JUSTIFICATION IN THE EPISTEMOLOGICAL CONCEPTION OF TRUST

Benedict Michael, PhD & Edoh Sunday Odum

Abstract The concept of trust is not new in philosophy; it has been used in different times and epoch, first as transactional virtue in The Republic of Plato and multilateral virtue in Aristotle's Habituation Ethics as essential commodity in the formulation of friendship as brotherhood. In John Dewey's Democracy and Education, trust is the value that individuals posses for social cooperation and mutual dialogue for the growth and development of any society, while Francis Fukuyama consider trust as aspect of social capital necessary for both economic and political growth and development. In essence the extant theorist, have examined trust from the dimensions of political, economic, culture, moral and social dimensions. In this study, we shall examine the epistemological notion of trust. Traditionally, epistemology is based on genuine knowledge beliefs (Justified Truth Belief) acquired by trusting others either by rational belief as argued by the rationalist or sense impressions as held by the empiricist. Only a small aspect of our knowledge is generated from our personal experience. Relaying on what others say is one of the fundamental ways to acquire knowledge, not only about the external world, but also about who we are, for instance about when and where we were born. Epistemic trust is the examination of first the authority, source and the pragmaticality of our knowledge claims, content of our communication in the process of justifying our knowledge.

Key words: Philosophy, Epistemology, Trust, Justification, Traditional Epistemology,

INTRODUCTION Epistemology is one of the major branches in philosophy. The term epistemology is derived from two Greek words, “episteme” which means “knowledge” and “logos” which means logic or rationale. However, in contemporary usage it has come to mean theory of knowledge (Everit and Fisher 1995). What then is knowledge? There are three ways of looking at the question of what knowledge is. First, we have capacity knowledge which is referred to as knowledge know how. This type of knowledge refers to the ability of the individual knowing how to do something. For instance, knowing how to put on the television, radio, how to drive a car. The second type of knowledge is knowledge by acquaintance. This type of knowledge deals with the kind of knowledge of what exist in space and time, for example you can know a country, a building, a river or a painting. The third type of knowledge is propositional knowledge. In propositional knowledge, knowledge is defined as Justified Truth Belief. That is, for any piece of information to be called knowledge, it must satisfy these three conditions which are individually necessary and jointly sufficient for any knowledge claims. For example to make statement that A knows P, it means that for the

40 Nnamdi Azikiwe Journal of Philosophy, Vol.12(1), 2020 truth of A knows that P. they are: 1. P is true 2. A believes that P 3. If A can justify that it is P. The first condition, is called the truth condition, it states that you cannot know that something is true, if in fact, it is false. To know that p means that P must be true for example I know that Lokoja is the capital of Kogi State, it will be false to say that Lokoja is not the capital. The second condition, the condition that A believes that P. The fact that A believes P requires explanation. It is possible for A to know that Makurdi is the capital of Benue state. But the knowledge A has comes from uncertain source. The concept believe only signifies that the source of knowledge could be faulty, which means that our knowledge could be inclusive. However, epistemically, believe stands for the fact that the strength of conviction still remains undetermined by the second condition. The third condition A justifies that P. the third and final condition is stipulating , that is, the requirement of knowledge is that it must justified here our believe about our statement of fact that Makurdi is the capital of Benue State is justified because it left the level of believe to justification of the fact the statement is true. In the 21st century, most discourses in epistemology; genuine knowledge is based on beliefs acquired by trusting others. Knowledge or rational belief, as opposed to opinion, is ultimately based on individuals held clear and distinct ideas as Rene Descartes puts it in his First Meditations and sense impressions as John Locke argued in his Treatise of Human Knowledge together with sound relations among these ideas. In the contemporary debate individualistic stance or arguments in the contemporary debate, claims that individually held reasons and individual cognitive states are the ground of justification of our beliefs. At the same time a number of social phenomena such as the role of expertise in public decisions within societies, collaborative work in the sciences and other aspects in the academe, most especially in the information sciences due to new media and technologies have made a part of contemporary epistemology to incorporate social notions such as trust, deference and authority. This coincides with the period in which our epistemic dependence on other people's knowledge is a key ingredient of our cognitive life, the role of trust in this dependence is much more open to debate. What is the relationship between other types of trust and epistemic trust? How do we arrive at epistemic trust? These shall be the focus of the paper. The paper apart from its introduction is divided into three parts, the first attempts at conceptualizing trust, the next section evaluate the various notion of trust and its relationship with epistemic truth. While the third part looks at the epistemological arguments of the notion of trust. The last aspect of the paper is the conclusion.

Conceptual Elucidation of Trust Trust is a multifaceted concept that is very ambiguous to define. This is because various people define it to suit their ideological coloration. For Peri Blind, trust is a complex interpersonal and organizational construct. According to him, trust occurs when parties holding certain favourable perceptions of each other allow the relationship to reach the expected outcomes (17). Mark Karsperson, on the other hand, views trust as a subjective

41 Michael & Odum Justification in the Episteological Conception of Trust evaluation of a relationship (791). This relational approach to trust is much more common in social research. He further contends that trust is a rational evaluation of social situations along four dimensions. A person who trusts (the subject) implies that he or she thinks that the object of trust meets certain requirements: the object would be competent, intrinsically committed (caring), extrinsically committed (accountable because of encapsulated interest) and predictable. Competence suggests that the subject of trust thinks the object of trust has the ability to perform according to expectations or in the subject's interest. Commitment implies that the subject thinks the object will act in the best interests of the subject for either of two reasons. First, the object would have an intrinsic need to act in line with the subject's interest, because they care for each other or share the same goals. Kasperson labels this aspect as care. Second, the subject's ability to enforce the object's actions, if only through threat so as to punish untrustworthy behaviour by denying future support. The third dimension of the social nature of trust is accountability. That is, trust can be held accountable in the sense that the subject binds the object to his or her interests: the interests of the subject become encapsulated self- interests of the object (801). Fourth is reliability or predictability. This has to do with the extent to which the object's past behaviour is consistent. Trust plays a pivotal role in the unity or cohesion of any society; this is considered to be the main function of trust in this constellation of definitions. According to Simmel, trust is one of the most important synthetic forces within society (91). To some other scholars, such as Gambatta, Saligman and Misztal, trust is an economic perspective of human relations and interactions (5). According to these scholars, trust is the main component of social capital, and social capital is the necessary condition of social integration, social economic efficiency and democratic stability. Russell Hardin, in the same light, believes that trust is an “encapsulated interest” (27). This definition of trust stipulates that “we trust you because we think you can take our interest to heart and encapsulate into your own” (7). Trust makes it possible to maintain peaceful and stable social relations that are the basis for collective behaviour and productive cooperation. On the other hand, Luhmann contends that although trust involves risk, it transcends economic encapsulated risk to political risks. This is because trust, he contends, is the transformation of the Hobbesian state of nature from being nasty, brutish, and short, to being a more pleasant, more efficient, and altogether peaceful society. Social life without trust would be intolerable and, most likely, quite impossible, he concludes (18). Sociologically trust is the basis for cooperation at all levels of human interactions. Arising from the above is the indication that there are various types of trust, they include: i. Moral trust ii. Political trust iii. Economic trust iv. Cultural trust v. Epistemic trust However in this paper we shall divide the various types of trust into epistemic and non epistemic trust, while epistemic trust stands on its own, moral, cultural, political and economic trusts constitute the non epistemic trust.

Non Epistemic Notion of Trust Epistemic authority and trust are not just philosophical topics; they are important aspects of human social life. As such, they are studied as social-historical phenomena (1). For instance, in his book entitled A Social History of Truth, Steven Shapin reconstructs the role of culture in determining credibility in the scientific practices in modern sciences,

42 Nnamdi Azikiwe Journal of Philosophy, Vol.12(1), 2020 and its new experimental standards for scientific discourse. Trust and civility are inseparable concepts: they define a cultural system, that is, a set of presuppositions that guides “conversation” not just in its ordinary sense but also in the art of conducting oneself in social interactions. In this cultural system, an honourable gentleman is one who deserves to be trusted. Social practices of recognition, cultural heuristics and epistemic maxims are intertwined in the cultural constitution of any body of knowledge, science inclusive. Shapin's history of trust has the merit of embedding deference to epistemic authority in historical and practical contexts, in contrast to other abstract and formalized approaches. His approach converges in this respect with sociological approach. In people's ordinary everyday opinion to the epistemic authority about others in different professional discipline, even personal interactions, epistemological, moral and cultural reasons are completely intertwined about considerations to trust or not to trust. Harold Garfinkel argues that there is a difficulty in disentangling moral and cognitive trust because both carry the same face (12). The sociological and historical perspectives of trust show that trust is historically situated; it is a social construction that cannot be normatively evaluated outside of their social-historical context. It makes the rationality and logical connectedness of trust within social context and historical dimension to be fruitful as far as socio-scientific approach in research is concerned.

Trust in Philosophy The concept of trust plays a key role in virtually all the branches of philosophy. For instance, it plays a key role in interpersonal relationships in social and political order and cooperation in general. In political philosophy, trust is seen as a voluntary transfer of power from the governed to those who govern, a transfer that is justified through democratic means, and not coercion or of rational argument (Friedmann 86). In social theory, trust is seen as a form of rational choice to pursue on-going cooperation (Philip 8). In moral philosophy, trust is a social virtue that cannot be reduced to strategic thinking (Baier 96). To what extent are these various approaches to trust in general relevant to the study of trust in epistemology? Shall be the focus in our consideration of epistemic trust, the study also briefly examine three areas in which trust play key contributions to epistemic trust, they are political philosophy, social theory, and moral philosophy. Philosophy is the methodological work of thoughts. Political philosophy is the philosophical reflections of how best to arrange our collective life, such as our political institutions and social practices. It is also the study of individuals and the society; it is the source of insight for social epistemology. In political philosophy, trust is seen as a key component of the authority relation, in which a person desists from demanding justification of the thing he or she is being asked to do or to believe as a condition of her believing (Friedmann 77). Trust in political philosophy refers to a normative consensus on the limits of action present in a political community. March and Olsen conceived of it as the most important variable not based on justification but human actions (81). Trust in political philosophy is seen as a social cement necessary for existence of any polity. The presence of trust in any polity shows the extent to which the individuals or diverse groups cooperate with each other. On the individual level, trust come into play when a lay person blindly defers to a recognised authority, be it an expert, a “wise man”, or a religious

43 Michael & Odum Justification in the Episteological Conception of Trust leader. They involve the acceptance of beliefs that are only partially understood. For instance, I believe my doctor when he tells me that my level of cholesterol is too high, and I follow his prescription, even if my understanding of what cholesterol is poor, and my comprehension of its physiological role is metaphorical (Speber 149). Epistemologists pay attention to this type of believes justification because it deals with testimonial knowledge based on relevant sense perception. Text on testimonial epistemology holds that beliefs which are distinct and clear but lack direct evidence has contributed to giving picture of our dependence on socially distributed knowledge. It is the paradigmatic social transfer of knowledge among scholars from one epoch to the other found in the community of an academic discipline. However, in many social situations-including situations playing a major role in cultural transmission information exchanged is less straightforward and raises problems not just of believability but also of comprehension. The interplay between believability and comprehension and the role of cooperation not just in epistemic but also in interpretive guidance are important aspects of epistemic trust. This takes us to John Dewey's connection between morality, trust and politics in a society. John Dewey's notion of trust is derived from his reflective moral values, democracy and the public community. His idea of trust is such that it brings about peaceful, personal and social relationship that can bring about absolute lasting security and sustainable development. As a reflective system of values it can provide much desired social transformation and order through which the fundamental human goods can be achieved and sustained. The ability of the sustenance of such goods is in the fact that the policies are evaluative and could be reexamined through well informed experiences. Dewey conceives of the value of trust as the value that encompasses other values such as mutual dialogue, social cooperation, and tolerance. He traces the origin of trust in his reflective value of democracy and believes that, the value of trust is crucial for the establishment of social order in which people can act responsibly and intelligently. And that the cultivation of trust in the society is necessary because it ensure the strong ties and the adherence to commonly accepted values. He believed that the value of trust is central in maintaining the dignity and responsibility of the human person in the democratic order. Trust ensures that mutual dialogue fruitful, through dialogue the individuals or their representatives and the various sector of the jointly negotiate the basis of their conception of certain values and common good and device the rules for mutual cooperation and commitment. The argument here is that, Dewey conceive of trust as the basis upon which democracy thrives in any democratic society, accordingly, dialogue provides the a platform for consideration of relevant experiences and formation of better values and legitimate policies to ensure a just and fair opportunity for human interactions. Through the value of trust, dialogue and the sharing of experiences facilitates the conduct of interpersonal relations in an atmosphere of fair recognition of the worth, and contribution of each person to the communities pool for social good. Mutual dialogue and trust, he further argued, are essential for social harmony and peaceful existence since men live in community in virtue of things which they have in common. For there to be trust and agreement between people in the community, there should be room for dialogue. This is precisely because dialogue militates against the feelings of isolation, frustration, mistrust, injustice and oppression that arise in a political society which affects

44 Nnamdi Azikiwe Journal of Philosophy, Vol.12(1), 2020 individuals. Dialogue implies an acceptance of pluralism and the need for tolerance and respect for the views of others. It recognizes the possibility of various approaches to the resolution of differences, this in turn create room for tolerance. By implication, the acceptance of pluralism implies recognition of a rational cogency of various openness and complementary reflection on problematic situation so as to provide better salutary method. Dewey conceives of pluralism not as relativism of opinion, rather as the inevitability of dissensus in the complex and imperfect world and how it can be worked to realize process and procedures that make dissensus and dissonance tolerable and productive. The value of trust enhances mutual dialogue and create avenue for the acceptance pluralism and hence tolerance. He conceives of Tolerance as a social value built around moral value trust that allows for diverse cognitive views in society. It promotes a rational and consistent consideration of alternative views. By implication, the value of trust conceives of tolerance as the value that rejects both indifferentist relativism and dogmatic absolutism or dogmatic uniformitarianism. Dewey believes that tolerance is a sympathetic consideration and acceptance of others views for cohesive and social coexistence. It is the value that is responsible for constructive communal existence in a well ordered society. It is a social value in a pluralistic society that affirms the coexistence of different social interest and the coordination of conflicting interest for the social good. His conception of trust contributes in the formation of epistemic trust since ideas of political philosophy are based on the foundation of knowledge. Social theory approaches to mutual cooperation and social dialogue can also serve as another source of social epistemology. Communication is a form of cooperation, in the case of cooperation in general, it raises the question of what causes communicator to cooperate when their interests is served. In many cooperation games having the structure of an iterated prisoner's dilemma, it has been shown (Origgi 191- 202), that a tit for tat strategy of one party makes defection less advantageous than cooperation for the other party. In an article entitled Epistemological Tit of Tat, Michel Blais argued that such a game theoretic approach is based on trust within a scientific community (Axelrod 13). Scientists have an interest in reporting genuine observations and results, because the costs of uncooperative behaviour is high, and typically consists in the public and permanent exclusion of the cheater from the community. Taking another dimension in social theory and group cooperation, Francis Fukuyama in his Trust the Social Virtue and the Creation of Prosperity was the first member of the pragmatic school to react to John Dewey's notion of trust to construct his socio -economic theory 'social capital'. Coming after his The End of History and The Last Man Fukuyama contends that, “in all successful economic societies the communities are united by trust” (106). He argued that trust is the factor that motivates individuals and groups towards a spontaneous socio-economic endeavour (107). Accordingly, trust is the expectation that arises within a community of regular, honest, and cooperative behaviour, based on commonly shared norms, on the part of other members of that community. He believes that: Trust norms can be about deep "value" questions like the nature of God or justice, but they also encompass secular norms like professional standards and codes of behavior. That is, we trust a

45 Michael & Odum Justification in the Episteological Conception of Trust

doctor not to do us deliberate injury because we expect him or her to live by the Hippocratic oath and the standards of the medical profession (26).

Fukuyama believes that social capital is a capability that arises from the prevalence of trust in a society or in certain parts of it. It can be embodied in the smallest and most basic social group, the family, as well as the largest of all groups, the nation, and in all the other groups in between. Social capital differs from other forms of human capital insofar as it is usually created and transmitted through cultural mechanisms like religion, tradition, or historical habit. Economists typically argue that the formation of social groups can be explained as the result of voluntary contract between individuals who have made the rational calculation that cooperation is in their long-term self-interest. By this account, trust is not necessary for cooperation; enlightened self-interest, together with legal mechanisms like contracts, can compensate for an absence of trust and allow strangers jointly to create an organization that will work for a common purpose. Groups can be formed at any time based on self-interest, and group formation is not culture dependent. Accordingly, contract and self-interest are important sources of association; the most effective organizations are based on communities of shared ethical values. These communities do not require extensive contract and legal regulation of their relations because prior moral consensus gives members of the group a basis for mutual trust (27). It was his contention that, “the social capital needed to create this kind of moral community cannot be acquired, as in the case of other forms of human capital, through a rational investment decision” (52). That is, an individual can decide to invest in conventional human capital like a college education, or training to become a machinist or computer programmer, simply by going to the appropriate school. Acquisition of social capital, by contrast, requires habituation to the moral norms of a community and, in its context, the acquisition of virtues like loyalty, honesty, and dependability. The group, moreover, has to adopt common norms as a whole before trust can become generalized among its members. In other words, social capital cannot be acquired simply by individuals acting on their own. It is based on the prevalence of social, rather than individual virtues. The proclivity for sociability is much harder to acquire than other forms of human capital, but because it is based on ethical habit, it is also harder to modify or destroy. Fukuyama's theory corroborates the results of the various studies carried out by Robert Putnam who presents persuasive reasons why a high level of trust has a correlation with the creation of prosperity and democracy. Putnam claims in his work entitled “Making Democracy Work”, that social capital social capital is key to making democracy work (185). Putnam defines social capital as “features of social organization, such as trust, norms, and networks that can improve the efficiency of society by facilitating coordinated actions” (167). Unlike John Dewey and Francis Fukuyama before him, he contends that “cooperation is the ultimate end of social capital” (5). He believes that the involvement in community organizations produce social capital and is also an indicator of the level of social capital in the community. Through face-to-face interaction, people learn to trust each other. They also develop “the habit of cooperation” in these organizations. He

46 Nnamdi Azikiwe Journal of Philosophy, Vol.12(1), 2020 considers a core component of social capital, and that he sees social capital and trust as essentially synonymous (16). This view has been criticised for placing excessive confidence in the reliability of the constraints (Hardwig, 693-708). Another criticism is the question of adequateness of the iterated game of Prisoner's Dilemma to the case of science. Something like a tit for tat strategy may be at work in the decision of scientific teams working on the same issues to share or not to share results before publication. In the more epistemically significant cases of the publication of observations and results that the response to the production of fake evidence is not symmetrical. It is not to produce false results in return until defectors fall back in line, it is to ostracize them. This response is not only qualitatively but also quantitatively asymmetrical, and costly not just to the defector, but also to the community at large. Why deprive the community forever from the input of competent scientists that have, typically, been carried away by their theoretical convictions, rather than punish them in proportion to the damage done and then reintegrate them? Would not this be costly enough to the perpetrators to deter scientists tempted to fake their data? Ostracism of evidence-fakers seems guided, by a sense of moral disgust among scientists who are eager to preserve their collective self-esteem and not just the epistemic value of their output. Social theory and general cooperation contribute to epistemic trust through resolve to release honest and genuine information and communication about research output, results and findings. Since trust is allocated in a manner that is context sensitive, morally and psychologically rich theoretical modelling. Moral philosophy is a third source of insight on epistemic trust. It appeals to the intuition that “trust is not the fact that one, after calculating the odds, feels no risk. It is feeling no risk without calculating the odds” (Hertzberg 307-322). In moral philosophy, trust is often analysed as a particular prior commitment to a relationship and not an outcome of the cooperative behaviour between the parties. This prior commitment is not obviously purposive. I do not trust others in order to gain from my interaction. Rather, the fact that I trust them gives me an expectation to gain from interacting with them in some occasions. According to Annette Bayer, trust and distrust are feeling responses, not cognitive states, to how we take our situation to be: an accepted vulnerability to another's possible, but not expected, ill will. To what extent is such a view of trust of interest to epistemology? Does it help capture the fundamental role of trust in the acquisition of vicarious knowledge? Epistemic trust is trust, on the one hand, in the goodwill of others, and, on the other hand, in their competence. The moral notion of trust is of clear relevance to assessing goodwill, in particular in enduring personal relationships. Trusting the other party's willingness to take into account my own interest, either for the sake of our future relation, or simply out of an affective attitude, does not assure me that what I am obtaining is valuable information. The moral attitude of trust influences the sharing of information in other ways. On the one hand, it may cause interlocutors to do their epistemic best. On the other hand, it may cause the morally trusting receiver of information to display a stance of epistemic trust for the sake of the relationship. And may either lower the epistemic criteria for accepting a belief or remain inwardly sceptical and possibly check what he or she has been told on the basis of independent evidence (Richard Holton, 63-76). Even in

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strong enduring personal relationships epistemic trust does not reduce to moral trust but rather contribute to formulating epistemic trust.

Epistemological Conception of Trust In examining epistemic trust, we shall examine two opposing epistemological positions, that is; the reductionist and non reductionist approaches. Epistemic trust is illuminated and sourced by different aspect of philosophy but not fully accounted for by any of them, because it genuinely involves a variety of cognitive and social mechanisms that can be normatively evaluated from several points of view. This study however, present the neglected aspect of epistemic trust involved in the pragmatics of verbal comprehension. This pragmatic form of epistemic trust calls for a non reductionist account. The question therefore is, in the domain where social knowledge relies on verbal communication, can epistemic trust be fully accounted for in a reductionist way? The granting of certain individuals epistemic authority is for certain reasons, which might be because of independent reasons which may be direct or indirect, moral or epistemic. And it is because the individual so trusted is said to be reliable and he is source of information, the type of authority granted is said to be derivative authority. However, if there are suspected reasons in granting epistemic authority, it means we are willing to accept whatever you say just because you believe it, it means we are granting you fundamental authority (Gibband 5773). The division between derivative and fundamental authority is traceable to the philosophy of testimony between reductionists and anti-reductionists. Historically, the leading exponent reductionism is David Hue. According to him, reliance on testimony is based on the same kind of inductive inference that justifies any other belief, that is, on the evidence of accustomed conformity of testimonies to facts (694). We rely on others because experience has shown them to be reliable, thus we have independent reasons to believe them. The nonreductionist on the other hand, led by Thomas Reid, considers the evidence of testimony as a fundamental category of evidence neither reducible to other forms of perceptual or inferential evidence nor justifiable in terms of them. According to him, The wise and beneficent Author of nature, who intended that we should be social creatures, and that we should receive the greatest and most important part of our knowledge by the information of others, hath, for these purposes implanted in our nature's two principles that tally with each other. The first of these principles is a propensity to speak truth...the second is a disposition to confide in the veracity of others, and to believe what they tell us.

Both positions were recently reviewed by John Hardwig in his article entitled The Role of Trust in Knowledge. According to him, epistemologists should acknowledge trust as “the ultimate foundation for much of our knowledge” (335-349). This did not imply, according to him, a major departure from usual epistemological concerns. According to Hardwig trusting others is normatively accountable in terms of a particular class of reasons that justifies the acquisition of knowledge through testimony: If A has reasons to believe that B has reasons to believe that p, then A has reasons to believe that p, even if the nature of A's reasons is irreducibly different from that of B's. A's reasons to believe that p

48 Nnamdi Azikiwe Journal of Philosophy, Vol.12(1), 2020 are based in her assessment of the “epistemic character” of B and in particular of his honesty and competence, whereas B's reasons to believe that p depend on his assessment of the evidence for or against p. Trust is thus a matter of assessing the moral and epistemic reliability of other people on a particular subject matter. In this account epistemology does not reduce to ethics, or the other way around. Rather, what it means is that epistemology integrates some moral standards. Trust especially epistemic trust consists of admixture of epistemic and moral norms. Epistemologists such as Alvin Goldman and Philip Kitcher (22), developed a reductionist account of trust in which considerations of social factors contribute to reasons and justifications for holding beliefs. They integrate the kind of reasoning that justifies our trust in vicarious knowledge in an overall view of cognition that may be described as rationalist. For this school of thought, the rationalist, trusting others means having reliable criteria to assess their competence and trustworthiness, using the criteria of clarity and distinctiveness, tools introduced by Rene Descartes. People may have different reasons to allocate authority to others, all equally rational in epistemology; no one is in doubt of the authority of Rene Descartes, John Locke, Immanuel Kant, John Dewey, and Richard Rorty etc. In other instances, a person may allocate contextual authority to people they judge to be in a better epistemic position to provide some specific information. In such a case, trusting others is a way of exploiting their perception and reasoning as proxy for one's own. We use experts as “tools” (Fodor 23), as we use a telescope to enhance our perception. Understanding a social process of development and distribution of knowledge gives us indirect criteria for trusting specific topics. To properly foreground our position, we shall analyse, using the nature of communication to show that without it, the process of acquisition of knowledge will not be possible. Using the empiricist position, with the understanding that in recent times in the study of empirical cognition and social epistemology which is the empirical study of knowledge institutions, little or scanty attention has been paid to the empirical study of communication or the content of what is communicated. Epistemologists like Burge and Coady, whose works placed emphasis on the nature of communication in their account of social knowledge. View the transfer of testimonial information as being achieved by means of a linguistic encoding by the speaker of his/her meaning and a decoding of that meaning by his/her audience (457-488). However, scholars like Paul Grice rejects this model on the ground that it suffers from incomprehensibility, contending that rather it should be seen largely as a logically inferential. Sperber and Wilson (199) on the other hand, contend that a linguistic utterance is best viewed not as an encoding of the speaker's meaning, but as a semantically rich piece of evidence from which this meaning can be inferred. The result of linguistic decoding is typically an ambiguous and gappy conceptual structure that vastly underdetermines its interpretation. Interpretation on the other hand, is based on the decoded conceptual structure taken together with contextual information and guided by maxims of conversation or by expectations of relevance raised by the utterance. According to Grice, successful communication involves cooperation among interlocutors. Their conversation must have a common goal, and their utterances must be contributions to this common goal. Interlocutors should conform to maxims of conversation that guide their cooperation. Among these, there are maxims regarding

49 Michael & Odum Justification in the Episteological Conception of Trust truthfulness, and in particular the maxim “Do not say what you believe to be false,” which Grice viewed as the more important of all. A cooperative speaker will abide by the maxims and, in particular, will speak truthfully. Accepting such an account, one might view it as going a long way towards grounding epistemic trust (265-331). There is however, an objection - people can participate in conversation in bad faith, try to deceive their audience, and pretend to be cooperative when in fact they are not. Just as the fact that the maker of an assertion presents her assertion as true whether it is true or false and therefore cannot very well be believed just because he/she is making an assertion, a participant in a conversation cannot be believed just because she presents herself as cooperative and in particular as truthful. Grice is not claiming that interlocutors are always genuinely cooperative, and even less that they always follow the maxims. What he is claiming, is that the audience must presuppose that the speaker is cooperative and follows the maxims in order properly to infer her meaning, even if, in the process or later, they may be led to revise this presupposition. Adopting a stance of trust in the cooperativeness and in particular, in the truthfulness of the speaker is a constitutive part of the comprehension process. This stance of trust is adopted without any other reason than a desire to engage in communication and understand others. In this sense, it is a form of fundamental trust. However, this trust by default and for the sake of comprehension can very easily be rescinded when it comes not just to comprehending but to accepting the content communicated, or even in the process of comprehension. Wilson and Sperber (202) have argued that the presumption that guides comprehension is not one of cooperativeness and truthfulness but one of relevance. According to the Relevance Theory, every utterance conveys a presumption of its own relevance, and this is what guides the process of comprehension. More specifically, hearers seek an interpretation that meets the expectations of relevance raised by the utterance itself. That is, they adopt a stance of trust in the relevance of the speaker in order to understand her. When truthfulness is a condition for relevance, as it often is, hearers adopt a stance of trust in the speaker's truthfulness too. To give an illustration, consider the following utterance: trust in the relevance of the speaker in order to understand them. When truthfulness is a condition for relevance, as it often is, hearers adopt a stance of trust in the speaker's truthfulness too. To give just one illustration, consider the following utterance Watch repairer to Dooshima: It will take some time to repair your watch. Literally understood, the watchmaker's statement is a truism since repairing a watch is a process extended over time. If Dooshima was interpreting this utterance just on the basis of a presumption of truthfulness or of a Davidsonian principle of charity, she might be satisfied with its literal truistic meaning. Looking for an interpretation that fulfils her expectation of relevance, she understands that repairing her watch will take more time than she might have expected. For instance, if she might have expected the watch to be repaired the next day, she will understand the watchmaker as meaning that it will take several days. Why not understand him to mean that it will take an absurdly high amount of time, years for instance, since this would be even more relevant? It would be relevant only if true, otherwise it would be just a poor joke. Here, relevance implies truth. Dooshima takes the watchmaker to be committing himself, not to the truth of any interpretation of “some time” in his utterance, but to the truth of the first interpretation that is relevant

50 Nnamdi Azikiwe Journal of Philosophy, Vol.12(1), 2020 enough to be worth her attention. Having understood what the watchmaker means, she may then choose to question its truth, but still, she had to adopt a stance of trust in relevance, which involved a stance of trust in truthfulness as a subpart, in order to understand what her interlocutor meant. It is very clear that the position of these epistemologists though differs but converges in suggesting that a stance of trust is an automatic part of the interpretation process. In engaging in conversation, and through this stance of trust, people develop a “common ground” or a “mutual cognitive environment” (Wilson 67). They do so at least tentatively in the context, and for the sake of the verbal exchange and of social intercourse more generally. This may ready them for a full-fledged acceptance of the contents of this common ground, but this is not automatic. The stance of trust involved in communication is both fundamental and fragile, and can easily be withdrawn when it comes to accepting the content understood. Such an approach therefore meets the anti-reductionist requirement of “non gullibility”. That is, the requirement that people should not automatically accept whatever their interlocutors say. In young children, the stance of trust needed for comprehension may extend into quasi automatic acceptance. This may be a distinctive trait of a phase of cognitive development where language acquisition, language understanding and the acquisition of information about the world are wholly intertwined processes (Bloom 34) Once, however, children master to a sufficient level, the language spoken in their community and have refined their interpretive abilities, they may display a somewhat more sceptical attitude toward information that comes from others. This does not mean that they systematically start checking the truth or the probability of what they are told. Rather, what they become better at is checking the intentions of their interlocutors and the reasons they have to communicate with them. Thus, they may start developing more fine grained heuristics for assessing credibility and trustworthiness. A large part of our knowledge reaches us through communication and communication is a much more creative and richly interpretive process. We do not just accept information, but we reconstruct the information in a manner relevant for us. Trusting other people is involved in the constructive process of understanding. There is no passive “blind trust”. There is no blind trust in communication in the same sense as there are no raw sense data in perception. A stance of trust, however, is part of the interpretive competence that grounds our capacities to understand, to learn how to communicate, and to cope with the complex social networks of knowledge that make us humans.

Conclusion The paper examined the concept of epistemology laying emphasis on the propositional definition of knowledge, we also highlighted the 21st century notion of epistemology contending that it has expended beyond the arguments about justification and belief to discourse in epistemic authority, epistemic of difference and epistemic trust. The study however emphasised on epistemic trust. The paper identified various types of trust but examined the notions of trust in philosophy, it analysed trust in political philosophy, social theory and general notion, and moral trust. It was discovered that trust in moral philosophy, political philosophy and social theory provide the essential conditionalities for the formulation of epistemic trust. The paper was able to show that epistemic trust

51 Michael & Odum Justification in the Episteological Conception of Trust emanates from communication especially the content of what is communicated after it has been evaluated and confirmed to have emanated from a reliable source.

Benedict Michael, PhD Department of Philosophy, Benue State University, Makurdi –Nigeria; Email: [email protected] Tel: +234(0)8036588177

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Edoh Sunday Odum Department of Philosophy, Benue State University, Makurdi –Nigeria; Email: [email protected], [email protected], Tel: +234(0)8104030790.

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