors—recall the example of H’s colleague α—sometimes because they genuinely believe them to be true, sometimes as a way of engaging in small talk. Experts, too, are of course not immune to the passing on—or starting—of rumors, not least when ideological commitments are at play (see fn. 20).
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Acknowledgments
Early versions of this paper were presented at a meeting of the Epistemology Research Group, University of Edinburgh, and at the 2nd Copenhagen-Lund Workshop in Social Epistemology, University of Lund, in 2011. A revised version was given at the “Interdisciplinary Workshop on Influence and Persuasion in the Formation and Sustainment of Social-Fringe Groups”, held in Kuching, Sarawak (Malaysia), in 2012. I am grateful to the audiences at all three occasions for stimulating discussions, and to the United States Air Force for funding my invitation to the Kuching workshop.
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Gelfert, A. Coverage-Reliability, Epistemic Dependence, and the Problem of Rumor-Based Belief. Philosophia 41, 763–786 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-012-9408-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-012-9408-z