Testimony, Trust, Transmission

Introduction

This paper‟s purpose is to address two questions that are of huge importance in the
epistemology of testimony. One of these, the second one has received much attention
and this paper sets out my view on the matter and compares it to some of what I take
to be the most compelling accounts in the literature. This is the question of whether or
not trust is necessary for either knowledge transmission through testimony.

In my consideration of this question I argue that trust is not a necessary condition for
the transmission of knowledge regardless of whether or not the listener accepts the
testimony of the speaker as true, that is to say, whether the testimony is successful. I
provide a refutation for both of these views by way of counterexamples. I argue that
testimony can succeed in transmitting knowledge without trust if trust is replaced by
the weaker but related attitude of reliance in the case of successful testimony. I also
argue that if one accepts that knowledge is transmitted by testimony in everyday
exchanges, then knowledge can be transmitted in cases where there is clear distrust
between the interlocutors.1 It will follow from my examples to prove these claims that
the existence of some form of testimony is a necessary condition of knowledge
transmission but trust, or even acceptance of the statement expressed in the testimony
as true is not necessary for knowledge transmission.

Before this however, I consider a question that is basic, but I find is not addressed
extensively in the literature on the epistemology of testimony. Possibly it is because it
is so basic that those epistemologists with special interests in testimony have felt that
it is not necessary to confront the question head on. The question „what is it to trust
someone?‟ and the related question of „what is it for someone to be trustworthy?‟
(both in relation to testimony) are not widely discussed.

There exists a significant and growing literature in the field of ethics that discusses the
question of what trust is with ethical considerations in mind, but in epistemology there
is not such a wide discussion, with epistemologists presumably thinking it can be
taken as read.2 Since there is disagreement in the literature of ethics regarding what
1
As far as I am aware, most authors on the epistemology of testimony do accept that testimony can
transmit knowledge under certain circumstances. The most effective discussions of this principle in my
opinion are Jennifer Lackey, “Testimonial Knowledge and Transmission,” The Philosophical
Quarterly, (1999) Volume 49, Number 197, pp. 471-90, Lackey, “Paul Faulkner, “Understanding
Knowledge Transmission,” Ratio, (2006) Volume 19, Number 2, pp. 156-175 and Lackey‟s discussion
of ordinary testimonial transmission in Lackey, “Knowledge and Credit,” Philosophical Studies, (2009)
Volume 142, Number 1, pp. 27-42.
2
For a sampling of the literature on reductive accounts of trust in society published with social and
ethical considerations in mind, see Annette Baier “Trust and Antitrust,” Ethics, (1986) Volume 96,

1
trust is, I think it useful to state and motivate my account of what trust is in a
testimonial context. My view of trust in a testimonial context is related to my view of
trust in interpersonal relationships expressed elsewhere, but whilst the two bear
striking similarities to one another I do not think that my account of what trust in
interpersonal relationships is can be simply transplanted into a testimonial sense.
Subtle alterations are necessary and these will be made clear. If only to make my
discussion of the question of knowledge transmission in the second section clearer, I
will begin by discussing what I take the necessary and sufficient conditions for the
truth of „A trusts B when B says U.‟ I will establish and motivate my account,
demonstrating why some conditions that might prima facie appear to be necessary in
an account of trust actually make such an account untenable if they are added in.

The need for me to do this might be challenged. It might be objected that various
philosophical disciplines and in epistemology in particular there is agreement on very
little in the way of reductive accounts. For example there is much disagreement on
what knowledge is and what justification is, but this does not preclude effective
discussion of knowledge attributions and conceptions of justification. 3 Thus it might
be claimed that an explicit account of trust is unnecessary. Whilst I agree that there is
much disagreement, in the case of trust, given the shortage of literature on the
identification of trust and without an agreed conception of knowledge or trust I am
concerned that my discussion will become somewhat vacuous. I will permit the reader
to use whatever conception of knowledge they would like- there are many on offer-
with the proviso that they allow that knowledge can be transmitted by testimony, but I
will argue that trust under my characterisation is not a necessary condition for the
transmission of knowledge, whether or not the testimony in question can be said to
have been successful.

The Conditions of Testimonial Trust

What I take the truth value of the proposition „A trusts B when B says U‟ to depend on
is the following set of conditions, which I will call The conditions of testimonial trust.
I hold these conditions to be necessary and sufficient viz. they all need to be met and
whenever this is the case then the proposition is true.

Number 2, pp. 231-260, Oswald Hanfling, “How we Trust One Another,” Philosophy, (2008) Volume
83, Number 2, pp. 161-177, Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness (New York: Russell Sage
Foundation, 2002), Richard Holton, “Deciding to Trust, Coming to Believe,” Australasian Journal of
Philosophy, (1994) Volume 72, Number 1, pp. 63-76, Karen Jones, “Trust as an Affective Attitude,”
Ethics, (1996), Volume 107, Number 1, pp. 4-25, Phillip Pettit, “The Cunning of Trust,” Philosophy
and Public Affairs, (1995), Volume 24, Number 3, pp. 202-225, and Stephen Wright, “Trust and
Trustworthiness,” Philosophia, (forthcoming).
3
For different conceptions of what knowledge is see Edmund Gettier, “Is Justified True Belief
Knowledge?,” Analysis, (1963), Volume 23, pp. 121-123, Hilary Kornblith, “Knowledge Needs No
Justification,” in Quentin Smith (ed.), Epistemology: New Essays, (New York: Oxford University Press,
2008) pp. 5-23 and Ernest Sosa “The Analysis of „Knowledge that P‟,” Analysis, (1964), Volume 25,
pp. 1-8.

2
 (1) U is intelligible to A.
(2) A takes U to be true.
(3) A adopts the participant stance toward B as a result of U.4
(4) A believes that B is able to make either a true or false statement about the
subject matter expressed in U.
(5) A believes that they stand to lose or gain something depending on the
truth/falsity of B‟s response to U even if this is just the value of a trusting
relationship.

This analysis describes the listener receiving a particular testimony. Of course it is

perfectly plausible to envisage a situation where A would dogmatically trust B‟s
testimony regardless of what proposition it expressed. In this sense, A would be said
to trust B generally in a testimonial sense. This kind of trust I characterise in the
following way: A trusts B generally iff for any U presented to A by B, A would meet
the conditions of testimonial trust. Having set out my conditions, I now propose to
explain why I think it is that these and not some other conditions are the conditions of
testimonial trust. My account of trust is a psychological one, concerning attitudes and
beliefs and I feel that it is this particular set of psychological conditions that identify
trust, distinguishing it from dependence or reliance, which I think is important in
order to capture the uniqueness of trust.

I believe that there is nothing whatsoever that could reasonably be considered

controversial about either condition (1) or condition (2). Certainly, a proponent of the
view that I will come to oppose, who believes that trust is necessary knowledge
transmission will struggle to make their account convincing if they wish to deny
either of these. If it is not the case that A receives a testimony, that is to say (2) is not
fulfilled then regardless of whether or not knowledge is transmitted, two things can be
said:

Firstly the case is no longer one of testimonial transmission and thus cannot be
brought to bear on the question of how trust is related to the transmission of
knowledge through testimony. Any knowledge that is transmitted is cut away from
testimony since the testimony itself has not even been accepted. Similarly with (1) if
it is not true that the testimony is intelligible to A then the testimony must not have
been successful. If A cannot even make sense of the proposition expressed in U then I
think that it follows that A cannot know the truth value of the proposition involved
with U. Claiming knowledge is transmitted without this I fear commits one to a
radical epistemic externalism, which is prey to BonJour‟s problems of clairvoyance,
which are concerned about knowledge being divorced unacceptably from
responsibility since the justification for the listener‟s knowledge acquired by

4
I will come back to the issue of the participant stance and develop it further later in this paper. It is
originally formulated in Holton, “Deciding to Trust, Coming to Believe,” (1994) and discussed in
Wright “Trust and Trustworthiness,” (forthcoming).

3
transmission is not cognitively available to them. 5 I do not believe that anyone
actually wishes to deny either (1) or (2) as necessary conditions of trust, but I wish to
make it clear that anyone attempting to do so would face these serious difficulties and
would need to consider this. I assume then that I am warranted in taking (1) and (2) as
conditions of trust.

Condition (3) concerns the adoption of the participant stance. This is drawn from
Richard Holton‟s work and I have defended it elsewhere as a condition of trust in
relationships between individuals. 6 Since I have discussed it elsewhere and the
arguments employed there are broadly similar to the one that I wish to employ here, I
will simply give a quick overview here of what the participant stance is and why I
consider it to be preferable to alternative conditions designed to play the same role in
alternative analyses of trust.

Adopting the participant stance towards someone involves preparing to feel gratified
or betrayed dependent on how they respond to the trust invested in them. In the case
of testimony, the response would be their testimony, the nature of which would bring
about the corresponding feeling in the trustor. This is distinct from expecting
something of them or relying on them since in these cases, the purported trustor
would only feel betrayed by their trustee if they did not behave as their trustor would
like. Compliance would not generate the required feeling of gratification that is
associated with well placed trust if the attitude towards the trustee was one of
expectation or reliance. The role that the participant stance plays in an analysis of
trust is to raise the stakes. This raising of the stakes is necessary to support a claim
that a trusting relationship is more valuable than one that is a relationship of reliance,
which is a common intuition. If there is more at stake in the relationship between the
parties, the relationship has a higher value. There is at the very least an intuitive
feeling that a trusting relationship is preferable to one of dependence and my account
takes this seriously and aims to make sense of it. Trust is a special type of relation
held only between people. When people say that the testimony of their electricity
meter is trustworthy (if they say that), I hold that they really mean that the testimony
of the meter is reliable. Hence they rely on their meter rather than trust it, which is
evident when they do not feel gratified that it has worked as they wanted it to as they
would in a case of trust. A common alternative to fill the role played by the
participant stance is the requirement of good will between the participants. 7 This has
the requisite effect of increasing the stakes since there is an emotional as well as a

5
The clairvoyant is discussed in Laurence BonJour, “Externalist Theories of Empirical Knowledge,”
Midwest Studies in Philosophy, (1980), Volume 5, Studies in Epistemology, p. 62. A similar example is
the example of “Mr. Truetemp” discussed in Keither Lehrer, Theory of Knowledge (2nd Edition),
(Colorado: Westview Press, 2000), pp. 187-188.
6
Cf. Holton, “Deciding to Trust, Coming to Believe,” (1994) and discussed in Wright “Trust and
Trustworthiness,” (forthcoming).
7
This view is held by Annette Baier, “Trust and Antitrust,” (1986). Jonathan Adler holds a view that
expectation is a condition of trust in, “Testimony, Trust, Knowing,” The Journal of Philosophy,
Volume 91, Number 5, (1994), p. 271.

4
material investment for the parties to consider in a case of trust, but the trouble with
this is that it does not act as a satisfactory indicator of trust because there are cases
that I feel ought to be ones that are marked out as trust where there is no evidence of
good will. This means that good will is not a necessary condition of trust as the
following example demonstrates:

Consider a scenario where a football coach from a rival club accepts an invitation to
take training sessions in the absence of the club‟s usual coach who has been taken
unwell and is expected to be unavailable for a week. Given that the visiting coach has
never been acquainted with the players and vice versa, there may well be no good will
between the two parties, nor indeed anywhere in the picture.

Does it follow from this that they cannot trust what he says in the sense that they are
incapable of fulfilling the conditions I have set out? I do not think so. In addition it
seems that this is the type of example that should be considered as trust regardless of
which analysis an one adopts. It is plausible that the players might trust their new
(temporary) coach and as a result this case is one that an adequate account of trust
needs to be able to accommodate. The example I gave used a group trusting an
individual, but I think that this is not problematic since the intuitions involved would
be much the same. I believe then that the participant stance is one of the conditions of
testimonial trust. This is not to say that there may never be good will in a trusting
relationship- to say such a thing would be extremely difficult to prove conclusively.
What I do wish to say however is that good will between participants or anywhere in
the picture is not a necessary condition of a trusting relationship and as such is not a
condition of testimonial trust. Another alternative for the good will advocate is to say
that good will is conducive to trust or that there is a correlation between good will
between participants and trusting relationships. I do not deny this is possible but I
think it would require some evidential support before it would be convincing. Even if
it were the case that such a theory could be empirically supported, it locates trust
separate to good will (if there is to be a correlation there must be at least two distinct
things to be correlated- nothing correlates with itself). For these reasons, I will take (3)
to be sufficiently well motivated to be included in an appropriate description of the
conditions of testimonial trust.

Conditions (4) and (5) deliberately leave open the possibility that for all A knows B
may be intentionally speaking untruthfully. This is to say that for all A knows, B is
capable of betraying them. There are two important things to consider in this
condition and I shall come to them both in turn. I hold that these conditions need to
permit that firstly A must think it possible that B can betray them, but also secondly
that it does not have to be the case objectively that B was in reality able to speak
falsely, so long as A believes that they were free to do so. If either of these terms is
not met, then the conditions of testimonial trust are not met. The following should
assist with the explication of my conditions:

5
 Case 1: A believes that B can betray them, but in reality B was only capable of
formulating a true sentence means that A can trust B. Realistic examples of this are
difficult to formulate but here is a borrowed and adapted case to demonstrate what I
mean:

In a situation where A asks B whether or not B passed their recent epistemology exam,
A has reason to believe that B is in a position to lie to them and betray their trust. In
actuality B did not pass. Unbeknownst to A or B however the examiners are listening to
the conversation between A and B and based on how B decides to testify, they will alter
B‟s grade (if necessary) after he has decided what to say but before he has said it in
order to make B‟s testimony true. B is thus unable to supply false testimony to A.8

Can A trust B here?9 I rather think so. It seems to me that the external situation, of
which A was unaware need not have any bearing on whether or not A can trust B.
What A is unaware of I do not think can be brought to bear on A‟s decision making
process, something which is borne out of my consideration of trust as an attitude.
Consider a related, but fundamentally distinct case in order to clarify this point:

Case 2: A believes that B is not able to betray them, but in reality it is the case that B
can give A false testimony, thus constituting a breach of A‟s trust.

In a situation where A asks B whether or not B passed their recent epistemology exam
and B did not pass, A has reason to believe that the examiners are recording the
conversation between A and B and based on B‟s decision, they will alter B‟s grade (if
necessary) after he has decided what to say but before he has said it in order to make
B‟s testimony true. A thus believes that B cannot bear false testimony and betray their
trust. In reality this is not the case and the examiners are in fact not listening to the
conversation or monitoring B. In actual fact, B can bear A false testimony, breaching
the trust.

In this situation can A trust B? I am inclined to say not. Since A believes on the basis
of evidence available to them that B is not able to bear false testimony and thus breach
A‟s trust, then A cannot trust B. A is able to rely on B, or make an educated guess at
predicting whether or not B will tell the truth, or justifiably depend on B but due to the
fact that A believes that B is not able to potentially betray A, A cannot meet the
conditions of testimonial trust and therefore A cannot trust B.

What I want all of this to do is to show conclusively is that it is not the case that for A
to trust B then A must be vulnerable as a result of B‟s outcome. In a case of trust, it is
not necessarily the case that there is vulnerability involved. Case 1 I presented as a
case of trust without risk. What I do find essential for trust is a perceived risk from the
trustor. In an example of testimonial trust such as a conversation, this condition is

8
This is adapted from an example given by Richard Foley, in “Evidence and Reasons for Belief,”
Analysis, (1991), Volume 51, pp. 98-102. Foley himself states that his example is adapted from
Gregory S. Kavka‟s example in “The Toxin Puzzle,” Analysis, (1983), Volume 43, pp. 33-36
9
When I ask if A can trust B I am not asking whether or not B is trustworthy or reliable as people often
mean when they ask this question. I am asking whether or not it is possible for the necessary and
sufficient conditions for trust to be met in this circumstance.

6
more or less always fulfilled and I had to create a hypothetical example to make my
point, but nonetheless, I think that the two cases show clearly why perceived risk is
necessary but actual risk is irrelevant based on my account of trust as an attitude. This
may be similar to something that Jonathan Adler has in mind when he considers the
distinction between trusting someone and trusting their testimony, suggesting that a
listener may know the correct answer to the testimony, but still extend trust towards
the speaker.10 I think this assessment of risk has a good deal of plausibility, since A
knowing but having forgotten the answer to his question before B responds means that
A perceives herself to be vulnerable to having their trust breached by the false
testimony of B without being objectively vulnerable since they are able to recall the
correct answer after B testifies. For these reasons, I take conditions (4) and (5) to be
correct as conditions of testimonial trust. This explains the motivation for my account
of trust. I believe that this exposition will at least assist the reader when I refer to trust
later in my discussion of what role, if any, trust is required to play in knowledge as a
result of testimony.

Is Trust Necessary for Knowledge based on Testimony?

In this section of the paper I consider the claim that for knowledge to be transferred
the listener must trust the hearer. One attractive account that implies that trust is
necessary for the transfer of knowledge comes from Elizabeth Fricker. 11 Fricker notes
that since knowledge that has been transmitted from another individual is second hand
knowledge, it is epistemically inferior to knowledge that has been gained by
perception, since there is obviously more opportunity for something to interrupt the
smooth transmission of knowledge. 12 I do not propose to challenge these assertions
made by Fricker, though there are those who would challenge Fricker‟s claim that
testimony merely preserves justification (and by extension, knowledge) rather than
provides any justification of its own in the knowledge transmitting process.13 Since I
wish to contest the idea that trust is a necessary condition for knowledge transmission
I will not attach my theory to a view on the generative/preservative nature of
testimony in relation to epistemic justification. There is another aside that I feel it
would be beneficial to distinguish the question of whether testimonial knowledge
10
Adler, “Testimony, Trust, Knowing,” (1994), p. 266. I come back to this later in the paper for a fuller
discussion.
11
Elizabeth Fricker, “Testimony and Epistemic Autonomy,” in Jennifer Lackey and Ernest Sosa (eds.),
The Epistemology of Testimony, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006) pp. 225-250.
12
For a fuller development of Fricker‟s epistemology of testimony, see Elizabeth Fricker, “Against
Gullibility,” in Bimal Matilal and Arindam Chakrabarti, Knowing From Words: Western and Indian
Philosophical Analysis of Understanding and Testimony, (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers,
1994) pp. 125-161, also her “Second-Hand Knowledge,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research,
Volume 73, Number 3, (2006) pp. 592-618.
13
The literature on this has exploded over the past fifteen years or so, but the most notable opposition
to the view that testimony preserves justification rather than gives any justification of its own comes
from C.A.J. Coady, “Testimony: A Philosophical Study,” (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1992), Alvin
Goldman, “Knowledge in a Social World,” (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999) and Tyler Burge,
“Content Preservation,” Philosophical Review, Volume 102, Number 4, (1993) pp. 457-488.

7
requires trust from. It is the issue of whether or not knowledge as a result of a
speaker‟s testimony requires knowledge on the part of the speaker.

Jennifer Lackey contends that for a listener to have knowledge as a result of testimony,
it is not necessarily the case that this knowledge must have been „transmitted‟ from
the speaker- that is to say, the listener can acquire knowledge in spite of the fact that
the speaker does not have knowledge themselves. 14 The claim that I make is neutral
with regard to this issue. Whilst I refer to knowledge from testimony in terms of
transmission, this is because testimony is the less controversial form of a listener
acquiring knowledge from a speaker‟s testimony. Lackey‟s argument does not
preclude a listener from having knowledge when a speaker has knowledge of a
proposition, she argues that a listener can have knowledge from testimony regardless
of whether or not the speaker has knowledge of what the proposition that they assert.
Other authors such as Frederick F. Schmitt suggest that a principle similar to a
transmission account of knowledge is necessary for an epistemology of testimony,
whereby knowing as a result of testimony requires the speaker to know the
proposition that they assert.15 In order to remain neutral on the question of whether or
not it is a necessary condition of the listener having knowledge as a result of
testimony that the speaker knows the proposition, I will use examples in which a
speaker does have the knowledge of the proposition that their testimony refers to. The
question of whether or not a speaker knowing is a condition for the listener knowing
in a testimonial exchange is an interesting one, but it does not directly bear on the
question of whether or not trust is a necessary condition for the listener gaining
knowledge from testimony.

According to Fricker, an epistemically ideal subject would not form their beliefs on
the basis of testimony, for the reason that it is second rate because one can clearly see
cases of it going wrong and failing to transmit knowledge, whether deliberately in the
form of lies or otherwise in the form of honest mistakes. 16 Fricker arrives at the
conclusion that it would severely handicap an individual however if their conviction
to be as epistemically pure as Fricker‟s fictional autonomous knower would render
them unable to act and possibly even without any beliefs whatsoever. 17 The moral of
the story then according to Fricker is that „[o]ne cannot live in a modern scientifically
and technologically sophisticated society, nor have any social life at all without

14
Jennifer Lackey, Learning From Words: Testimony as a Source of Knowledge, (New York, Oxford
University Press, 2008), pp. 37-39. Cf. Peter Graham, “Transferring Knowledge,” Nous, Volume 34,
Number 2, (2000) pp. 131-152.
15
Frederick F. Schmitt, “Testimonial Justification and Transindividual Reasons,” in Jennifer Lackey
and Ernest Sosa (eds.), The Epistemology of Testimony, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006) p.
193.
16
Fricker, “Testimony and Epistemic Authority” (2006) pp. 225-7. For some clear examples of how
testimony can go wrong see C.A.J. Coady, “Pathologies of Testimony,” in Jennifer Lackey and Ernest
Sosa (eds.), The Epistemology of Testimony, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006) pp. 253-271,
who considers gossip, rumours and urban myths as examples of pathologies of testimony.
17
Fricker, “Testimony and Epistemic Authority,” (2006) pp. 225-7

8
trusting others in almost one‟s every action‟ albeit whilst exercising due caution when
deciding to trust.18

Since Fricker argues that despite being more epistemically safe, an individual cannot
operate without knowledge that is transmitted from the testimony of others, she
argues there is a need to trust them. I think that Fricker may well be right to say that
some sort of trust is essential in order to operate, but I think that the role that trust
plays is important due to the fact that it allows a believer to get enough knowledge
from testimony in order to operate. I do not think that if the epistemically concerned
individual were to stop themselves from trusting in anyone whatsoever, possibly
because they were concerned over their own ability to properly apply the Testimony
Deferential Acceptance Principle that Fricker later develops, that they would be
unable to acquire knowledge from testimony. 19 Thus, it seems that an individual can
get their body of knowledge started without trusting, but they will need trust in order
to obtain enough knowledge to be able to operate effectively. It should be pointed out
here that in a sense I am not directly arguing against the main point that Fricker makes
in this section of her work. I accept that refusing point blank to trust handicaps an
individual dreadfully. I am formulating an answer to her question of whether or not
such an individual would be able to have any knowledge of empirical propositions
without trusting anybody. I propose to demonstrate why it is that I think that they can
by means of some more hypothetical examples.

KNOWLEDGE WITHOUT TRUST 1: Suppose that B knows that the capital of

Kazakhstan is either Astana or Tashkent and that B knows this from a combination of
perception and memory ie. without testimony. Suppose also that when B asks A, A
informs B by testimony U that the capital of Kazakhstan is Tashkent. B knows that A
has been sent by the captain of a rival quiz team, not averse to underhanded tactics and
as a result A will try to deceive B. In this case, as a result of B’s background beliefs, B
is now in a position to know that the capital of Kazakhstan is Astana by modus tollendo
ponens and also not trust A in any sense.

This is a particularly cynical case. It can be made more general though. I think that it
can be applied to any case where the listener has reason to believe the speaker‟s
testimony to be false due to there being a high probability of them lying for whatever
reason. To avoid question begging, these reasons to believe might also have been
formed on the basis of perception and memory as well. If B is sufficiently cunning in
the example, they may check out various facts by feeding them into a testifier who is
known to be deliberately deceptive.20 There are a few objections to this example that I
anticipate might be made and I think I ought to respond to.

18
Ibid., p. 228.
19
Fricker, “Testimony and Epistemic Authority,” (2006), p. 231.
20
It is important to note at this point that this example is of a case where the testimony is obviously not
a case of truth-telling. This is distinct from the examples mentioned in Coady, “Pathologies of
Testimony,” (2006).

9
One suggestion that might be made of my example is that it only works when the
listener is in a place to apply modus tollendo ponens. The example works because the
listener already has prior knowledge that either x or y. Thus when the speaker testifies
that x the listener is able to infer ¬x and as a result, y. It might be reasonably said that
often a listener is not in a position to employ modus tollendo ponens and as a result,
oftentimes regardless of whether or not they believe the speaker to be dishonest, a
listener cannot have knowledge. For instance it is perfectly plausible that the listener
should receive the testimony with no beliefs about the capital of Kazakhstan and not
be able to infer Astana as a result. What I would suggest in response to this is that for
any proposition that obeys the law of the excluded middle permits the listener, if they
know this, to assume x ∨ ¬x and deduce ¬x from the speaker‟s testimony that x
coupled with their beliefs concerning the nefariousness of the speaker. It is reasonable
to say that most of the time, whilst a listener might not be epistemically well enough
placed to know that the capital of Kazakhstan is either Astana or Tashkent, but it is
almost certain that the listener will know that the capital of Kazakhstan either is
Astana or is not Astana even with no other beliefs about Kazakhstan. Added to this is
the fact that I am contesting the claim that knowledge from testimony requires trust.
Since it is plausible that a listener might be in a position to know either x or y as they
are in the example given, it is not a problem that this is not the case most of the time.
Thus I do not see a problem with this condition in the example.

Another potential problem that might be raised against my example might be that the
receiver does not know that the testifier is lying and as a result, they do not know that
they will get the right result by employing modus tollendo ponens and eliminating the
proposition corresponding to the speaker‟s testimony. As a result, the listener does not
know in the example. The listener is left with the knowledge of if x→y and if ¬x→¬y.
Unfortunately, they do not know whether x or ¬x is the case. From this, they cannot
infer y, ¬y, or indeed anything of value.

The problem here is similar to the lottery paradox described by John Hawthorne,
where an individual who would not ordinarily be able to go on holiday for financial
reasons has a lottery ticket and therefore does not know that they will not be able to
go on holiday the following year since they do not know that their lottery ticket will
not win. 21 This may well stop my example from working. What I do not think
however is that it is uniquely a problem for my view. I think that if this problem is
taken seriously, it must be done consistently, which gives it the power to undermine
all knowledge from testimony, not simply the problem that I have supplied.

It might also be objected that the speaker‟s testimony against x gives the listener no
right to infer x or anything to do with it and does not constitute evidence for any
proposition. Someone who holds this view might say that when a listener receives
testimony that x they can know x and receiving testimony that ¬x means that they can
21
John Hawthorne, Knowledge and Lotteries, (New York, Oxford University Press), (2003).

10
know that ¬x but receiving testimony that x never enables a listener to know that ¬x
nor does receiving a testimony that ¬x enable a listener to know that x. I think that to
deny knowledge in the case I gave based on an argument like this one would be
irrational. Given the premises:

1. A knows that if x, B will testify that ¬x and if ¬x, B will testify that x.
2. A knows that B testified that x.

The conclusion

3. A knows that ¬x

Follows deductively. To accept both premises, which are features of my example but
to deny the conclusion seems to me to be irrational.

The worry about my view expressed in these responses is that a listener cannot know
when an individual‟s testimony is false. I think that my argument will become clearer
if I set up the issue in a fashion similar to how those who espouse disjunctivism about
perception set out their view. Consider what could be called the „good‟ case of
testimonial knowledge- knowing that x because someone testifies that x. Lackey
echoes Fricker‟s point that a significant proportion of an individual‟s knowledge is
gained in this fashion, giving an example of how an individual asking for directions
can know simply because of the testimony that they are given. 22 The problem
presented for my view works equally well in this type of case. It could quite easily be
said that in this situation, a listener does not know that a testifier is speaking the truth,
since the good and the bad cases are subjectively indistinguishable and thus does not
know the proposition that they seem to know through testimony. Lackey‟s solution to
this problem is that in these paradigm cases of what is ordinarily taken to be
knowledge acquired through testimony, it is problematic denying these as cases of
knowledge, as Fricker points out thus they ought to be permitted. Earlier in this paper
I stated that my claim that an individual can know from testimony without the need
for trust was conditional on the idea that an individual can ever gain knowledge from
testimony. If this is not granted, then I do not think that anyone can get knowledge
from false testimony. Obviously an appeal to an argument in the style of the lottery
paradox would counteract my example, but it also means that nobody ever learns
anything from testimony makes for an unattractive view. As a result of this I think it
reasonable to dismiss the objection, since taking it seriously comes with extremely
difficult consequences and also this seems to be the view taken by others in the
literature, meaning that I am (only) following their lead.

22
Jennifer Lackey, “Why we Don‟t Deserve Credit for Everything we Know,” Synthese, Volume 158,
Number 1, (2007), pp. 353-354.

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I conclude from the above that a listener does not need to trust a speaker in order to
gain knowledge as a result of their testimony. Indeed there is another claim that I can
make from much the same example. I think the example also shows that for a listener
to gain knowledge as a result of a speaker‟s testimony, the speaker does not need to
be trustworthy, nor do they need to be regarded by the listener as trustworthy. I will
not in this paper state and contrast my view of trustworthiness against others in the
literature as I did previously for my account of trust.23 The reason for this is that I
think regardless of what conception of trustworthiness one employs, it is the case that
a testifier who intentionally lies and who has the intention to deceive the listener will
be regarded as untrustworthy by any appropriate theory of trustworthiness. The
example I supplied is a case of knowledge being gained from testimony from a source
that is universally accepted to be untrustworthy. Based on the discussion of this
example, I conclude that gaining knowledge from testimony does not require either
the listener to trust in the speaker or to believe in the trustworthiness of the speaker.

In the example that I gave, knowledge was gained by the listener because they
rejected the testimony as a result of their knowing that this was the right thing to do.
Given this, it might be the case that trust is a necessary condition of knowledge as a
result of successful testimony. If the example were different and the listener knew that
they should use modus ponendo tollens based on acceptance of the speaker‟s
testimony as true it might seem to be the case that trust would be necessary. What I
take it to mean to say a testimony is successful is that the listener accepts the
speaker‟s testimony and forms a belief that corresponds to the proposition in question.
In my conditions of testimonial trust, conditions (1) and (2) bring about the success of
the testimony. In the next section I argue against the idea that knowledge from a
successful testimony requires that the listener trust the speaker.

Is Trust Necessary for Knowledge based on Successsful Testimony?

In this section I argue that trust is not a necessary condition for knowledge to be the
result of successful (that is, accepted as true) testimony. This view stands in direct
opposition to that of John Hardwig. Like I am in this paper, Hardwig is concerned
with the listener‟s attitude towards the speaker and the possibilities that open up as a
result of which attitude the listener takes. Hardwig states that “A must TRUST B, or A
will not believe that B's testimony gives her good reasons to believe p.”24 From this
quotation it is not explicit whether or not B has asserted that p as opposed to ¬p.
Hardwig also says that in addition to this “B must be TRUST-WORTHY or B's

23
This has been done elsewhere in Wright, “Trust and Trustworthiness,” (forthcoming). Another
account of trustworthiness not discussed here is that of Keith Lehrer discussed in Theory of Knowledge
(2000) and also in “Testimony and Trustworthiness,” in Jennifer Lackey and Ernest Sosa (eds.), The
Epistemology of Testimony, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 145-159.
24
John Hardwig, “The Role of Trust in Knowledge,” The Journal of Philosophy, Volume 88, Number
12, (1991), p. 700.

12
testimony will not in fact give A good reasons to believe p, regardless of what she
might believe about B.”25 Hardwig therefore thinks that if trust is to be considered a
rational attitude, A must at least believe B to be trustworthy. I propose to consider
Hardwig‟s conclusion with the assumption that the speaker has testified in favour of
the proposition in question. I will also naively assume that this is the more normal
case of testimony, since I feel that I have shown both assertions to be false as
assertions of necessary conditions if A is not in receipt of any testimony, or testimony
that ¬p. In this section I use an example developed from Adler to show that trust is
not a necessary condition of knowledge from testimony even in a case where the
situation is one in which the testimony is accepted by the listener as true.

KNOWLEDGE WITHOUT TRUST 2: Suppose A asks B a question and B supplies A

with testimony U. Now suppose that A has good evidence to assume that B is an
unscrupulous testifier on all other matters, but on the particular one that U is based on,
he is unerringly accurate. As a result, A accepts the testimony and gains knowledge
from it by so doing.

In this case, unlike KNOWLEDGE WITHOUT TRUST 1, the listener acquires

knowledge from the testimony by accepting it. This example however is clearly not
one where the listener trusts the speaker. Indeed it may well be the case that the
listener believes the speaker to be untrustworthy due to their propensity to telling lies.
The listener may therefore take the speaker‟s testimony to be true and gain knowledge
by so doing without either trusting the speaker or considering them to be trustworthy.
If the listener is in a similar position to the individual in KNOWLEDGE WITHOUT
TRUST 1, in as much as they already know x ∨ y and they have a reliable but
untrustworthy speaker, they can use the testimony of the speaker who states that x to
infer that ¬y.

To explicate the reasoning behind why I do not believe that the listener trusts the
speaker even though they take their belief to be true, I turn again to my initial account
of trust. Condition (3) required that the trustor adopt the participant stance towards
their trustee. I also stated that the participant stance is distinct from expectation or any
other predictive attitude to how the trustee will behave. In KNOWLEDGE
WITHOUT TRUST 2, I explicitly stated as part of the scenario that A had good
evidence to believe that B was going to be a reliable truth indicator of matters similar
to U. Thus, A will surely hold an attitude of expectation towards B rather than the
participant stance. In the event of U being false, A would not feel the betrayal
associated with the participant stance, rather some form of surprise. Since A does not
form the participant stance and I believe that it is a necessary condition of trust, it
follows that I hold that A does not trust B. This is my view of KNOWLEDGE
WITHOUT TRUST 2, which I will now compare to Adler‟s own response and a view
adapted from Paul Faulkner‟s account of what trust involves. Adler holds a different

25
Ibid., p. 700.

13
view to mine and the view that raises a potential problem is adapted from Faulkner‟s
comments concerning trust and credulity. I intend to show why my view is the most
plausible.

Adler‟s view on the situation given in the example is that it shows that a listener can
trust a speaker‟s testimony without trusting the speaker. Adler discusses a case similar
to the one that I have set out that involves trusting a generally unscrupulous
scientist.26 The conclusion that Adler draws is similar to but distinct from mine. Adler
argues that A‟s attitude to B is one of reliance, which he feels is distinct from trust- a
view that I endorse.27 What I interpreted the situation to demonstrate was that trust
was absent from the picture in this case, meaning that A gained knowledge as a result
of successful testimony, without any trust. This I took to entail that trust is not a
necessary condition of knowledge from testimony, even when the testimony was
successful. Adler on the other hand regards this as an example of a listener not
trusting a speaker, but trusting their testimony. 28 Thus it is not that case that
knowledge from testimony necessarily requires trust.

Another potential problem for my view is hinted at in a comment by Faulkner. 29

Faulkner states that “[i]n trusting a speaker we adopt a credulous attitude.” 30 This in
itself might be the case, Faulkner‟s suggestion that trusting a speaker requires a
credulous attitude towards their testimony matches up to my conditions for
testimonial trustworthiness (1) and (2). What would be a problem for my view
however would be if it were the case that if they adopted a credulous attitude towards
the speaker, an individual automatically trusted them, making (1) and (2) sufficient as
well as necessary conditions. If a credulous attitude were sufficient for the listener to
trust the speaker, then this would leave most of my conditions redundant (3), (4) and
(5). What it is important to note however is that a proponent of a view according to
which a credulous attitude is sufficient for trust is committed to saying that in
KNOWING WITHOUT TRUST 2, the listener‟s credulous attitude entails that they
trust the speaker. I think that working with this account of trust would be difficult,
since it seems obvious to me (and possibly also to Adler) that the listener absolutely
does not trust the speaker. The moral of this story is that equating trust with a
credulous attitude is too weak and seems to catch examples that are not actually trust.

This dispatches the theory that trusting an individual‟s testimony is identical to taking
a credulous view of it. Adler‟s challenge however is still untroubled by this. His
suggestion that in KNOWING WITHOUT TRUST 2, the listener trusts the speaker‟s
testimony whilst adopting an attitude of reliance toward the speaker themselves, still

26
Adler, “Testimony, Trust, Knowing,” (1994), p. 270.
27
Ibid., p. 270, for my endorsement of this see the section on trustworthiness in Wright, “Trust and
Trustworthiness,” (forthcoming).
28
Adler, “Testimony, Trust, Knowing,” (1994), p. 270.
29
I do not think that Faulkner holds the view that I consider, thus this discussion is not an attack on his
view, but it is a view that was brought to mind when reading his paper.
30
Paul Faulkner, “A Genealogy of Trust,” Episteme, Volume 4, Number 3, (2008), p. 305.

14
stands undefeated in opposition to my view that trust is not essential for a listener to
accept a speaker‟s testimony and gain knowledge as a consequence. There are two
reasons why I believe that Adler‟s idea that a listener might trust a speaker‟s
testimony whilst they regard the speaker themselves as untrustworthy but reliable is
problematic. The first is because I feel that a testimony itself is not the kind of thing
that can be trusted or distrusted. The second is because I think that it is incoherent to
adopt an attitude of trust a testimony from a speaker whilst considering the speaker
themselves to be untrustworthy.

I hold that the attitude of trust is one that is held between a trustor and a trustee, both
of which must be people. Not necessarily individuals, groups can trust and be trusted,
but the conditions of trust might differ for them. Elsewhere I stated that people do not
trust everyday objects such as refrigerators since they are not capable of making a
choice between cooperating with the apparent trustor and betraying them, so they are
relied upon rather than trusted.31 Under my account, testimony is not the sort of thing
that can be trusted since it does not meet conditions (4) or (5) and arguably also not
(3). I will leave the question of (3) aside, but certainly it cannot be stated either that a
trustor thinks that a testimony itself is capable of choosing whether or not to be true or
false, which means (4) is not met. I think this is sufficiently obvious for me to not
require an argument in support of it, but I will come back to this when I state my
second reason for rejecting Adler‟s claim. (5) is also not met since it cannot also be
reasonably said that the testimony itself stands to gain anything from whether or not it
is believed, or even that any reasonable listener believes that the testimony stands to
gain something based on whether or not it is believed. This I also take to be
uncontroversial. This sums up my first reason for rejecting Adler‟s claim that an
individual may trust a speaker‟s testimony without actually trusting the speaker
themselves.

In order to understand my second point against Adler‟s claim, consider the question of
whether a testimony is able to have any influence over whether or not it corresponds
to the truth.32 Uncontroversially, the only opportunity to decide whether or not the
testimony corresponds to the truth is with the speaker, since they control the content
of the testimony. It may be that the speaker is mistaken about the fact of the testimony,
if so they cannot control the truth value of the proposition expressed in the testimony,
but nonetheless it is obvious that the opportunity to make the testimony true or false is
with the speaker and not the testimony itself. I think that this means that the attitude
adopted toward the testimony ought to be a reflection of the attitude adopted toward
the speaker. In KNOWLEDGE WITHOUT TRUST 1, the attitude toward the
testimony was one of disbelief following on from the attitude of distrust from the

31
Wright, “Trust and Trustworthiness,” (forthcoming).
32
It may be the case that some propositions expressed through testimony such as “I am speaking” are
made true by the testimony itself, but in this paper I consider the majority of statements made
concerning empirical propositions where testimony does not have a bearing on the truth of the
proposition asserted.

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listener toward the speaker. KNOWLEDGE WITHOUT TRUST 2 is a more
complicated case, since the listener accepts the testimony as true despite it being from
a generally unreliable source. In this situation, I hold that the attitude toward the
testimony should reflect the attitude toward the speaker. This means that it is
unreasonable to „trust‟ the testimony, since the listener does not trust the speaker.
They can rely on the testimony and indeed they do, which corresponds to their
reliance on the speaker and this can be sufficient for the listener to gain knowledge.

Conclusion

What I think these two responses to Adler‟s problem show is that his suggestion that
an individual might trust a speaker‟s testimony whilst not trusting the speaker
themselves is not a tenable position. In arguing against this position, I hope to have
shown that in cases of testimony, knowledge can be transmitted by acceptance of
testimony even when there is no trust in the picture. This paper thus shows that
testimony can transmit knowledge without trust regardless of whether the situation is
one where the testimony is successful or treated with suspicion by the listener. As a
result of this, trust is neither a necessary, nor sufficient condition for knowledge as a
result of testimony, regardless of whether or not the listener believes the speaker‟s
testimony to be true. I also conclude that the necessity of trust as claimed by Fricker is
best understood in terms of giving an individual enough knowledge to operate, not as
a necessary condition of any testimonial knowledge. This conclusion need not devalue
trust or trusting relationships however. It simply gives an account of how they work
and still holds onto the claim that they are desirable things, albeit in a more limited
sense than it might be initially perceived to be.

Acknowledgements

I would like to extend my thanks to Stephen Laurence, University of Sheffield for his
insightful and helpful feedback that helped me to develop my account of what trust is,
Fiona Woollard, University of Sheffield for introducing me to the central issues in
testimony, David Galloway, King‟s College London for directing me towards some
helpful readings in the fields of both trust and testimony and Jennifer Lackey, for her
email exchange which enabled me to clear up some confusions concerning the nature
of her account of testimony. It naturally goes without saying that any mistakes in this
paper are a result of my efforts and not theirs.

Stephen Wright
stephen_wright@fastmail.fm

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