Trust Linda Zagzebski

1. Introduction Trust in its practical form it is an attitude opposed to suspicion. In its epistemic form it is an attitude opposed to doubt. In either form it is a stance of acceptance of vulnerability. It is natural to be trusting, but the reflective person will want to know whether trust is defensible. If trust is identical with a belief, the reasonableness of trust is just the reasonableness of the belief. If trust includes an affective component, trust is reasonable only if affective states can be reasonable. I will argue that trust is a complex attitude with a component of belief, a component of feeling, and a behavioral component, and these components are present in standard cases of epistemic trust as well as trust in the practical domain. My position is that it is reasonable to have all of the components of basic epistemic self-trust and trust in others. Epistemic trust has a crucial role in intellectual virtue since many of the intellectual virtues are either enhancements of epistemic trust or constraints on it. If a virtuous person must reliably succeed in reaching the end of the virtue, these traits would not be virtues in a person unless that person is trustworthy, and some virtues require that others are trustworthy as well.

2. The components of trust 1

Trust is essential to social beings, and it is therefore important for many areas of human life, as well as a number of different fields of philosophy. I will start with a schema for trust in its most abstract form. I think of trust as a three-place relation.1 X trusts Y for purpose Z (or in respect Z). I trust Outlook to send my email message when I click send. I do not trust my unreliable rain gauge to accurately register the amount of rain that has fallen. I trust my neighbor not to damage our property while we are away. There are many politicians whom I do not trust to tell the truth when lying would serve their interests. As I think of trust, then, it can be properly directed towards inanimate objects and systems as long as they have the potential to harm me, and trust is only appropriate when the potential for harm is something I am aware of and accept. If I am browsing in an antique store and come across an old clock or radio, I might judge that it is unlikely to be reliable, but it would be odd to say I do not trust it to work since it does not have anything to do with me. As long as it remains in the shop, its unreliability does not make me vulnerable. In contrast, my email system, my rain gauge, my neighbors, and politicians can harm me, at least in the weak sense of making it harder for me to reach my ends. I propose that trust combines epistemic, affective, and behavioral components, each of which is a three-place relation. When X trusts Y for purpose Z, (1) X believe s that Y will get Z and that X may be harmed if Y does not do so. (2) X feel s trusting towards Y for

This view of trust as a three-place relation appears in Baier (1986) and in Jones (1996), among others. 2

purpose Z, and (3) X treats Y as if it will get Z. I do not claim that all three components of trust are necessary in every instance, but I think that they are present in standard cases, and for the purposes of this paper I am only interested in standard cases. Annette Baier defines trust as acceptance of vulnerability to harm that others could inflict, but which we judge that they will not in fact inflict (Baier 1995). A weakness of this definition is that it applies only to trust in persons, although it can be easily amended to include non-persons. It includes a component of belief, which seems to me to be right, and it includes a component of acceptance of vulnerability, which also seems to me to be right, but I think the affective component of trust goes farther than acceptance of vulnerability. Consider a case in which a person has the appropriate belief and the behavior appropriate for trust, but accepts her vulnerability with fear and trepidation. Suppose Sarah wants to go to a family wedding, but she is phobic about flying. She may believe that the plane will get her safely to her destination and acts as if it will do so, but she might still feel fear, have doubts, face indecision about getting on the plane, and regret her decision as the plane is taking off. All of this is compatible with believing that the plane will get her safely to her destination and acting as if it will. She accepts her vulnerability in the sense that she is willing to take her chances, but it seems to me she does not trust the plane to get her there safely if she is in the grip of fear and doubt. There is a big difference between Sarah and the person happily reading the newspaper in the seat next to her. Trust includes an emotional element, a feeling that I cannot identify any more precisely than simply the feeling of 3

trust. In the case I am imagining, Sarah lacks that feeling, and I submit that for that reason she lacks trust. I also think that trust has a behavioral component, although that component might not be independent of the other two. If Sarah wants to take the flight to the wedding, believes the plane will get her there safely, and feels trusting of it for that purpose, why wouldnt she get on the plane? Barring special circumstances, failing to behave in a way appropriate to trust indicates that either she does not really believe the plane will get her safely to her destination, or she lacks the feeling of trust in that respect. If so, the lack of appropriate behavior is evidence, maybe even proof, of the lack of either the epistemic component or the affective component, and the presence of the appropriate behavior does not add an element of trust that is not already entailed by the other two components. So the behavioral component might be redundant. But since we generally associate trust with behaving in a trusting manner, I am including it in my account. I am not attempting a precise analysis of the state of trust. I have said that trust can be appropriately directed towards non-persons, and I think it can be appropriately directed towards our epistemic faculties. I assume that the main purpose of our epistemic faculties is to get us the truth.2 If we do not get the truth, we are potentially harmed, and we are aware of that. Trusting our epistemic faculties, then, means

For those who dislike the term truth, the above assertion can be reformulated as the weaker claim that the main purpose of our epistemic faculties is to get us the answers to our questions. 4

that (1) we believe that our faculties will get us to the truth and that we can be harmed if they produce falsehoods, (b) we feel trusting towards our faculties for that purpose, and ( c) we treat them as if they will get us to the truth. Trusting our faculties for the purpose of getting the truth does not mean believing that our faculties will succeed every time we use them, of course, but I think it includes believing that they will succeed often enough to make it worth our while to rely upon them and to think that in general we will not be harmed by them. I believe that it is natural to have all three components of trust in our epistemic faculties. We naturally desire truth, and we naturally believe that our faculties can satisfy that desire and rely upon them to do so. I also think that we naturally feel trusting of our faculties, although it is harder to know what we naturally feel. Our awareness of our vulnerability to false beliefs probably grows as we gain experience. Young children may not have full epistemic self-trust because they are not aware of their vulnerability if they acquire false beliefs. But the child gradually develops that awareness with experiences of doubting what someone tells her, or doubting a memory, or noticing that she believed something that conflicts with a current observation. Experiences of this kind teach her to reflect, but she begins in a state like self-trust, but minus the awareness of vulnerability. Perhaps we should call the self-trust of young children proto- self-trust.3 In any case, it seems to me that we

Much of this section and section 3 are based on Chapter Two of Epistemic Authority, forthcoming, Oxford University Press. In that chapter I claim that there is a natural, prereflective self-trust. I think now that the trust of young children is missing the aspect of 5

develop full epistemic self-trust long before we have ever heard of philosophical arguments about skepticism. Self-trust is the starting point of philosophical investigation. The faculties we rely upon in forming beliefs operate on an environment, so trusting our faculties includes trusting that the environment is appropriate to the faculties. It is natural to believe that our faculties are appropriate to the environment, we feel trusting of them in that way, and we treat them as if they are appropriate. Our faculties may operate on the environment directly, or they may operate indirectly through the faculties of others. The trust we have in our faculties and environment includes trust in the faculties of many other persons.4 Again, awareness of the ways that other persons can harm us epistemically and acceptance of it arises gradually with experience, but trust in others, like trust in the self, is the starting point for philosophical inquiry.

3. Reflective epistemic self-trust I have proposed that epistemic self-trust and epistemic trust in others precedes philosophical investigation, but it is interesting to look at what happens to epistemic trust under the influence of philosophy. What I will do next is to argue that basic epistemic selftrust can be shown to be inescapable upon reflection. Furthermore, it is rational if we make

awareness of vulnerability and acceptance of it, so it is not full-fledged trust. But as I say above, I still think that full-fledged self-trust precedes philosophical investigation. For the classic expression of this point, see Thomas Reid, An Inquiry Into the Human Mind, Pt. VI, sec. 24, in Reid (1997: 1967). 6
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two assumptions I accept: (a) Rationality is doing a better job of what we do naturally, and (b) We do a better job of what we do naturally when we do self-reflectively what we do naturally. In section 4 I will argue that given the rationality of epistemic self-trust, epistemic trust in others is rationally inescapable. The simplest way to see the rational need for epistemic self-trust is to notice the phenomenon of epistemic circularity, or what Keith Lehrer (1997) has called the loop of reason. A number of philosophers have observed that there is no non-circular way to tell that the natural desire for truth is satisfiable, or as they typically put it, there is no noncircular way to tell that our belief-forming faculties are reliable as a whole. Richard Foley (2001) links the phenomenon of epistemic circularity to the lack of answers to the radical skeptic and the failure of the project of foundationalism. We can do everything epistemically that we are supposed to do, including following the evidence scrupulously, but we have no assurances that the results will give us the truth or even make it more probable that we will get the truth. Foley concludes that we need self-trust in our epistemic faculties taken as a whole, in conjunction with our pre-reflective opinions. Selftrust is necessary, and further, he argues, it is rational in that it is a state to which we are led by the process of rational self-criticism. One is rationally entitled to self-trust and one is entitled to the degree of confidence one has in ones opinions and faculties after critical reflection (25, 47). Foleys thesis that we are entitled to our confidence when it withstands self-criticism 7

seems to me to be right. But notice that for Foley, self-trust is a state to which we must move when we reflect upon the skeptical hypotheses and the failure of responses to them, particularly the failure of foundationalism. While Foley does not say that self-trust would be unnecessary if there was an adequate answer to the skeptic, his argument explicitly arises out of his view of the skeptical threat. He implies that trust is a state to which we retreat when we do not have adequate justification, or a guarantee of the reliability of our faculties and opinions taken as a whole. William Alston offers a more detailed argument for a related conclusion about circularity in his final book, Beyond Justification (2005), which modifies an argument in Alston (1986). Alston argues that we cannot justify any belief arising from a basic practice of belief-formation (perception, memory, introspection, rational intuition, induction, and others) without justifying the well-groundedness of the practice, but we cannot do that without using that same practice. For instance, I cannot justify any of my perceptual beliefs without a justification of the reliability of my perceptual faculties, but I cannot justify my belief in the reliability of my perceptual faculties without using perception.5 This is a stronger claim than the one made by Foley. Alston argues that circularity arises in the attempt to establish the reliability of individual basic sources of belief such as perception,

Alston (2005) says that circularity can be avoided by keeping the targets very narrow (e.g., the reliability of perceptual beliefs about pies (205)), but as long as the issue is the reliability of broad sources of belief, the attempt to establish the reliability of beliefs deriving from that source will inevitably take us back to the source from which we started (209-10). 8

memory, and deductive reasoning, whereas Foley claims only that circularity arises in the attempt to establish the reliability of our epistemic faculties and beliefs taken as a whole. I will not take a stand on this issue since it does not affect the points I want to make in this paper. Either way, epistemic circularity is a real phenomenon, and the reflective person must respond to it. A second difference between Alston and Foley is that Alston does not think that the problem of epistemic circularity is necessarily tied to the threat of skepticism. He says that the specter of skepticism is a dramatic way to put the issue, but it is not necessary for a calm, fully mature consideration of the problem (2005: 216).6 As Alston sees it, the problem is that the ultimate circularity of the justification of our beliefs prevents us from being fully reflectively justified in our beliefs. We need not be especially worried about evil geniuses and brains in vats to notice circularity, and we need not think that the alternative to full reflective justification is skepticism. I think Alston is right about that. The reflective person desires full reflective justification for her beliefs because that is what a self-reflective person wants. She feels dissonance within her psychic states if she is aware that she does not have it. Her realization that she cannot get full reflective justification need not have anything to do with fear of skepticism. Alston proposes that our response to epistemic circularity should be this: Proceed to

He says, however, that he will pursue the discussion in the following pages in terms of the more dramatically attractive skeptical challenge. His response to epistemic circularity two pages later is therefore framed as a reply to the Pyrrhonian skeptic. 9

form beliefs and rely on them (take them to be credible, take them to be at least probably true), using various modes of belief formation that we find ourselves in possession of and the reliability of which we find ourselves strongly inclined to trust. All this without already having shown them to be reliable. ..(2005: 218). Alston then says that the better part of wisdom is to get over the desire for the impossible, and full reflective justification is impossible. We need self-trust, and to try to avoid it is to try to get the impossible. Neither Alston nor Foley says much about the state of self-trust and what it involves, so I cannot tell whether they think of self-trust as a belief state, or whether they think it includes affective or behavioral components as I have suggested. But there is at least one respect in which I differ from them. Both of them think of epistemic self-trust as the outcome of a sophisticated line of argument. According to Alston, we are forced into selftrust by careful reflection on the human epistemic condition. If we could be fully reflectively justified in our beliefs, presumably we would not need to take our faculties to be reliable and our beliefs to be credible. We would not need self-trust because we would have something in principle better, but impossible to achieve. Similarly, Foley implies that if strong foundationalism had succeeded, or if we had some other adequate answer to skepticism, trust in the self would not be needed. So for both of them trust is a fall-back position, a state to which we retreat when we cannot get what we really wantproof or a strong form of justification, and for both of them we find we need it after philosophical reflection. It is an end state, not the state from which we start. 10

I differ from them on these points. I have already said that it seems to me that selftrust precedes philosophical reflection. Before we reflect about the ultimate justification of our beliefs or the skeptical hypotheses, we trust ourselves and our environment, including other people. Foley and Alston think of trust as a fall-back position because they think of it as something we have when we do not have something else that in principle would be better: proof. My position is that we do not start in a state that is neutral between trust and doubt. We start with trust. Pre-reflective trust is naive in that it does not include as full an awareness of our epistemic vulnerability as we get from philosophical reflection, but it does not take proof of our lack of proof of the trustworthiness of our faculties to realize our vulnerability as small minds in a big universe, with plenty of experiences of making mistakes in our perceptions, memories, and beliefs. The awareness of epistemic vulnerability and acceptance of it occurs long before we engage in high level reflection. The difference is that philosophical reflection shows us that we can never escape epistemic vulnerability. We need to either doubt our beliefs and lose trust in the faculties that produce those beliefs, or else trust in a fully reflective way. It also seems to me that if, per impossibile, we were able to get non-circular proof of the reliability of our faculties or the truth of our beliefs, we would still need self-trust and trust in others. Trust, as I see it, does not require the lack of proof. Rather, it is a state that does not depend upon proof. If Jim lacks proof of Marys fidelity, he may trust her, but once he gets proof of her fidelity, he does not cease to trust her. His attitude towards her remains 11

the same whether or not he has proof. Perhaps he feels less vulnerable once he gets the proof on some occasion, but the vulnerability never goes away, and trust is still needed. Similarly, even if we got proof that our epistemic faculties are working perfectly on some occasion, we are still vulnerable as long as the match between our faculties and the world can ever change. Is it rational to have self-trust after philosophical reflection? That depends, of course, on what we mean by rationality, and whether it applies to all three components of trust, including the behavioral and feeling components. As I have said, I think of rationality as doing a better job of what we do naturally in the use of any our faculties. The moral of the phenomenon of epistemic circularity is that our ultimate tool of rationality is reflection upon our total set of psychic states. There is nothing more we can do than to reflect as carefully as we can in an attempt to make our states properly fit the world. I call the quality of doing that epistemic conscientiousness. Trust is necessary because the conscientious internal use of our faculties is ultimately our only means of telling that those faculties put us in proper contact with external reality. Our epistemic faculties fit the world when they produce true beliefs. Our emotions fit the world when they are appropriately connected to their objects: we admire the admirable, fear the fearsome, pity the pitiable, etc. Our acts fit the world when we act rightly. As long as emotions can be appropriate or inappropriate, and acts can be right or wrong, I see no reason to exclude our emotion dispositions and overt behavior from the domain of the rational. The conscientious use of our faculties and the conscientious 12

resolution of conflict between them is our ultimate test of whether our faculties are properly in tune. Reflective self-trust resolves the dissonance we experience when we discover epistemic circularity, and that seems to me to be rational. It is rational to believe that my faculties are trustworthy for the purpose of getting the truth; it is rational to treat my faculties as if they will get me to the truth, and it is rational to feel trusting of them in that respect. Of course, if someone thinks it is not rational to have a belief without non-circular justification, then self-trust is not rational, but then none of our beliefs is rational. However, I see no reason to think that that is what rationality is. Would it be rational for a person to respond to the problem of epistemic circularity by not trusting her faculties? Since trust has more than one component, there is more than one way she might lack self-trust. It is hard not to treat our faculties as trustworthy even after grasping circularity, but I know people who claim that they do not believe that their faculties are trustworthy even though they act as if they do. However, it seems to me that to treat something as deserving of trust without believing it is deserving of trust creates dissonance in the self that becomes noticeable once we reflect upon it. When I become aware that I treat myself as epistemically trustworthy, I feel pressure within myself to either believe that I am trustworthy or to stop treating myself as trustworthy. It is possible to accept the dissonance or not to notice it, so I do not insist that it is impossible to live a normal life

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without believing that our epistemic faculties are trustworthy.7 But the self-reflective person at some point will become aware of the dissonance if she does not believe her faculties are trustworthy, and will then have to decide whether to accept the natural belief that her natural desire for truth is satisfiable or else live with dissonance. The same point applies to the dissonance produced by lacking the feeling component of trust. Someone might judge that her faculties are trustworthy in getting her to the truth and treat them that way, but she might continue to be plagued by doubts. She might feel this way because she obsesses over the skeptical hypotheses, but the more interesting case is one in which she is a person who just reflects excessively and never feels that the issue is settled even when she judges that it is. Karen Jones (forthcoming) gives an amusing example of a woman who believes she has her passport in her purse, in fact knows that it is there, but checks obsessively in the taxi to the airport to make sure that she has it. The problem is not that she thinks an evil genius might have stolen it; there is no particular hypothesis that generates her doubts. She simply feels untrusting, even when she not only believes that the passport is in her purse, but believes she has done everything a reasonable person can do to believe truly. It seems to me that a person can obsess over the trustworthiness of her faculties

Alvin Plantinga says proper functioning demands that we trust the reliability of our faculties so as to prevent cognitive disaster, and he quotes Humes remark that if we find reason to doubt the reliability of our faculties and sink into philosophical melancholy, nature will, fortunately, cure me of this delirium, either by relaxing this bent of mind, or by some avocation ...which obliterates all these chimeras. I dine, I play a game of backgammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends (Plantinga 2002: 210). 14

in the same way. Even when she believes they are trustworthy and acts as if they are by living a normal life, she may not feel trusting of them. The feeling of doubt may continue to plague her, and she cannot dispel it because she lacks the feeling aspect of trust. Is she rational? I realize that many people think that rationality is not at issue when we are talking about feelings, but in the broad sense of rationality I am using, she is not rational because of the dissonance between her feelings and her beliefs. She is not doing a better job of what we do naturally. The same point applies to the woman with the flying phobia I mentioned earlier. It is rational to resolve dissonance between components of the self. Doing so is our only way to tell that our faculties are properly connecting us to reality. The woman who never feels trusting of her faculties and the woman with the flying phobia have not done so. Hopefully, in both cases the lack of rationality is short-lived. But notice that if we agree that they are not rational, that shows that it is rational to feel trust in those cases. There is, finally, the most radical response to epistemic circularity-- the radical skeptic who, upon reflection, neither believes her faculties are trustworthy, feels trusting of them, nor treats them as trustworthy. Perhaps the ancient Pyrrhonians were like that. Maybe they lacked all of the components of trust I have identified. If there are such people, they would not face dissonance between and among their beliefs, feelings, and behavior. To restore harmony in the self, they would also have to give up the natural desire for truth, and maybe they were able to do that as well. I have my doubts that there are such persons, but let us suppose that there are. Are they rational? The radical skeptic I am imagining does not 15

have the irrationality of dissonance, but she attains that by foregoing much of what we do naturally. I have suggested that rationality is, roughly, doing a better job of what we naturally do. The extreme skeptic I have described is not going a better job of what we do naturally because she is not doing what we do naturally. However, I am not interested in critiquing skepticism in this paper. Epistemic self-trust is rational in the sense I have described, and it is more rational than alternatives in that it requires making the fewest adjustments in the pre-reflective self. Self-reflection is what a self-conscious being does, and a rational being does it carefully. However, it is possible to go on reflecting forever about whether Y is trustworthy in respect Z. Trust ends the process of reflection, and it is rational because excessive reflection is not rational. Trust prevents excessive reflection, and in my view, it is an essential component of a rationally self-reflective being.

4. Epistemic trust in others As self-reflective persons, we reasonably and inescapably trust the beliefs we form when we are conscientious-- using our faculties in the best way we can to reach their ends. One of the beliefs we will inevitably acquire when we are conscientious is the belief that other normal, mature humans have the same natural desire for truth and the same general powers and capacities that we have. If I have a general trust in my faculties and I accept the principle that I should treat like cases alike, I am rationally committed to having a general trust in the faculties of others. Of course, in some cases I may have reason to think that some 16

individual has defective or undeveloped epistemic powers, and if so, my belief in the general trustworthiness of that person would be defeated. In such cases I have good (ultimately circular) reasons to think that I am more generally trustworthy than some other person, but if I am honest, I must admit that those reasons apply to a very limited range of cases. In so far as I have a general trust in the connection between my natural faculties and desire for truth, on the one hand, and success in reaching truth, on the other, then I should trust the same connection in other persons. When I see no relevant difference between others and myself, then given that I trust myself, I should trust them. My reason for believing that other persons have the same natural faculties that I have is not a priori since I do not know a priori that there are other human beings who belong to the same natural kind as myself and who have the same general sensory faculties, memory, powers of reasoning, and desires. But the principle that I should treat like cases alike is a priori.8 I have said that epistemic trust in myself has three components: (a) I believe my faculties are generally trustworthy for the purpose of getting the truth, and realize that I am vulnerable to falsehoods, (b) I have a feeling of trust towards my faculties for the end of getting truth, and ( c) I treat my faculties as trustworthy in that way. I am arguing now that under the assumption that I see no relevant difference between my general epistemic

Cf. Tyler Burges (1993) argument that we have a priori entitlement to believe what others tell us. 17

faculties and those of others, I ought to have the same attitude towards their faculties as I have towards my own. I should believe their faculties are generally trustworthy, feel trusting of their faculties, and treat them as trustworthy. The conscientious use of my faculties not only leads me to have general epistemic self-trust, it is also my ultimate means of distinguishing particular occasions when I am trustworthy from those occasions when I am not. When I am epistemically conscientious, I trust myself in particular when I am believing in a conscientious way. But when I am conscientiously reflective and because I am conscientious, I will discover that there are other persons who are as conscientious as I am when I am as conscientious as I can be. If I am consistent, I owe them the same particular trust in their faculties when they are conscientious as I owe myself when I am conscientious. That means that the fact that someone else conscientiously believes p gives me a prima facie reason to believe p. But unless the fact that someone believes p is already a prima facie reason to believe p, there is no reason to think that the fact that a person believes p conscientiously is a reason to believe p. That is because a person would not be trustworthy when she is using her faculties as well as she can unless those faculties were generally trustworthy. It does not matter for this argument whether the person is myself or someone else. In so far as self-trust is trust in common human faculties and trust in their connection to a common human environment, trust in myself extends to trust in others.

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I want to stress that the argument of this section is not about trust in testimony.9 It is about the reasonable response to conscientiously believing that other persons are relevantly like myself, that they have whatever property I have that I trust in myself, and that the outputs of their faculties are relevantly like the outputs of my faculties. It does not matter whether they tell me anything. I am only talking about how I should think of their faculties and epistemic capacities in comparison to my own. I owe their faculties the same general trust I have in my own faculties, and I owe their conscientiously used faculties the same particular trust I have in my own faculties when I use them conscientiously. Epistemic trust in others is a demand of consistency for those who respond to the problem of epistemic circularity in the most reasonable way by trusting themselves.10

5. Trust and the intellectual virtues Is epistemic trust a virtue? If a virtue is an acquired trait, pre-reflective trust is not a virtue; it is part of our natural human equipment. Even reflective trust is natural in the sense that the alternatives to self-trust or trust in others require us to change something that comes naturally. We would have to give up the natural belief that human faculties can get us truth, or the natural feeling of trust in these faculties, or reliance upon our own faculties and those

I discuss the relationship between trust in others and reasonable belief on testimony in Epistemic Authority, Chap. 6. An expanded discussion of the way that epistemic self-trust commits us to trust in others and to a form of common consent arguments appears in Epistemic Authority, Chap 3. 19
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of others to serve our natural ends. But one function of reflection is to reveal our options to us. When doubt is an option, trust is an option. When suspicion of our faculties is an option, trust in them is an option. After reflection, we do have a measure of control over the option we take, even though nature is on the side of trust, and the degree of trust we have is up to us. In our practical lives we think that a person can be too trusting or too suspicious, and being properly trusting is virtuous. Similarly, if we can be too epistemically trusting or too epistemically suspicious, proper epistemic trust is a virtue. I think that many of the intellectual virtues either restrain or enhance epistemic trust. They prevent trust from becoming either excessive or deficient, and some virtues direct trust in a certain direction. Virtues like open-mindedness and intellectual humility restrain selftrust, but they presuppose self-trust in order to restrain it. Neither trait would be a virtue were it not for the fact that we assume it is reasonable to trust our faculties. However, we think that we need caution to limit our enthusiasm over the self. Humility restrains our level of confidence in the match between our faculties and their objects. Open-mindedness restrains self-trust mostly by enhancing trust in others. There is an implicit assumption that our natural tendency is to trust others less than we ought, and ourselves more than we ought. Open-mindedness requires us to think about a problem or issue from the perspective of other persons, but that would not be virtuous if a basic trust in others were not prima facie justified. That is, we think in advance of the evidence that the perspectives and opinions of others are reasonable and ought to be taken seriously in our reflections. Open-mindedness is 20

a disposition to be open to the views of others out of a certain belief in their general trustworthiness and feeling of trust in them. If that is right, open-mindedness is a refinement or enhancement of the attitude of trust in others, as well as a restraint on the attitude of trust in the self. The way I have described intellectual humility and open-mindedness, they are attitudes that presuppose the attitude of self-trust or trust in others. But is an attitude sufficient for virtue? Would a virtue that includes trust in others be virtuous if others were not trustworthy? This raises the issue whether a person must reliably succeed at reaching the end of a virtue in order to be virtuous. If the end of the virtue of humility is to restrain selftrust because the self is not as trustworthy as we are naturally inclined to suppose, then humility is a virtue only if we are not as trustworthy as we are naturally inclined to suppose. But humility also would not be a virtue unless we are generally trustworthy since it is not a virtue to restrain a natural tendency unless the natural tendency is generally on the right track. Similarly, if reliable success is a component of virtue, then open-mindedness would not be a virtue unless the open-minded persons belief that other persons are generally trustworthy is true. There would be nothing virtuous about being open to the views of others if others were not generally trustworthy. Some of the intellectual virtues follow immediately from being reflectively selftrusting. Attentiveness, intellectual carefulness, and intellectual thoroughness are no doubt in this category. There would be no point in being careful, attentive, and thorough in 21

evaluating evidence if it was not reasonable to trust the faculties we are using when being careful and attentive and thorough. But again, if a trait is not a virtue unless it reliably succeeds in reaching its end, these traits would not be virtues unless our faculties are generally trustworthy in this way. There are also virtues that enhance self-trust, such as intellectual courage, perseverance, and firmness.11 Perseverance is the disposition to persist in a line of inquiry when one reasonably trusts that doing so will pay off with eventual success at reaching ones intellectual end- discovery of truth or deeper understanding of truths already believed. Courage adds the feature that some harm to ones well-being might ensue, and one must overcome fear or aversion to such harm. I interpret these virtues as not only presupposing self-trust, but enhancing it when faced with obstacles. It is interesting that if virtue requires reliable success in reaching the end of the virtue, it must be the case that an intellectually courageous person is not only epistemically trustworthy, but that she is capable of recognizing her trustworthiness and justifiably believing that she is trustworthy enough in a particular case to make it worth undergoing sacrifice in the exercise of her epistemic faculties. I think also that there are intellectual virtues that have as their ends aiding a community in increasing its stock of knowledge or spreading knowledge throughout the

Robert C. Roberts and Jay Wood discuss the intellectual virtue of firmness in Roberts and Wood (2007). 22

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community. I have claimed elsewhere that what we as a community know may not be identical with what any one person in the community knows.12 It is because the community is the bearer of knowledge that the bearer of knowledge can remain the same over many centuries, longer than the lifetime of any one person. Participants in the community need certain intellectual virtues to aid the community in getting knowledge, virtues that are not limited to the virtues of an individual in her search for knowledge. For instance, intellectual fairness is hard to explain if the end is knowledge or true belief for oneself. Fairness involves what I owe others in so far as we live in a community. Since there are epistemic communities, there are things we owe each other epistemically that are important features of the community if it functions well. What we believe is not the result of the intellectual inquiry of one person, but of groups of persons acting on behalf of the community. Intellectual fairness is a virtue that aids the intellectual cooperation necessary for community inquiry and community belief-formation. Fairness is necessary because what we believe is not solely my personal business. Intellectual fairness requires other virtues, such as attention to the views of others. I think of this trait as going beyond open-mindedness. The latter is a virtue in aid of my personal epistemic ends, whereas attention to the views of others aids knowledge as a community achievement. The project of getting community knowledge requires much more

I make this claim in Epistemic Authority, chapter 7, where I address the issue of epistemic authority in communities. 23

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extensive community participation than the project of getting knowledge for oneself. I believe that much of the edifice of knowledge for both individuals and communities rests on epistemic self-trust and trust in others. In other work I have argued that what we call reasons or evidence is derivative from self-trust, including the trust in others that is a commitment of self-trust.13 Norms of reasoning are rules that conscientious persons affirm upon reflection. Intellectual virtues are traits that conscientious persons endorse. Here I have argued that many intellectual virtues presuppose epistemic self-trust or trust in others, and they operate to restrain or enhance epistemic trust in various ways. I have not mentioned virtues that do not presuppose trust. Perhaps intellectual originality or creativity does not. But even those virtues require self-trust if their exercise leads to a project that lasts for a reasonable amount of time. That is because the original and creative person will not be motivated to exercise her originality or creativity without trust in her own powers. An instantaneous expression of creativity does not require self-trust, but a research program or book project certain does. Epistemic trust is a fascinating and important human disposition. I have defined it as an attitude a combination of belief and feeling, together with the behavior that typically expresses that attitude, although I have said that the behavioral component of trust may not be a distinct feature of it. I have argued that epistemic self-trust is reasonable because it is natural and is found upon reflection to be inescapable. Trust in others is reasonable because

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Epistemic Authority, Chapters 2 and 3. 24

it is a commitment of consistent self-trust. Most of the traits we call intellectual virtues would not be virtues were it not for the reasonableness of epistemic trust, and many of them are ways of modifying self-trust or trust in others either restraining or expanding it. If a virtue is not simply a dispositional attitude, but requires behavior that reliably leads to a certain end, then the traits we call intellectual virtues not only presuppose epistemic trust, but they also presuppose epistemic trustworthiness. Our epistemic lives rest upon both the attitude of epistemic trust and the trustworthiness of our epistemic faculties.14

Bibliography

Alston, William P. 1986. Epistemic Circularity. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 47, pp. 1-30. _______________. 2005. Beyond Justification: Dimensions of Epistemic Evaluation. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Baier, Annette. 1995. Trust and Anti-Trust," in Moral Prejudices: Essays on Ethics. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, pp. 95-129. Burge, Tyler. 1993. Content Preservation. Philosophical Review 102:4, pp. 457-88. Foley, Richard. 2001. Intellectual Trust in Oneself and Others. New York: Cambridge

Many of the arguments of this paper appear in a form intended for students in my short book, On Epistemology, Chap 4. 25

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University Press. Jones, Karen. 1996. Trust as an Affective Attitude. Ethics 107, pp. 4-25. _______. Forthcoming. The Politics of Intellectual Self-Trust, Episteme: A Journal of Social Epistemology . Plantinga, Alvin. 2002. Reply To Beilbys Cohorts. In Naturalism Defeated?: Essays on Plantingas Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism, edited by J. K. Beilby. Ithica, NY: Cornell University Press, pp. 205-276. Reid, Thomas. [1764] 1997. An Inquiry Into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense, edited by D. R. Brookes. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Roberts, R. C. and W. J. Wood. 2007. Intellectual Virtues: An Essay in Regulative Epistemology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Zagzebski, Linda. 2009. On Epistemology. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth/Broadview Press. ___________. Forthcoming. Epistemic Authority: A Theory of Trust, Authority, and Autonomy in Belief, Oxford University Press.

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