Abstract
It is commonly assumed that either testimony is credulously taken on trust or it is accepted with good reason and trust plays no role. I argue that this opposition is ill judged. Trust should not be aligned with credulity and its absence with reason. Rather, the acquisition of testimonial knowledge always presupposes trust: to trust a speaker is simply to treat them as a source of knowledge. The question of whether and what justifies this attitude of trust remains open.
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Faulkner, P. (2003). The Epistemic Role of Trust. In: Falcone, R., Barber, S., Korba, L., Singh, M. (eds) Trust, Reputation, and Security: Theories and Practice. TRUST 2002. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 2631. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-36609-1_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-36609-1_4
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