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The entanglement of trust and knowledge on the Web

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Abstract

In this paper I use philosophical accounts on the relationship between trust and knowledge in science to apprehend this relationship on the Web. I argue that trust and knowledge are fundamentally entangled in our epistemic practices. Yet despite this fundamental entanglement, we do not trust blindly. Instead we make use of knowledge to rationally place or withdraw trust. We use knowledge about the sources of epistemic content as well as general background knowledge to assess epistemic claims. Hence, although we may have a default to trust, we remain and should remain epistemically vigilant; we look out and need to look out for signs of insincerity and dishonesty in our attempts to know. A fundamental requirement for such vigilance is transparency: in order to critically assess epistemic agents, content and processes, we need to be able to access and address them. On the Web, this request for transparency becomes particularly pressing if (a) trust is placed in unknown human epistemic agents and (b) if it is placed in non-human agents, such as algorithms. I give examples of the entanglement between knowledge and trust on the Web and draw conclusions about the forms of transparency needed in such systems to support epistemically vigilant behaviour, which empowers users to become responsible and accountable knowers.

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Notes

  1. Paolo Massa’s blog: http://www.gnuband.org. The link to the post on Shirky’s blog is: http://www.gnuband.org/2009/11/16/clay_shirky_on_trust_web_algorithms_authority/ [date of access: 26.11.2009].

  2. “An Application of Set Theory to Cosmology”: www-math.mit.edu/~rstan/papers/turtles.ps [date of access: 26.11.2009].

  3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down [date of access: 26.11.2009].

  4. Epistemic acceptability in turn is defined as follows: “Some content A is epistemically acceptable in community C at time t if A is or is supported by data d evident to C at t in light of reasoning and background assumptions which have survived critical scrutiny from as many perspectives as are available to C at t, and C is characterized by venues for criticism, uptake of criticism, public standards, and tempered equality of intellectual authority” (Longino 2002: 135).

  5. Hardwig (1991) introduces a third criterion to assess someone’s trustworthiness: adequate epistemic self-assessment, i.e. the ability to assess one’s own level of competence regarding the issue at hand. Since adequate epistemic self-assessment is a second-order competence, which indicates the limits of one’s competence, I subsume it under my considerations on the assessment of competence.

  6. Some authors have argued that there is no need for epistemic trust, because there are strategies by which a novice can assess and compare experts based on evidence. Such strategies include the evidence on the track records of the experts or asking further experts either for their opinion on the topic matter or on the expert at stake (Goldman 2001). Despite certain problems (cf. Coady 2006), such strategies are clearly possible and often useful. However, they are themselves based on trust—on trust in other people or trust in evidence, which is provided by someone. Thus, they do not offer an alternative to the view in which knowledge and trust are inherently entangled, but only possible strategies to make trust more rational by basing it on some knowledge.

  7. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:About [date of access: 27.11.2009].

  8. As noted before, I assume a position according to which quality assessment always depends on the epistemic purpose and the standards vary depending what is at stakes.

  9. http://wikiscanner.virgil.gr/ [date of access: 26.04.2010].

  10. FAQ of WikiScanner: http://virgil.gr/31 [date of access: 26.04.2010].

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the three anonymous reviewers as well as Noah Holtwiesche, Gloria Origgi and Roberto Casati for their feedback on earlier versions of this paper. The research for this paper was enabled by several grants: the ANR2008 grant (Agence Nationale de la Recherche, France) CSOSG- CAHORS for a Project on a “Information Evaluation, Analysis, Organization and Ontologies for Intelligence and Security”, the project LiquidPub, funded by the Future and Emerging Technologies (FET) Programme within the 7th Framework Programme for Research of the European Commission (FET-Open grant number: 213360), as well as a research scholarship from the University of Vienna, Austria for a project on notions of knowledge, sociality and trust in social epistemology and social software (Project number: F-405).

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  1. Institut Jean Nicod, Ecole Normale Supérieure, 29, rue d’Ulm, 75005, Paris, France

    Judith Simon

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Simon, J. The entanglement of trust and knowledge on the Web. Ethics Inf Technol 12, 343–355 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10676-010-9243-5

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