Abstract
Recent approaches to the social epistemology of belief formation have appealed to an epidemiological model, on which the mechanisms explaining how we form beliefs from our society or community along the lines of infectious disease. More specifically, Alvin Goldman (2001) proposes an etiology of (social) belief along the lines of an epistemological epidemiology. On this “contagion model,” beliefs are construed as diseases that infect people via some socio-epistemic community. This paper reconsiders Goldman’s epidemiological approach in terms of epistemic trust. By focusing on beliefs as diseases, Goldman misconstrues and underestimates the central role that epistemic trust plays in their formation (maintenance, revision, etc.). I suggest that we put trust, accordingly, as the center of an epidemiological model of social doxology—epistemic trust, rather than beliefs, is the disease with which one is infected. So, contra Goldman, beliefs themselves aren’t the disease—they are symptoms. Trust, on this approach, can be viewed as a pathology. This point connects Annette Baier’s (1994) work on moral trust—taking a cue from her “pathologies of trust.” The real pathology centered in social doxology is the epistemic trust manifested by those beliefs. Accordingly, I shall explore (and tentatively defend) an epidemiological model for such “pathological” epistemic trust inspired by Baier’s work on moral trust, one which can more adequately account for the infectious epistemic trust at work in social belief formation.
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Notes
Kitcher (2001) argues, using formal models of how cultural items spread in a population, that the infection/contagion analogy is “the more promising approach” to the mimetic inheritance/imitation proposal (390).
Later, I’ll defend a more substantive account of ET. But, since this occurs after and as a result of arguing against Goldman’s approach to the relation between beliefs and trust with respect to social doxology, we can use ET in place of “credal trust” without presupposing anything problematic at this stage.
The details of the genesis for the ET disposition would certainly diverge on Reid’s view from Sperber’s notion of a disposition. On Reid’s view, God implants our default ET in us whereas, for Sperber, it’s clearly because of a evolutionary adaptivity that we have it. However, I’m not convinced that this change in the origin of ET changes much. We could replace Reid’s appeal to God as the source for default ET with one based on one which makes ET evolutionarily adaptive without any substantive loss.
I thank an anonymous referee of this journal for pushing me to discuss this work.
Annette Baier, whom we’ll discuss soon, makes this clear.
“It seems fairly obvious that any form of cooperative activity, including the division of labor, requires the cooperators to trust one another to do their bit, or at the very least to trust the overseer with his whip to do his bit, where coercion is relied on. One would expect contractarians to investigate the forms of trust and distrust parties to a contract exhibit” (1995a, 96).
We could revise this condition to: (2’) H accepts that p. I’ve become convinced that there can be legitimate cases of ET where the propositional attitude at issue is weaker than outright belief. But, since acceptance can include belief, this change won’t affect either the substance of the account or the account’s ability to use ET as a basis for belief.
Elswhere (2018, especially §5) I develop an account of epistemic dispositions that can be acquired, to fit the idea that dispositional ET could be a non-innate disposition that one can develop, which puts in in line with the kind of selective (epistemic) trust we see discussed in the social psychology literature cited in §2.
Or “accept,” noting the possibility of (2’) from note 6.
We need this formulation rather than “H is disposed to believe/accept what S communicates” because one can trust a source for something the hearer takes the source to communicate even if that source doesn’t actually communicate it to H.
Since the account is no longer tied to any specific p to be communicated, there is no need for any version of (1). We can capture the idea that H tends to believe S’s communications, if and when they occur, in (2*).
Once this is clear, we can see a few places in Sperber’s work which might help support a pathology of ET more directly than belief. When referring to certain types of beliefs—ones which Goldman might call “social”—Sperber says some are “reflective”: “what made the reflective representation a belief was the authority granted to the source of the representation… Such beliefs are rationally held, not in virtue of their content, but in virtue of their source” (1995, 91-2; emphases mine). If we ground the belief itself in taking someone as authoritative or belief “in virtue of” its source, we locate the crucial mechanism for belief as something like ET. These lines, I suggest, fit naturally into the ET-based contagion model I propose here.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Karl Adams, Kevin DeLapp, Greg Oakes, Eric Scarffe, Katherine Valde, and audiences at the 2023 Bled Philosophical Conference and 2023 Alabama Philosophical Society Conference for comments on earlier drafts of this paper. This work is partially supported by a RISE grant from the Office of the Vice President for Research at the University of South Carolina.
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McCraw, B.W. Social Epistemology and Epidemiology. Acta Anal (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-024-00589-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-024-00589-0