Abstract
In this paper we address the question of how it can be possible for a non-expert to acquire justified true belief from expert testimony. We discuss reductionism and epistemic trust as theoretical approaches to answer this question and present a novel solution that avoids major problems of both theoretical options: Performative Expert Testimony (PET). PET draws on a functional account of expertise insofar as it takes the expert’s visibility as a good informant capable to satisfy informational needs as equally important as her specific skills and knowledge. We explain how PET generates justification for testimonial belief, which is at once assessable for non-experts and maintains the division of epistemic labor between them and the experts. Thereafter we defend PET against two objections. First, we point out that the non-expert’s interest in acquiring widely assertable true beliefs and the expert’s interest in maintaining her status as a good informant counterbalances the relativist account of justification at work in PET. Second, we show that with regard to the interests at work in testimonial exchanges between experts and non-experts, PET yields a better explanation of knowledge-acquisition from expert testimony than externalist accounts of justification such as reliabilism. As our arguments ground in a conception of knowledge, which conceives of belief-justification as a declarative speech act, throughout the rearmost sections of this paper we also indicate to how such a conception is operationalized in PET.
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Notes
If it is impossible that everybody knows everything of importance, epistemic labor must be divided between the members of a society in order to satisfy all the epistemic needs of its members. The division of epistemic labor is, hence, a necessary condition for the distinction between experts and non-experts. These roles could not exist in a society, which demanded that everybody would satisfy their epistemic needs on its own.
We prefer the term “non-expert” to the term “layperson” because it carries much less pejorative connotations and better represents the relational character of the statuses “non-expert” and “expert”.
Note that this description of expertise is compatible with different definitions of „truth“. Note further that we are aware of the different kinds of knowledge, which are covered by the term expertise. One can be an expert in virtue of having a great amount of propositional knowledge, but one might as well be an expert in virtue of possessing very good skills and know-how. In this paper we are primarily concerned with scientific expertise, which includes a great amount of propositional knowledge as well as practical know-how about research methodology and the norms of proper research practice. As the context of our investigation is testimonial knowledge, we focus only on the propositional knowledge involved in scientific expertise.
This is important, because expertise is characterized by a great amount of tacit knowledge, which can only be obtained through immersion in an expert community (cf. Collins and Evans 2007).
Note that it is not “expertise”, but the notion of “expert” that is defined by this condition. As an anonymous reviewer rightly remarked the audience-relativity of the expert-status involved in this notion implies that some experts could be better positioned to function as good informants for certain non-expert audiences than others. While we see why this would be problematic as an implication for the notion of “expertise”, we do not see in what way this could be problematic for the notion of an “expert”. As long as one (objectively) possesses expertise in a certain domain of knowledge one can already be an expert by virtue of being a good informant relative to a very small and specific audience; in principle a one-person-audience would suffice. Even though being a good informant relative to larger and more diverse audiences would no doubt strengthen one’s expert-status or—as one might want to put it—one’s epistemic authority there is no threshold greater than 1 with regard to the size of the audience.
One could object that this question misrepresents the phenomenon of expert-to-non-expert-communication, because one might think that what non-experts usually want from expert testimony is not knowledge in the sense of justified true belief, but true belief simpliciter. Most of the time non-experts fare quite well with true belief, at least as long as they are not pressed by others to give reasons for their testimonial beliefs. Moreover, even if the non-expert would be pressed by his fellow non-experts, most of the time a simple “a reliable expert told me so” will suffice to calm the doubts. As will become clear in the following pages, our approach to knowledge from expert testimony is able to account for a great variety of contextual justificatory requirements. These include contexts, in which the non-expert can aim at true belief simpliciter, because he already possesses a contextually sufficient justification, as well as many other more interesting contexts, in which an already existing justification (“a reliable expert told me so”) will be insufficient to calm his critical audience’s doubts. In those latter cases it is always preferable for the non-expert to aim for more than just true belief from expert testimony.
One might doubt, whether it is actually possible for a non-expert to acquire knowledge from expert testimony in the strict sense of justified, true belief. However our practice of ascribing knowledge strongly opposes this view. Non-experts can have knowledge of the existence of Black Holes or the Higgs Boson without ever being able to directly give reasons for their beliefs, which are independent from (expert) testimony. The semantic of “to know” allows us to say that an interested non-expert not only has a true belief about the existence of Higgs Bosons, but a belief, which can be justified in virtue of being mediated by testimony. Denying the possibility of knowledge from expert testimony leads us directly into Hardwig’s trilemma: If it was impossible to gain knowledge from expert testimony, we would either face the problem (a) that much of what we think non-experts know is not actually knowledge due to lack of justificatory evidence, or (b) that it is possible to know without any justificatory evidence, or (c) that the community of expert and non-expert is the bearer of knowledge (Hardwig 1991, p. 699).
Defeating conditions are conditions under which a testified belief is wrong. For example, the sun standing in the zenith is a defeating condition for the testified belief that it is 5 pm now.
Goldman (2001) provides a similar example for the case of esoteric astronomical knowledge becoming exoteric over time. A non-expert cannot confirm an astronomer’s prediction of a future solar eclipse but he can easily confirm the astronomer’s prediction on the day the eclipse happens.
This is probably the reason why Goldman only discusses much less problematic examples such as geographical or mechanical knowledge (Goldman 1999). A person who is told the way to the town hall or the cause for the malfunctioning of his air-conditioner can simply verify the truth of such propositions by following the described pathway or by checking whether the air-conditioner works after he repaired it according to the expert’s instructions.
In defending reductionism, one might want to insist that it is not necessary to demand all the epistemic work of expert-assessment to be done by single non-expert. A reliable, easily accessible, and regularly updated expert registry might bundle the experiences of a whole community of non-experts. Still, this does not circumvent the problem, but only pushes it to an institutional level. How is a single non-expert to obtain enough independent evidence to decide whether or not to trust the registry’s collective testimony?
As a moral concept trust is often regarded as involving an expectation of the trusted person’s good will (Baier 1986) or commitment (Hawley 2014) towards the trustee and is opposed to thinner notions of “trust”. Thinner notions require only the expectation of a trusted person’s rationality and self-interest (Hardin 2002). These descriptions of “trust-relationships” are often also addressed as “mere reliance”. For an overview on the more recent debates on trust in ethics, epistemology and social philosophy see (Faulkner and Simpson 2017).
Qualified in this way it would for example be pragmatically rational for a patient to adopt an attitude of coping trust regarding his family doctor’s diagnosis of a severe cold but not regarding his family doctor’s diagnosis of, say, a rare auto-immune disease. However, even if the risk of acquiring a wrong belief in the former case would be extremely low and the costs of acting on false belief manageable for the non-expert, her reasons for her belief in the doctor’s testimony would be entirely pragmatic.
The focus on an agent’s pragmatic reasons to trust is also revealed in Frost-Arnold’s discussions of moral trust in science (Frost-Arnold 2013). To explain the practice of scientific collaboration despite the dangers of coercive authorship and ineffective institutional detection and sanctioning of scientific misconduct she makes a case for the prevalence of moral trust in science as opposed to mere reliance between researchers. However, while all this is convincing as an argument for the diffusiveness of moral trust in science it does not add much to the question of how trust in a scientist’s testimony can justify the non-expert’s belief that p as knowledge.
In the emphasis of trust as a (partly) affective attitude Forst-Arnold’s considerations significantly overlap with Faulkner’s. However, on Faulkner’s account the distinction between predictive trust and affective trust is similar but not congruent with the distinction between reliance and trust (Baier 1986) on which Frost-Arnolds theory is based. Predictively trusting involves the recipient’s willingness to depend, which is expressed in his belief that the speaker will speak truthfully. In reliance the recipient lacks this belief.
According to Wilholt conventional methodological standards of a research field need not be explicitly taught or written down in documents. Many of these standards are implicit and revealed only when someone’s research is found to have violated a particular standard.
On Daukas’ theory one can be an epistemically trustworthy person only if one is disposed to extend the presumption that a speaker’s expression that p is also a reason for the truth of p (i.e. the principle of charity) only to those persons who are epistemically trustworthy as well and to withhold extension if those persons are not. For the context of non-expert-expert-communication this means, that the hearer’s character traits relevant to her own epistemic trustworthiness guide non-experts in identifying epistemic trustworthy experts. Only if the non-expert is disposed to be epistemically trustworthy himself, he will be able to have accurate beliefs about other persons’ epistemic characters and competences and will extend or withdraw the principle of epistemic charity when it is appropriate. So whether a non-expert is disposed to rationally place his epistemic trust finally depends on his own epistemic character traits. It is here where one finds the fundamental similarity with Zagzebski’s approach.
A preemptive reason for the belief that p is a reason “that replaces my other reasons relevant to believing p and is not simply added to them.” (Zagzebski 2012, p. 107).
Deliberative reasons are subject-dependent epistemic reasons. Like self-trust, many mental states such as trust in others, intuitions, memory or experience can provide reasons to believe that p, which cannot be direct reasons for others to believe that p. Theoretical reasons, instead, are subject-independent and are open as epistemic reasons to everyone. Evidence is a typical third-personal reason. For instance the fact that I have experienced that p may be taken as evidence by others for the truth of p. As such it constitutes as a theoretical reason in favor of p (Zagzebski 2012, p. 63).
Analyzing testimony as a speech act of telling as opposed to a speech act of asserting, assurance accounts argue that justification for belief in (expert-)testimony is not (primarily) based in the audience’s epistemic self-trust but in the epistemic responsibilities of the speaker (Moran 2005; Hinchman 2005; Faulkner 2007; McMyler 2011). In telling a speaker is not simply asserting a proposition, she also represents herself as having reasons for p that should be good enough for the audience. The speech act of telling signals that the speaker intends to be believed and intends to take responsibility for the truth of his assertion’s propositional content. Hence, through the act of telling the speaker assures the audience that p is true and this assurance entitles the audience to believe that p. For the distinction between the speech acts of “assertion” and “assurance” see also (Lawlor 2013, p. 9).
This way telling constitutes a normative relationship between speaker and audience, in which the audience is invited to trust the speaker and in virtue of this can legitimately hold the speaker responsible should his trust be betrayed and his testimonial belief that p turn out to be false. The audience’s justification to belief that p then does not derive from evidence the speaker presents for the truth of p but directly from the audience’s understanding of the speech act of telling.
As Zagzebski is not primarily concerned with expert testimony but with a general account of testimony an invitation to trust can also constitute a deliberative, first-personal reason to believe a speaker, if the audience does not consider the speaker to be an authority. In general it suffices for an invitation to trust to constitute a reason of this kind, if the audience judges the speaker to be at least as epistemically conscientious as himself.
For the reasons why we think an internalist justification would be desirable see Sect. 7 of this paper.
See footnote 3.
Note that what we call “cooperative epistemology” strongly differs from the program of a “communitarian epistemology” as promoted for example by Martin Kusch (Kusch 2002). Unlike Kusch we do not think that knowledge is a shared social status and that all aspects of knowledge are based in communal performative speech acts. What we share, however, is the idea that successful justification requires intersubjective agreement. It is mainly by virtue of this, that we consider knowledge a social phenomenon.
We are well aware that in practice there are patients, who address doctors even though they are not in need of medical information. It should be obvious, however, that in such cases doctors are not actually addressed as medical experts.
We do not intend to say that the expert status solely depends on the judgement of a single non-expert. A medical doctor maintains her expert status through the acknowledgement of a larger community of non-experts and fellow experts respectively. We also grant that in practice there might be other, non-epistemic factors that might prevent a patient from questioning a doctor’s expert status, such as a person’s unconscious bias to generally accept the medical profession as authority.
Of course, if the patient presses the issue further the doctor might still come up with explanations about why the requested information is uncertain or difficult to obtain; and maybe these explanations will help the doctor to restore her expert status in the eyes of her interrogator. We will get back to this epistemically important practice shortly.
Some epistemologists have challenged this presupposition (e.g. Sartwell 1991; Hanfling 2000; Ernst 2002). However, they do not deny that having a justified true belief is often epistemically more desirable than just having a true belief. As we are not primarily concerned with knowledge as a concept in this article, granting only the later is sufficient for our argumentation.
As will become clear on the following pages PET draws on a broad concept of “doubt”. As a first approximation in PET a doubt includes all utterances and expressions, which imply a skeptical stance towards a proposition. This includes direct verbal articulations such as objection, negation or protest as well as more subtle verbal and non-verbal forms such as requests for clarification or refusals to belief the information.
Those, who have opposite intuitions in this case, should note that it is not possible to say that the patient’s trust in a doctor is an adequate justifying reason for his belief that he suffers from the disease. This is because blind trust relates at best to the doctor’s general trustworthiness concerning medical issues, but not to the truth of a specific diagnosis.
If a non-expert would in fact acquire the expert’s justifying reasons he would turn into a potential expert herself. The non-expert is a non-expert precisely because he is not an expert with the capability of understanding these reasons and cannot–by virtue of this–function as a good informant for others in this domain of expertise.
We thank an anonymous reviewer for pointing out this similarity.
For our purposes we can leave open how large the range of doubts to be dispelled must be in order to become acknowledged as an expert. We assume however that in the process of becoming a scientific expert one comes across a comparatively great number of doubts and learns to dispel them.
The reasons a non-expert acquires through PET are justifying if they function as sufficient reasons for belief in his lay community. To know that p a non-expert is not required to justify his believe that p against any doubts, which could possibly be raised against her belief. He is only required to justify this belief against the doubts of his fellow non-experts.
It is important to note, that the acknowledgement is always originating from the non-expert. PET can also take place in situations when the expert does not note that a non-expert’s doubts are defied by her presentation of his expertise. E.g. if a non-expert reads an article written by an expert his doubts are quite often defied, because the expert anticipated them in her writing (same holds for videos or lectures etc.). In the writing of expert literature it is quite common to think about doubts a targeted audience is likely to have and to dispel them in advance. This is, by the way, what we do from Sect. 5 onwards.
One can easily think of properties that are taken as social indicators for expertise without being reliable. A white coat, a healthy appearance, and an empathic attitude towards their patients can help medical doctors to appear trustworthy, but are far from being reliable indicators of their medical knowledge and skill. Misinterpreting such properties as indicators for expertise is an eminent source of epistemic injustice (Fricker 2010).
Whatever will turn out to be the right conception of truth (if there is any), our account of expert testimony will be compatible with it. All we need from a theory of truth is the claim that truth needs to be independent from the specific people, who mutually agree. If this independence from the concrete consensus is spelled out in terms of idealized consensus (consensus theories), general warranted assertability (pluralism/pragmatism) or the world (correspondence theories) can be left open for our account.
The same notion holds for verficationist or relativistic accounts conceptualising truth as kind of warranted assertability (c.f. McDowell 1976; Dummett 1978; Kusch 2002). Even if truth is best to be conceptualised as warranted assertability, all we need to claim is that the community needs to be bigger than just the expert and the non-expert discussing whether p is true. Consensus theories of truth (cf. Habermas 1973; Apel 1988) would argue as well that the discussion of a non-expert with an expert is too far away from consensus under ideal circumstances to account for the production of truths in this kind of discourse.
This does not set us for a realist theory of truth. We can operate with a quite humble concept of “world” here by just stating that what makes a belief true is not the outcome of the specific deliberation between expert and non-expert, but something that cannot be settled by this deliberation alone, but is determined by something that is not up for discussion in a specific case of expert testimony.
We need to leave the prominent doubts posed in the Gettier discussion about whether a true justified belief is knowledge (cf. Gettier 1963) and the challenge if we are capable of dispelling the doubt posed by the radical sceptical hypothesis (see e.g. Greco 2007) for another paper. But we are quite confident that this account has the resources to deal with these problems (See Hanfling 2000; Ernst 2002).
Neither the testifier that tells falsehoods nor the testifier that fails to believe what he testifies is to be considered an expert. An expert is supposed to know p before she testifies and to tell her belief to the non-expert. As an expert she does not come to know that p only while dispelling the non-expert’s doubts. In ideal situations the non-expert’s doubts are not considered to have a bearing on the expert’s belief, that p. E.g. a physician is supposed to collect the information necessary for a diagnosis and to tell me what she believes about my condition only afterwards, and a geographer is supposed to know what`s the capital of Madagascar before telling me etc.
It is the topic of a far more controversial debate whether as human beings we are capable to decide to acquire a belief or not (c.f. Smith 2005; Hieronymi 2008b). We will not position ourselves regarding this question in this paper. All we claim is agreement that the acquisition of a belief does not necessarily depend on agreement from others.
Usually the community is much wider; there is seldom a case of an isolated expert coming to believe that p is true and an isolated non-expert asking this expert. But for our purpose stick to the simplified picture of a knowledge community of one expert and one non-expert.
Since it is of no bearing significance for our proposal to define who counts as an epistemic peer, we leave this question open. For this point an epistemic peer only needs to be a person capable of understanding the justification of the testifier.
Note that this does not imply that persistent disagreement between expert and non-expert is a reliable indicator for the falsehood of the expert’s belief. In many cases of persistent disagreement experts and non-experts simply talk past each other, because they do not even have a genuine interest in knowledge-exchange.
There would still be a realistic chance of an evil expert being undetected, if she would be capable to convince the whole non-expert community by her rhetoric tricks (e.g. by mass media communication).
Relevant beliefs are all non-expert’s beliefs contradicting the expert’s claim.
Note that we do not intend to exclude other possible ways of justifying a belief (e.g. collecting evidence for p). All we want to point out is that all the accounts we discussed so far face all the considered problems when it comes to expert testimony.
Expert testimony is quite common, but still a quite special source of justification. It would not be a defeater for externalist accounts of justification to say that in normal circumstances we (may be) searching for an internalist justification. However, because of our dependence on and the extraordinary circumstances of expert testimony, we are relying on a way of justification as proposed by externalist theories of justification.
We acknowledge that this is not a necessary truth. Many beliefs we acquire without any justification especially if we are young are far more stable than specific pieces of knowledge we acquainted throughout our adulthood (cf. Hyman 2015). Nevertheless, this thesis holds at least for those beliefs we acquired from testimony.
What it takes to be an expert can basically be answered in two ways. First, objective accounts conceive of experts as persons that have a high amount of esoteric true beliefs in a domain of expertise, second reputational accounts conceive of experts as persons acknowledged as experts by others. It is the reputational account we are focusing on in this paper. If the expert wasn’t recognized as an expert by a non-expert, her testimony would not count as a case of expert testimony, because the non-expert wouldn´t have approached this person as an expert in the first place. Again, this does not mean that a person with expertise in a domain of knowledge is not worthy of being recognized as an expert. But the authority that comes attached to expertise in most concepts of “expert” must in PET be earned through becoming visible as an expert. And this means that aspiring experts need to use of their expertise by addressing other person’s epistemic needs.
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We thank audiences in Dublin (UCD) and Erlangen (FAU) for discussion of earlier drafts of this paper. We especially want to thank Isaac Choi (Yale) and two anonymous reviewers for Synthese for doubts and comments that greatly helped to improve the manuscript.
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Funded by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) - 396775817.
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Leefmann, J., Lesle, S. Knowledge from scientific expert testimony without epistemic trust. Synthese 197, 3611–3641 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-018-01908-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-018-01908-w