Abstract
Most explanations of the rational authority of testimony provide little guidance when evaluating individual pieces of testimony. In practice, however, we are remarkably sensitive to the varying epistemic credentials of testimony: extending trust when it is deserved, and withholding it when it is not. A complete account of the epistemology of testimony should, then, have something to say about when it is that testimony is trustworthy. In the typical case, to judge someone trustworthy requires judging them to be competent and sincere. In this essay we develop an exchange-based account of testimony that shows how those who receive testimony are in a position to evaluate the sincerity of speakers.
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Notes
We would also note that it might not be quite fair to criticize standard reductionist (or anti-reductionist) views for failing to provide guidance on which instances of testimony to accept. They may simply have other (more theoretical and less practical) aims. Nevertheless, even if extant theories do not aim to provide such guidance, it is certainly an advance if this guidance can be offered.
Dogramaci (2012) argues that, since epistemic agents trust their own belief-forming procedures, one way to see others as competent is by seeing others as sharing those belief-forming procedures. We think that this is on the right track. In our earlier work we argued that epistemic agents’ need to keep a store of information with high exchange value encourages everyone in a community to use the same belief-forming procedures. If so, for anyone that an agent is likely to encounter, there is reason to believe that that person reasons as he or she does, hence in a way that he or she takes to be reliable. [See Tebben and Waterman (2015a, b), as well as Graham et al. (2015)].
Some successful artists have even given away their recordings for free, essentially letting them serve as advertising for their live performances. Two examples: Nine Inch Nails charged nothing for downloads of their album The Slip, and Radiohead permitted listeners to download copies of In Rainbows for any amount that they would like to pay, including nothing.
Some important caveats apply. We can, in small groups, monitor the distribution of information. If Carla tells Fraser a secret, and enjoins him not to share it, then Fraser has an incentive to stay quiet for fear of losing Carla’s trust. The spread of information is also linked to the degree to which the information is indirectly rivalrous. If the information in question concerns the location of an apple (which is otherwise available to be eaten), one should expect audience members to be more reluctant to spread this information than if the information at issue is not indirectly rivalrous.
And, indeed, by some non-traditional reductionistic theories as well. For example, Dogramaci’s “epistemic communism” (see Dogramaci 2012).
It is, for example, iteration of the game that allows the famous tit-for-tat strategy to do well across a range of competing strategies in a prisoner’s dilemma game (see Axelrod 1984).
As noted in the main text, this is one of Aesop’s fables. We do not know if there is a canonical version of it; the version presented here is simply the story, as best as we can recall it, as it was told to us when we were children.
Say that, in fact, if the boy falsely cries ‘WOLF!’ x-many times, the villagers will stop responding to his signals. In order to maximize his payoff, the best strategy for the boy is actually to falsely cry ‘WOLF!’ x − 1 times. Fortunately for parents who are trying to teach their children not to lie, children rarely pick up on this.
Part of the reason that they are rare is that, when punishment is costly, they give rise to second-order free rider problems. If either A or B could punish C for lying, it is rational for A to rely on B to pay the cost of punishing C, and for B to rely on A to do it. On this topic see Boyd and Richerson (1992: 174).
We focus on what we call the “ordinary case” of exchange, where interlocutors are both part of a single epistemic community and hence can influence each-others’ reputations. The ordinary case is what game theorists would call an iterated game. Though much less common than the ordinary case, testimony is sometimes exchanged by individuals who are not part of the same epistemic community, as when we ask for directions in an unfamiliar city. Cases like these, which game theorists call one-off games, introduce some special considerations that are discussed in Sect. 4.
Vigilance involves more than trust: we are sensitive to an agent’s competence as well as their intentions and reputation for sincerity (Sperber et al. 2010: 383). There is a lively empirical debate over the extent of our vigilance (see Gilbert 1993), but we believe that the weight of the empirical evidence is on the side of Sperber, et al. To their formula we would add that agents are also sensitive to the utility of the information being exchanged.
To a first approximation the discount will be a function of how often we expect a speaker to lie, and the average value of the information they have on offer. It might seem like we should not accept information from a known liar, but this is not the case so long as it’s possible to estimate how often they lie. Take for example the car dealer who is known to sell lemons: if one in five cars priced at $20 k is a worthless lemon, then it is rational to buy from the dealer at the discounted price of $16 k.
Do lies lose value when they’re passed on, in the way that truthful testimony does? In some special cases perhaps. In those cases a term denoting this lost value should be added to the left side of (2). However, we believe these will be marginal cases. Typically the utility of a lie is derived from affecting the behavior of a particular individual. When we (falsely) tell the credit card company that the bill is in the mail, few people are positioned to benefit from this lie. Often no one else cares, and the speaker has little to gain or lose from the spread of the information.
It has been suggested to us that this argument only works if Norm does not have good reason to believe that Cliff is honest. If he has good reason to think him honest, the suggestion goes, he will disregard what Lilith tells him. We’re not so sure. If he has good (though in this case misleading) reason to believe that Lilith is reliable, he may disregard the evidence that he possesses. If he takes her to be about as reliable as he is himself, the effect of Lilith’s testimony depends on how problems of peer disagreement are resolved. (A contentious issue that we will not address here).
No one need consciously go in for this reasoning. It could be individually conditioned. Or (perhaps more plausibly) societies in which information is inexpensive tend to adapt better to changing circumstances, and so the, culturally instituted, practice of offering reliable gossip could spread because it results in more adaptable societies. We won’t speculate on this matter any further.
It is worth remarking that this information is usually not very valuable. It tends to be either widely available or not indirectly rivalrous. Speakers happily give away directions to the grocery store, but they tend to be more reticent about their bank PIN numbers.
This problem is well known to economists and game theorists. See Dasgupta (1988: 66 n 20), and the sources cited therein.
For a nice presentation of this solution, see McElreath and Boyd (2007, chapter 4). They credit Axelrod and Hamilton with the idea.
Compare this to act utilitarians’ acceptance of “rules of thumb” for making decisions when a lack of time or information precludes doing a full utilitarian calculation.
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Acknowledgments
An earlier version of this paper was presented in Prague to a conference on the “Nature of Rules and Normativity”, hosted by the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic. We would like to thank the members of our audience at that event for their helpful feedback. We would also like to thank an anonymous reviewer for providing written comments.
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Tebben, N., Waterman, J. Counterfeit testimony: lies, trust, and the exchange of information. Philos Stud 173, 3101–3117 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-016-0652-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-016-0652-0