Peut-on être anti-réductionniste à propos du témoignage ?

DRAFT-DO NOT QUOTE
Paper submitted to the review Philosophie. Special issue on the Philosophy of Testimony edited by Pascal Engel.

I would like to thank you Pascal Engel and Dan Sperber for useful comments on previous versions of this paper.

La connaissance est un bien commun. La plupart de nos croyances s’appuient sur l’expertise d’autrui. Accepter le témoignage des autres est une façon fondamentale d’acquérir des connaissances, non seulement sur le monde extérieur, mais aussi sur qui nous sommes, par exemple sur où et quand sommes-nous nés. Dans les mots de l’anthropologue Mary Douglas : « La colonisation mutuelle de nos esprits est le prix que nous payons pour penser »[1].

Il existe une tradition classique en philosophie qui, à partir de Platon, tend à exclure les croyances acquises par le biais d’autrui de l’analyse de la connaissance. Dans De utilitate credendi, Saint Augustin distingue la « connaissance », qui relève de la raison, de la « croyance » qui relève de l’autorité.[2] Locke s’inscrit dans cette tradition quand il affirme que les idées d’autrui acquises par témoignage ne deviennent dans nos esprits que des opinions, même si elles sont vraies. Selon cette conception, la connaissance, c'est-à-dire la croyance rationnelle et justifiée, s’oppose à l’opinion car elle est basée sur des idées dont « nous pouvons avoir l’intuition claire et évidente »[3] à la manière de Descartes, ou sur des idées produites par les données de notre perception ainsi que sur des relations valides entre ces idées, selon la version empiriste.

L’idée même d’un savoir acquis par déférence à une autorité pourrait sembler paradoxale. S’en remettre à l’autorité d’autrui serait incompatible avec la raison et l’autonomie intellectuelle nécessaires dans l’acquisition et la justification de nos connaissances. Pourtant, les croyances acquises par le truchement d’autrui jouent un rôle tellement central dans nos processus de connaissance que ce phénomène s’impose à l’attention des philosophes.

L’épistémologie contemporaine a réhabilité le rôle de la déférence à autrui dans la connaissance : le travail collaboratif dans toutes les sciences ainsi que l’explosion informationnelle dans les sociétés médiatisées, a forcé les épistémologues à incorporer dans leur réflexions des notions sociologiques telles que confiance, autorité et déférence. Aujourd’hui, l’épistémologie sociale est une discipline bien établie dont le but est d’étendre l’étude sociologique des mécanismes de la confiance qui sont à la base de l’ordre social à ceux qui sont à la base de l’ « ordre cognitif » de la société.[4]
La « division du travail cognitif » est reconnue comme une propriété fondamentale des tous systèmes culturels, y compris les communautés scientifiques.
L’épistémologie sociale ainsi conçue est une entreprise à la fois descriptive et normative : d’une part elle décrit comment les structures sociales de distribution des connaissances (universités, médias) ont une influence sur la diffusion des croyances vraies et fausses dans une communauté ; d’autre part, elle tente de préciser les conditions dans lesquelles il est légitime de s’en remettre à autrui pour acquérir un savoir.
On peut ajouter que le rôle de l’expertise scientifique dans les décisions publiques fait de la question de la légitimité de la confiance et de la déférence épistémique un problème central du fonctionnement des sociétés démocratiques. La tension entre le recours aux experts et la démocratie est au cœur des démocraties contemporaines. Richard Lewontin a écrit à ce sujet : La pénétration de la science dans la société civile et politique pose un problème spécial pour le fonctionnement de l’état démocratique. D’un coté, le comportement de l’état devrait réfléchir la volonté populaire, déterminée par l’expression directe de l’opinion du peuple, ou par le biais de représentants élus. De l’autre coté, le savoir et la compréhension exotériques requis pour prendre des décisions rationnelles dans lesquelles la science et la technologie sont des facteurs critiques est dans les mains d’une petite élite d’experts[5]. Les notions d’autorité épistémique, et d’expertise jouent donc un rôle dans la compréhension de l’autorité politique et des mécanismes de confiance qui assurent la survie des institutions dans les sociétés démocratiques. Des questions épistémologiques (qui devons nous croire et sur quelle base ?) se retrouvent donc au cœur de nos décisions morales et politiques : notre confiance dans l’ « ordre cognitif » de la société –qui sait quoi, selon quels principes le savoir est-il distribué et partagé, sur quelle base faut-il croire les experts – influence notre confiance dans son ordre social et réciproquement.
Le débat contemporain en épistémologie autour de la dimension sociale de la connaissance et en particulier du rôle de l’expertise et de la confiance dans la transmission du savoir est le sujet de cet essai. On distinguera les approches épistémiques et les approches non épistémiques de la déférence à autrui, pour discuter ensuite de l’opposition classique entre visions réductionnistes et anti-réductionnistes du témoignage et pour conclure par une défense non-réductionniste de la déférence.
Pour mieux cerner les enjeux de l’approche sociale à l’épistémologie, il faut introduire plusieurs précisions.
D’une part, le problème de la dimension sociale du savoir et celui de l’autorité épistémique ne coïncident pas. L’épistémologie contemporaine se pose aussi le problème de la légitimité de l’autorité de chacun sur ses propres pensées, c'est-à-dire, dans quelle mesure sommes-nous justifiés à considérer immédiat et immun de toute erreur notre accès à nos propres pensées[6]. D’autre part, le fait que les croyances soient socialement transmises n’est pas une raison suffisante pour considérer les facteurs sociaux comme épistémologiquement pertinents. L’air est un ingrédient fondamental dans la transmission du savoir, mais cela n’en fait pas pour autant un thème épistémologique. Ce qu’une approche épistémologique de la formation sociale des croyances doit montrer c’est que les facteurs sociaux, comme par exemple les institutions de savoir ou certaines conventions sociales, influencent la qualité épistémique de l’information transmise (c'est-à-dire sa vérité ou sa fausseté).

Deux approches principales dominent aujourd’hui la recherche en épistémologie sociale. Selon la première approche, la confiance que nous faisons aux autres dans l’acquisition du savoir relève de l’évaluation des compétences de nos interlocuteurs sur un sujet spécifique. En ce sens, déférer à autrui serait une pratique parfaitement rationnelle qu’on pourrait étudier aussi bien d’un point de vue descriptif que normatif. Le but de l’épistémologie sociale serait alors d’examiner les institutions et les pratiques sociales pour comprendre leur fiabilité dans la production, la conservation et la transmission du savoir. Les raisons que l’on peut avoir d’en déférer à autrui sont variables. On peut reconnaître une autorité contextuelle à notre interlocuteur à partir d’une appréciation rationnelle de sa meilleure position épistémique. Je téléphone de Paris à un ami qui est à Rome pour connaître le temps qu’il y fait car je reconnais qu’il est mieux placé que moi pour en juger. Dans un tel cas, on exploite la cognition d’autrui comme un outil pour acquérir une information qui est hors de la portée de nos sens. On peut aussi s’appuyer sur la fiabilité de certains mécanismes d’évaluation et de filtrage de l’information. Je peux par exemple faire confiance au travail d’évaluation et de sélection du comité de lecture d’une revue scientifique pour apprécier la qualité de l’information qu’elle contient. Ou encore je peux connaître les performances passées de quelqu’un dans un domaine particulier, et me fier à sa réputation.[7]
Selon les représentants de cette vision de l’épistémologie sociale, comme Philip Kitcher et Alvin Goldman, l’évaluation de ces critères indirects est une procédure cognitive universelle, qui peut être décrite et formalisée en termes de probabilités bayesiennes.

Les autres approches, qu’on pourrait appeler non épistémiques, sont plutôt orientées vers une lecture sociologique et historique des facteurs sociaux qui affectent la transmission du savoir. L’évaluation de la fiabilité des autres dépendrait d’une variété de pratiques culturelles. Un exemple magistral d’analyse de telles pratiques est le travail de l’historien des sciences Steven Shapin. Dans son ouvrage Une histoire sociale de la vérité, il reconstruit le rôle de la « culture du gentilhomme » dans la détermination de la crédibilité des pratiques scientifiques de la science expérimentale moderne, avec en particulier la constitution des nouveaux standards expérimentaux de la Royal Academy[8]. Même si Shapin ne tire aucune conclusion programmatique de ses recherches historiques, son approche est en continuité avec la vision radicale de la science proposée par la sociologie de la science. L’analyse sociologique de la science, développée par Bruno Latour en France et par David Bloor et l’école d’Edinburgh en Grande Bretagne[9], voit l’épistémologie comme une branche de la sociologie. Elle ne reconnaît pas aux sciences naturelles le statut spécial que leur avait attribué Karl Mannheim, père fondateur de la sociologie de la connaissance, en les décrivant comme un domaine non assujetti aux intérêts sociaux. Selon les sociologues de la science, la science reflète les relations et les intérêts sociaux comme n’importe quel autre domaine de connaissances. Cette position a amené dans certains cas à un relativisme radical qui considère chaque processus de production de connaissance comme une « forme de vie » particulière dont les standards cognitifs sont tout simplement ceux qui sont acceptés dans ce jeux linguistique. Un exemple de cette attitude intellectuelle est donné par l’étude[10] des rapports entre genre et autorité scientifique dans l’épistémologie féministe contemporaine. La standpoint view theory des épistémologues féministes interprète l’autorité cognitive comme un système de renforcement et de légitimation des préjugés liés à la subordination féminine. Ces positions ont l’intérêt de situer la déférence à l’autorité cognitive dans des pratiques culturellement et historiquement déterminées, en contraste avec la perspective rationaliste, plus formelle et abstraite.
Les partisans de la perspective épistémique ont de leur coté une intuition forte : l’explosion informationnelle et la croissance de la communication ne semblent pas rendre les sociétés plus irrationnelles. L’irrationalité trouve un terrain plus fécond dans les sociétés ayant un faible taux de circulation de l’information. Il doit donc bien y avoir un fondement rationnel dans la déférence à autrui et les systèmes de transmission des connaissances doivent bien satisfaire au moins à des critères minimaux de validité épistémique pour se stabiliser dans une société. De l’autre coté, les partisans de la deuxième perspective offrent une vision souvent plus réaliste des raisons que les gens ont d’accepter l’autorité d’autrui : dans la plupart des cas il est très difficile de distinguer les raisons épistémiques des normes et pratiques morales qui régissent la confiance. L’ethno-méthodologue Harold Garfinkel avait saisi cette difficulté dans les expériences informelles qu’il proposait à ses étudiants : essayez de refuser systématiquement toute confiance à ce que dit ou prétend savoir un de vos proches : il prendra cela comme une atteinte insupportable à son intégrité morale, et même après avoir découvert vos motivations il aura du mal à reprendre le rapport comme avant. [11]
Bien que les différences entre les deux approches décrites ici soient nombreuses, elles se retrouvent du même coté d’une autre distinction centrale dans ce débat : celle entre autorité dérivative et autorité fondamentale. Faire confiance à un autre parce qu’on a des raisons indépendantes de penser qu’il est une source fiable d’informations, c’est lui attribuer une autorité dérivative, tandis qu’accepter ce que l’autre dit seulement parce qu’il le dit, c’est lui attribuer une autorité fondamentale.[12] Quelles que soient les raisons pour lesquelles on défère à autrui – directes, indirectes, morales ou épistémiques - le fait que l’on défère pour des raisons rend la déférence dérivative et non fondamentale.
Cette distinction retrace le clivage historique entre conceptions réductionnistes et anti-réductionnistes de la justification du témoignage. Hume est le représentant classique de la position réductionniste : la confiance dans les témoignages est basée sur le même type d’inférence inductive qui justifie n’importe quelle autre croyance, c'est-à-dire, les indices a posteriori de la conformité du témoignage aux faits. Nous faisons confiance à ceux que l’expérience nous a révélés fiables ; donc nous avons des raisons indépendantes de les croire. La vision opposée, non-réductionniste est celle de Thomas Reid, qui considérait la déférence à autrui comme une source première d’information, irréductible à d’autres sources et n’ayant pas besoin de justification. Ainsi il écrit : « Le sage et bienfaisant Auteur de la nature, qui voulait que l’homme vécût en société, et qu’il reçût de ses semblables la plus importante partie de ses connaissances, a placé en lui, pour cette fin, deux principes essentiels qui s’accordent toujours l’un avec l’autre. Le premier de ces principes est un penchant naturel à dire la vérité, et à nous servir dans le langage des signes qui interprètent le plus fidèlement nos sentiments […] Le second principe que l’Etre suprême a déposé dans notre nature, est une disposition à nous confier à la véracité des autres et à croire ce qu’ils nous disent »[13]. Selon Reid, nos croyances à l’égard de ce qu’on nous dit sont garanties par le couplage d’un principe de véracité et un principe de crédulité. Le principe de crédulité garantirait alors l’attribution d’une autorité fondamentale aux autres[14].
L’autorité fondamentale pose un problème épistémologique bien plus difficile que l’autorité dérivative. Si la compréhension des raisons qu’on a pour déférer à ceux qu’on croit fiables est un projet épistémologique bien intelligible, il est beaucoup moins évident que le seul fait qu’autrui croit quelque chose puisse suffire à justifier qu’on le croit soi-même. Ce problème est, dans une certaine mesure, semblable à celui que pose l’autorité morale ou pratique : accorder une autorité fondamentale aux autres semble prima facie impliquer une sorte de « capitulation du jugement », une résignation de la raison qui a été souvent évoquée dans l’explication des paradoxes de l’obligation politique et morale.[15]
Il faut d’ailleurs distinguer l’autorité fondamentale de ce qu’on pourrait appeler « influence socratique »[16] : je peux décider d’abandonner mes raisons et même mes normes de raisonnement et accepter celles d’un autre parce qu’il m’a convaincue que les siennes sont meilleures. Mais le cas de l’autorité fondamentale est différent : je crois à ce qu’un autre dit sur la seule base du fait qu’il le croit. Suis-je jamais justifiée à croire autrui sur cette seule base ? L’attrait d’une vision reidienne du faire confiance aux autres c’est que dans nos pratiques quotidiennes d’échange d’information la confiance en autrui semble souvent précéder en quelque sorte le raisonnement sur la fiabilité de notre source d’information. Mais si on accepte l’image reidienne de la déférence épistémique comme trait fondamental de nos pratiques linguistiques et cognitives, comment peut-on aller au-delà du simple appel à une « disposition naturelle » à croire et essayer de justifier la légitimité de cet appel ?
Un argument à l’appui de la légitimité de la déférence fondamentale met sur le même plan la confiance en autrui et la confiance fondamentale que nous avons dans notre perception et notre mémoire. La confiance dans la fiabilité de nos propres états mentaux est le point de départ de toute acquisition de savoir : sans cette déférence fondamentale à nous-mêmes nous ne pourrions former aucune connaissance. Mais si nous nous fions à nos propres croyances grâce au simple constat qu’elles nous appartiennent, pourquoi devrions-nous nier le même type de confiance aux croyances qui nous viennent des autres à travers la communication ? Avons-nous vraiment le choix de ne pas les accepter tout comme nous acceptions celles qui nous viennent de nos sens ? Pourquoi être si « égoïstes » en épistémologie ?[17]
En outre, comme l’a souligné Allan Gibbard, l’influence des autres est omniprésente dans notre développement mental, surtout dans l’enfance. Si nous admettons que les normes de raisonnement que nous utilisons aujourd’hui ont été influencées par d’autres dans le passé, nous devons reconnaître une légitimité à ces normes et ne pouvons pas exclure des influences semblables dans le futur. Donc, selon Gibbard : « Nous devons accorder à autrui de l’autorité fondamentale »[18].
Cet argument dérive la légitimité de la déférence fondamentale à autrui de la légitimité de la déférence à nos sens : nous ne pouvons pas nous refuser de l’autorité sur nos croyances sans nous condamner à une position de scepticisme radical. De la même façon, nous ne pouvons pas totalement éviter l’influence des autres sur nos croyances, au moins dans notre passé, donc il faut que nous leurs accordions quelque forme d’autorité fondamentale sur nous-mêmes. Selon l’épistémologue Richard Foley, c’est à travers un processus de « simulation » des esprits des autres que nous leurs accordons une autorité fondamentale, c'est-à-dire, en les considérant comme des êtres cognitifs semblables à nous-mêmes. On pourrait cependant objecter que la nature des deux situations d’acquisition de connaissances est tellement différente que l’argument ne fournit qu’une raison de principe de nous fier à autrui sans trop nous éclairer sur les caractéristiques du contexte d’acquisition de croyances où cette raison de principe serait effective. Il est possible de mieux défendre la conception anti-réductionniste de la déférence en invoquant non seulement des raisons de principe mais en essayant surtout de mieux éclairer la nature des mécanismes cognitifs et des pratiques interprétatives sous-jacents à notre confiance à autrui.
Le langage est certainement la première de ces pratiques à explorer dans cette quête de la déférence fondamentale. Comme Hilary Putnam l’avait souligné dans son célebre article de 1975 The Meaning of “Meaning”, l’usage du langage est intrinsèquement déférentiel : je n’ai pas besoin d’être un expert chimiste pour utiliser le mot « aluminium » : en tant que locutrice compétente de ma langue, je peux l’utiliser même si je ne suis pas capable de distinguer l’aluminium de l’acier, parce que la « division du travail linguistique » lie chaque usage du terme au savoir pertinent partagé par les experts en métaux dans ma communauté linguistique. L’apprentissage linguistique manifeste clairement cette composante déférentielle : les enfants apprennent des mots sans être parfois capables de leur associer la moindre signification. Il est tout à fait normal pour un enfant de poser des questions du type : « Maman, qu’est-ce que blaireau veut dire ? ». L’enfant apprend le mot en déférant au langage public, et accepte l’autorité de sa mère pour en établir la signification.
Tyler Burge tire des conséquences épistémiques de la nature sociale et déférentielle du langage. Il définit un principe d’acceptation (Acceptance Principle) selon lequel l’acquisition des croyances par le biais des autres est rationnellement justifiée : Toute personne est légitimée à accepter comme vraie une chose qui est présentée comme vraie et qui est compréhensible pour elle, faute de raisons plus fortes pour ne pas le faire[19]. Que les autres nous disent la vérité est une norme qu’on peut présupposer si on n’a pas de raisons de penser qu’elle a été violée.
Même si on ne peut pas nier la présence d’une composante déférentielle dans le language, est-elle suffisante pour fonder la confiance que nous attribuons aux autres ? L’argument de Burge sur la justification a priori des croyances qui nous viennent de l’interlocution se base sur la fiabilité et la robustesse du langage comme moyen de transmission de l’information. En ce sens, il n’est pas si différent de la justification que Reid même donnait de son principe de crédulité, basée sur l’analogie, qu’il considère centrale, entre perception et langage. Le langage ne serait que l’un des moyens de préservation de l’information, comme la perception ou la mémoire.
Mais la communication linguistique est loin d’être un processus purement « préservatif ». Chaque contexte d’interlocution est une cause de distorsion et d’équivoque[20]. Nous ne déférons pas simplement au comportement linguistique des autres. Nous essayons plutôt de donner un sens à ce comportement en attribuant au locuteur l’intention de nous communiquer quelque chose.
La communication est un acte volontaire. Chaque acte de parole revendique l’autorité du locuteur sur ce qu’il dit. Parler est une façon d’exercer une pression sur les autres en leur demandant d’accepter ce qu’on dit au moins pour la réussite de la communication. Le fait que quelqu’un décide intentionnellement de nous adresser la parole nous légitime à assumer une posture conversationnelle qui lui reconnaît une autorité sur son discours. En m’adressant la parole, mon interlocuteur me communique quelque chose sur le monde et en même temps quelque chose sur lui-même : qu’il vaut la peine de l’écouter et de le croire. L’échange conversationnel selon Paul Grice, requiert au moins une forme de confiance dans l’autre, c'est-à-dire, une présomption dans la volonté de l’interlocuteur à coopérer pour la réussite de la communication. Cette présomption de coopération coordonne la communication et maximise la compréhension mutuelle. Ceci ne signifie pas qu’il faut croire passivement à l’interlocuteur. La présomption de confiance permet aux interlocuteurs de partager un contexte commun d’hypothèses nécessaires à l’interprétation. C’est toute la vulnérabilité cognitive qu’il nous faut accepter pour acquérir de l’information à travers la communication. Une fois que la communication a réussi et qu’on partage un contexte d’hypothèses nous évaluons la crédibilité de ces hypothèses sur la base de ce que nous savons déjà sur l’interlocuteur et sur le monde et éventuellement nous pouvons les accepter comme croyances. La confiance requise pour interpréter les autres, c'est-à-dire la confiance dans leur coopération, est donc en même temps fragile et fondamentale : si elle est une présupposition de toute acte de communication, on peut néanmoins décider de la retirer ensuite si les hypothèses partagées dans la communication se révèlent en contradiction avec d’autres informations.
Si cette déférence nécessaire peut coïncider avec ce que nous acceptons comme vrai dans les phases initiales de notre développement cognitif et linguistique, une fois que nous avons une certaine maîtrise du langage parlé dans notre communauté linguistique nous sommes en mesure de manifester une attitude plus sceptique vis-à-vis de l’information qui nous vient d’autrui. Et ceci ne veut pas dire seulement que nous allons vérifier la vérité ou la probabilité de tout ce qui nous est dit, car dans la plupart de cas, nous n’aurions aucun moyen de le faire. Nous cherchons plutôt à affiner notre compréhension des intentions d’autrui, et ainsi à développer des heuristiques plus sophistiquées pour évaluer leur crédibilité et leur sincérité.
Pendant les derniers vingt années, la psychologie du développement a essayé de mieux comprendre la capacité qu’ont les êtres humains de « mentaliser », c'est-à-dire, de donner un sens aux comportements des autres en leur attribuant croyances et intentions. Notre psychologie naïve guide notre « sens des autres » : elle est un outil aussi fondamental pour acquérir de l’information sur le monde que l’est la perception. Nos capacités interprétatives se développent d’une façon graduelle, mais elles sont présentes des premières étapes du développement cognitif. Des études récentes montres qu’au moins une psychologie naïve rudimentaire est indispensable à l’acquisition même d’une langue, suggérant qu’il s’agit d’une compétence encore plus fondamentale que le langage même.[21] Comprendre une langue, comprendre des intentions et acquérir de l’information par le biais d’autrui sont toutes des activités communicatives qui requièrent une riche capacité de compréhension sociale. Dans cette perspective, la disposition naturelle reidienne à faire confiance à autrui est décrite en termes cognitifs comme un aspect d’une compétence cognitive fondamentale de compréhension sociale.
Le savoir nous atteint à travers la communication et la communication est un processus beaucoup plus créatif qu’on ne le reconnaît normalement : nous n’acceptons pas seulement de l’information : nous la reconstruisons et la traitons sur la base de ce que nous comprenons de nos interlocuteurs. Faire confiance à autrui fait donc partie du processus constructif qui permet de partager un contexte d’hypothèses indispensable pour comprendre ce qui est dit. La confiance aveugle n’existe pas dans la communication, sauf peut être dans des cas extrêmes d’influence sociale ou dans les premiers étapes du développement. Notre attitude déférentielle fait partie des capacités interprétatives qui fondent notre compréhension du monde social et elle est compatible avec les stratégies épistémiques qui nous permettent d’évaluer la compétence et la bienveillance des autres. Notre premier objectif dans l’acquisition de connaissances par le biais des autres c’est de comprendre ce qui nous est communiqué en interprétant leurs hypothèses et croyances dans le contexte des nôtres. Nous ne sommes jamais passivement « infectés » par les croyances d’autrui. Nous partageons la responsabilité de l’interprétation et de l’engagement mutuel vis-à-vis d’une certaine qualité de la conversation. La dimension sociale de nos croyances est fondée dans notre activité d’interprètes, une activité que nous partageons toujours avec les autres.

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Moran, R. (forthcoming) “Believing the speaker”, manuscript.
Moran, R. (2001) Authority and Estrangement, Princeton University Press.
Origgi, G. (2000) “Croire sans comprendre”, Cahiers de Philosophie de l’universté de Caen, 34, pp.191-201.
Origgi, G. (2004) « Croyance, déférence et témoignage », in E. Pacherie, J. Proust (eds.) Philosophie Cognitive, Presses de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, Paris
Origgi, G., Sperber, D. (2000) « Evolution, Communication and the Proper Function of Language », in P. Carruthers, A. Chamberlain (eds.) Evolution and the Human Mind, Cambridge University Press.
Pouivet, R. (2003) Qu’est-ce que croire? Vrin, Paris.
Putnam, H. (1975) “The Meaning of “Meaning””, in K. Gunderson (ed.) Language, Mind and Reality, University of Minnesota Press, pp. 131-193.
Shapin, S. (1994) A Social History of Truth, Chicago University Press.
Williams, B. (2002) Truth and Truthfulness, Princeton University Press.















[1] Cf. Mary Douglas (1975) Implicit Meanings, Routledge and Kegan Paul.
[1] Augustin De Utilitate Credendi I, 4 : 11.25.
[1] Cf. Descartes Règles pour la direction de l’esprit, (Règle III).






[4] Cf. S. Shapin (1994), p. 16.
[5] Cf. R. Lewontin « The Politics of Science » The New York Review of Books, Mai 2002.
[6] Cf. Richard Moran (2001) Authority and Enstrangement, Princeton University Press ; T. Burge (1997) “Interlocution, Perception, and Memory”, Philosophical Studies, 86 (1997), 21-47.
[7] Ce que Philipp Kitcher appelle earned authority. Cf. Kicher (1992)
[8] Cf. S. Shapin (1994) A Social History of Truth, Chicago University Press.
[9] Cf. B. Latour (1987) Science in Action, Cambridge University Press ; D. Bloor (1976) Knowledge and The Social Imagery, Chicago University Press.
[10] Cf. B. Laslett, H. Longino (eds.) (1996) Gender and Scientific Authority, Chicago University Press.
[11] Cf. H. Garfinkel (1967) Studies in ethnomethodology, Prentice Hall.
[12] La distinction est de Richard Foley (cf. Foley 1994) en partie reprise d’Alan Gibbard (cf. Gibbard 1990).
[13] Cf. T. Reid, An Inquiry into the Humann Mind on the Principles of Common Sense, traduction française de Th. Jouffroy, Œuvres complètes de Thomas Reid, , t. II, Sautelet et C. Libraires & A. Mesnier, Libraire, Paris, 1828, pp. 346-350.
[14] Pour une discussion des principes de véracité et de crédulité voir R. Pouivet (2003) : « Qu’est-ce que croire ? » Vrin, Paris, notamment pp. 86-108.
[15] Pour cette interprétation de l’autorité morale, voir Richard Friedmann (1990) « The Concept of Authority in Political Philosophy », in J. Raz (ed.) Authority, New York University Press.
[16] Sur cette distinction, cf. A. Gibbard (1990) Wise Choices, Apt Feelings, Harvard University Press.
[17] Pour une défense de cette position, voir l’article de Richard Foley « Egoism in Epistemology » in F.F. Schmitt (1994) Socializing Epistemology, Rowman & Littlefield, pp. 53-73. Voir aussi R. Foley (2001) Intellectual Trust in Oneself and Others, Cambridge University Press, ch. 4.
[18] Cf. A. Gibbard, cit., p. 180).
[19] Cf. T. Burge (1993) : “Content Preservation” Philosophical Review 102 : 457-88.
[20] Un critique semblable de la conception préservative du langage de Burge a été formulée par Anne Bezundehout (1998) « Is Verbal Communication a Purely Preservative Process ? » Philosophical Review, 107, pp. 261-288.
[21] Cf. P. Bloom (2000) How Children Learn the Meanings of Words, MIT Press; G. Origgi, D. Sperber (2000) “Evolution, Communication, and the Proper Function of Language” in P. Carruthers, A. Chamberlain (eds.) Evolution and the Human Mind, Cambridge University Press, pp. 140-169.

Obituary (in Italian) of Paul Ricoeur 1913-2005

Pubblicato sul Domenicale de Il Sole 24 Ore, 22 maggio 2005

Paul Ricoeur, 1913-2005

Je suis ce que je me raconte, sono ciò che mi racconto, una frase che riassume una delle assi centrali del pensiero di Paul Ricoeur, ultimo grande maestro della filosofia francese, che si è spento venerdì 20 maggio a Châtenay-Malabry.
Nato a Valence, nel 1913 da una famiglia protestante, Ricoeur ha attraversato le correnti principali del pensiero del Novecento, dall’esistenzalismo all’ermeneutica, dalla psicanalisi alla teoria del linguaggio, dalla morale alla riflessione religiosa, senza mai rinchiudersi sotto un’etichetta teorica e mantenendo il dialogo aperto fino alla fine con tradizioni filosofiche diverse e tra loro spesso contrastanti.
Le sue prime preoccupazioni filosofiche negli Anni Trenta sono influenzate dall’esistenzialismo francese di ispirazione cristiana. Partecipa dopo la Seconda Guerra Mondiale alla rivista Esprit, di orientamento cristiano sociale. La sua tesi di dottorato è dedicata al problema della volontà e del male, un’opera in tre volumi, ripubblicata nel 1960 sotto l’unico titolo : Finitude et culpabilité (Finitudine e colpevolezza) e influenzata dalla fenomenologia di Husserl e di Jaspers.
Professore a Strasburgo dal 1949, nel 1957 è chiamato alla Sorbona, dove resta fino al 1965 quando decide di trasferirsi nella nuova università di Nanterre, alle porte di Parigi, di cui diventa rettore. La questione del male e dell’azione involontaria insieme a un’assidua lettura dei testi biblici lo spingono verso due discipline a cui dedica i principali lavori di questo periodo : psicanalisi ed ermeneutica. Nel suo saggio su Freud, De l’interprétation, Ricoeur propone la sua lettura linguistica della psicanalisi come « campo ermeneutico », ossia come una forma di esegesi. Tema privilegiato del campo ermeneutico freudiano è il doppio senso, l’equivoco nascondersi e insieme disvelarsi nei simboli del sogno di un altro senso che emerge dal profondo e che lega, secondo Ricoeur, le riflessioni di Freud a quelle dell’antropologia e della fenomenologia della religione. Nella sua ricostruzione ermeneutica della psicanalisi si precisa un pilastro del suo pensiero, ossia la sua visione del soggetto come qualcosa a cui non si accede direttamente, ma solo tramite un’interpretazione indiretta dei segni culturali e delle mediazioni simboliche che costituiscono l’io come narrazione quotidiana. L’io non è allora che un testo che ci narriamo incessantemente sotto i vincoli della nostra storia culturale e al quale accediamo grazie a un esercizio di interpretazione, in un continuo dialogo con noi stessi.
Deluso dai fatti del 1968, criticato e profondamente incompreso dalla nuova generazione francese, Ricoeur si ritira per tre anni all’università di Lovanio, per poi cominciare una « seconda carriera » filosofica negli Stati Uniti, all’università di Chicago. E’ qui che si confronta con la filosofia del linguaggio di tradizione analitica, un dialogo ben elucidato dal suo lavoro sulla metafora : La metafora viva, (Jaca Book, 1981) e nella sua opera monumentale : Tempo e racconto (Jaca Book, 1986) sui rapporti tra storia, identità e finzione narrativa. Un trittico imponente, le cui implicazioni morali danno origine all’opera successiva, Soi-même comme un autre in cui Ricoeur precisa la sua posizione dialogica sul soggetto, costruito tramite una mediazione riflessiva che implica il punto di vista dell’altro in modo da rendere impensabili noi stessi senza gli altri. Ed è questa lettura indiretta di noi stessi che dà senso alla nostra esistenza sociale e morale. I suoi ultimi libri Le Juste, (2000) et La mémoire, l’histoire et l’oubli, (2003) testimoniano il suo impegno etico e la sua forte esigenza di una forma universale di morale, forse una delle motivazioni più profonde del suo pensiero.

Narrative Memory, Episodic Memory and W. G. Sebald's idea of Memory

DRAFT - DO NOT QUOTE
This paper was first presented at the Italian Academy, Columbia University, New York, April 2005.

If I say, rightly, ‘I remember it’, the most different things can happen, and even merely this: that I say it
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Grammar

I think how little we can hold in mind, how everything is constantly lapsing into oblivion with every extinguished life, how the world is, as it were, draining itself, in that the history of countless places and objects which themselves have no power of memory is never heard, never described or passed on
W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz


Mnemosyne, one must admit, has shown herself to be a very careless girl
Vladimir Nabokov, Speak Memory

The now; the now. Mind this: in this is all
Earl of Shaftesbury



Memory is a hard notion for philosophers. It is probably a much better subject of inquiry for writers and poets. That is because a great variety of philosophical concerns are pulled in under the heading of memory. Memory is involved in the basic psychological experience of our continuity through time, that grounds - according to many - our personal identity. Memory is involved in our capacity of conceptualizing the world: To have a concept is to be able to recognize that the same takes place again. Memory is knowledge that we are able to retrieve as well as knowledge that we embody in our skills. Most of our knowledge at any given time is in memory. Memory is involved in everyday inference: inferring new facts from our sense perception implies combining in an efficient way new information with background information that is stored in memory. Memory is also involved in self-knowledge as the fundamental ingredient of experiencing some events as belonging to our autobiography. And through our memories of our past experiences as our own experiences we constitute ourselves as distinct and unique moral subjects.
Thus, memory seems to invade all aspects of our cognitive and moral life. Along the history of psychological science, memory, learning and knowledge are so intertwined topics that one could wonder whether it is possible to pry apart what belongs to the realm of memory and what is proper to learning and knowledge. On the one hand, memory shares some epistemic properties with the notion of knowledge. The verbs “knowing” and “remembering” are epistemic verbs, that is, they imply the truth of what is known or remembered. It is a sort of semantic nonsense to say that I know something that is not true or to say that I remember something that it did not take place, even if false memories can be an interesting subject of psychological inquiry (cf. Hacking 1995, or the most interesting case of “Flashbulbs memories” - that is, vivid memories, often inaccurate, of what we were doing when an important historical events happened – investigated by Ulrich Neisser) [1]. On the other hand, the understanding of memory and learning have been pursued as a unified research project for longtime, as for example in the empiricist tradition. Authors such as John Locke and John Stuart Mill speculated about the factors that affect the degree of strength of associations between ideas. According to this tradition, learning is to strengthen a particular association, and thus to be able to recall it.
Today, the science of memory distinguishes between a variety of phenomena that correspond to distinct neurological realities. Semantic memory, that is, the capacity to recollect factual information (such as Roma is the capital of Italy) is distinct for procedural memory, which allows us to learn skills and acquire habits. Autobiographical memory is still another neurological reality, which allows us to recall the personal episodes that uniquely define our lives[2]. This latter way of remembering breaks further apart into field and observer memories according to the position that the subject attributes to herself in the retrieved scene, that is, as part of the scene or as an external observer[3].
And finally, memory extends far beyond the limits of our minds: It is the collective memory that we share with a human group that defines our cultural and social identity. It is through the external traces of our common memory that communities establish traditions and cultural values. How ethical considerations can be applied to the notion of collective memory (as for example “The duty to remember”) is a core question of contemporary reflection in moral philosophy (cf. A. Margalit, 2003[4])
Although the multiple facets of the idea of memory may throw some doubts on the existence of a clear cut philosophical question about remembering or knowing the past, nothing seems to be more central to our human experience as our capacity to recall a unique repertoire of events, facts and emotions that distinguish our persons from anybody else. The very concept of our self seems to be grounded in our awareness of being enduring unique subjects through time.
Here, I would like to limit my remarks to the investigation of autobiographical memory. In particular, I would like to introduce a distinction that has been recently put forward by the British philosopher Galen Strawson, and see how it applies to the literary case of W.G. Sebald, one of the most astonishing writers of the last decades.
Let me add a last preamble to this exploration: I am not a literary scholar. My main concerns revolve around the epistemological question of how we come to believe what we believe and what sort of creatures are the varieties of mental objects that inhabit our cognitive life. Still, I think that some conceptual questions in philosophy can be illuminated by looking at literature, and that this is an exercise that worth exploring in order to gain insight on the nature of our mind. Take it as an exercise in what Steven Shapin calls “practical epistemology”, that is, the attempt to understanding our cognition through the investigation of history, biographies and fictional work.

The empirical investigation of autobiographical memory, that is, memory that involves the subjective experience of the person who does the remembering, has revealed gross inaccuracies in people’s reporting about their past events[5]. People reconstruct rather than simply recall events in their past, and the creative aspect of reconstruction is strongly influenced by contextual and emotional factors. Psychologists and philosophers have investigated the nature of these creative elements in memory reconstruction in order to understand whether there is any systematic constraints on the way people re-elaborate their past experiences. One of the mainstream hypothesis on these constraints is linked to a particular view of the self that is gaining attention in many fields of humanities according to which our self-identity is fundamentally experienced in a narrative way and people distort their past experience in order to fit some narrative constraints on their autobiographies. Take, for example, the already mentioned case of distortion in flashbulbs memories: In a study on the memory of the Challenger explosion, Ulrich Neisser and Nicole Harsh[6] interviewed college students less than 24 hours after the event and the again two and a half years later. The second reports revealed a substantial forgetting of the circumstances in which they learned about the accident and, surprisingly, no decay in the subjective confidence that the report was correct. A possible explanation of the unchanged confidence about their report is that subjects tend to link their personal experience in a strong, narrative way, to major historical events and thus witness episodes of their lives as belonging to History. Vladimir Nabokov avowed some inaccurate passages in his autobiography due to the misperception of the relation between historical events personal history in his 1966 forward to the new edition of Speak, Memory:
Among the anomalies of a memory, whose possessor and victim have tried to become an autobiographer, the worst is the inclination to equate in retrospect my age with that of the century. This has led to a series of remarkable consistent chronological blunders in the first version of this book.


Psychologists and neuroscientists, such as Jerome Bruner and Oliver Sachs, have claimed that our tendency to make up a narrative of our life is deeply entrenched in the way we perceive our self-identity: Self is a “perpetually rewritten story” and, according to Bruner, we constantly engage in “self-making narratives” in order to make sense of our past. Philosophers and literary theorists have enthusiastically joined the “Psychological Narrativity” thesis according to which making sense of our lives involves in a constitutive way the construction of narrative plots. Here is an illustration of what narrativism is about:
An attribute that may be uniquely human is consciousness of ourselves as temporal beings-beings with a history. Both as individuals and members of various groups our present existence is powerfully shaped by recollections of the past and anticipations of the future. Narrativists maintain that plot is the main device we use in trying to make sense of this aspect of our life […] Through narrative emplotment we organize, integrate and seek an accommodation with temporality. Emplotment humanizes our experience of life making its passage meaningful for us. It gives order and direction to events that otherwise might be perceived as random or isolated.[7]


Under the heading of “narrativism” we may cast very distant strains of thoughts, such as Paul Ricoeur’s idea of narrativity as the primary mode of knowing and therefore explaining the world to ourselves and to others, or Daniel Dennett’s idea of the Self as a multiple draft of narrations. Typically, albeit not exclusively, thinkers in the analytic tradition take narrativity as a phenomenological datum that corresponds to some psychological reality: we cannot help but organizing our experience in such a narrative way because that is how our phenomenological experience is organized. Whereas authors in the hermeneutic tradition, such as Gadamer and the above mentioned Ricoeur see narrativity as the manifestation in discourse of a specific kind of time consciousness or structure of time[8] that makes sense only as in the intersubjective discoursive exchange.

Narrativism may sometimes imply the stronger thesis of “Ethical Narrativity” according to which the moral experience of personhood is possible only through a narrative outlook on one’s life. Philosophers such as Charles Taylor and Marya Schechtman have argued for this view[9]. Paul Ricoeur seems to endorse a version of the same view when he writes:
How indeed could a subject of action give an ethical character to his or her own life taken as a whole if this life were not gathered together in some way, and how could this occur if not, precisely, in a form of a narrative? [1990]

In a recent article, Galen Strawson has challenged the centrality of narrativity in our experience of the past. According to Strawson, both theses, that is, “Psychological Narrativity” and “Ethical Narrativity” must be rejected on the basis of phenomenological and moral considerations:
It is not true that there is only one way in which human beings experience their being in time. There are deeply non-Narrative people and there are good ways to live that are deeply non-Narrative. I think the second and third views hinder human self- understanding, close down important avenues of thought, impoverish our grasp of ethical possibilities, needlessly and wrongly distress those who do not fit their model, and can be highly destructive in psychotherapeutic contexts[10].

Strawson discerns two psychological kinds of self-experience, diachronic and episodic, according to the role granted to the continuity of the self through time. Diachronic minds naturally figure their selves as something that was there in the past and will be there in the future. Episodic minds do not figure themselves, considered as their present selves, as something that was there in a past experience and will be there in a future experience.
Diachronic minds tend to have a narrative disposition towards their past, whereas episodic minds do not link their idea of their selves to a particular phenomenological quality of their “self-experience”. Our knowledge of being the same human beings as in our past can be of a very indirect nature, and the experience of ourselves as a self can be distinct from that knowledge. Henry James used to say that he thought his previous books “as the work of quite another person as myself” a close relative may be, but not the same self as his present one, even though he had no doubts about his continuity through time. Thus making sense of one’s own life and making sense of oneself are different matters.
Narrativism tends to link these two points of view on the self by arguing that it is only through the narrative reconstruction of our continuity through time that we make sense of our present self. Against this view, Strawson mentions writers such as Proust, Borges, Woolf, whose work shows to what extent the persistence conditions of our thinking ourselves as a “self” are distinct from the persistence conditions of our being the same human being in the past, the present and the future. Episodic minds –among which Strawson casts himself, the above-mentioned writers, Michel de Montaigne, the Earl of Shaftesbury, Stendhal, Fernando Pessoa, Iris Murdoch and many others– don’t have this persistent experience of identity through time as they were the main character in a novel who goes through a series of “peripeties” (as Edmond Dantès in the Count of Monte Cristo). Nevertheless, according to Strawson, they don’t miss anything central of the experience of being a self, nor lack any moral feature of the experience of making sense of one’s own actions through time. “Self-understanding – he concludes – does not have to take a narrative form” [cf. Strawson, 2004b, p.448].
I share Strawson’s resistance to narrativity as the central ingredient of our self-identity through time. To be conscious that the past has shaped our present self doesn’t imply to be conscious of the past: Memory is not knowledge of the past, but knowledge from the past. I can experience my self-identity, feel the lore of the past on it, and still lacking a narrative access to my personal history.
I am inclined to reject the “narrativity thesis” for two reasons. One has to do with my subjective experience of my past as a series of episodes that are linked to my present self in a very indirect way through time, space, people and emotional states. The other is that among the most interesting literary examples of writers who try to make sense of their self, few of them are narrative minds.
Here I would like to take as an example of anti-narrativism the writings of Winfried Georg Sebald, better known by his friends as Max, born in the Bavarian village of Wertag im Allgaü during the Second World war and died in a car accident in East Anglia in 2001.
Sebald is an explicit anti-narrativist: he was resistant to classify his fictional work as “novels” because of his intolerance of the “grinding noises” that accompany the heavy movements of a character through a plotted narrative.
Born in 1944, he studied German literature at Freiburg, and moved to England in 1966, first to Manchester and then to Norwich where he taught German literature at the University of East Anglia until his death at 57 years old. When the collection of novels The Emigrants came out in English in 1996 it was praised as a masterpiece, and its author acclaimed as new “voice of conscience” of Europe, compared to Nabokov, Kafka, Canetti and Thomas Bernard.
His style is a mix of genders: biography, poetry, essay, documentary and fiction. His books are filled with digressions and detailed physical descriptions of the landscapes and objects that surround the narrator. Captionless, black and white photographs are scattered through the pages, in an apparent unconsequential way. Their relation to the text slowly unfolds while the reader tries to make sense of the intricate pattern of stories, descriptions and memories that Sebald gathers in his patient reconstructions of the past. How memory of people and events from the past haunts our lives and resonates in the space around us seems to be the central concern of his work. But the reconstruction is always indirect, filled with disparate objects that tacitly evoke an absence as in a still life. The Emigrants tells the biographies of four exiled, the German-Jewish landlord of Sebald’s house in Manchester, the homosexual schoolteacher in his native Bavarian village, an uncle who emigrated to United States and the German-born artist Max Ferber. Two of them committed suicide, and another died in an asylum. As he reconstruct their lives with a mix of interview, biography and images, these emigrants seem to fade away again, as it was impossible to save them from their inevitable extinction in our memory: “And so, they are ever returning to us, the dead”.
Personal memories and historical memories are both spread out in a bric-à-brac of objects, landscapes, photographs and mental images that seem to vanish away in the very moment we try to resuscitate them:


But what can we know in advance of the course of history, which unfolds accordingly to some logically indecipherable law, impelled forward, often changing direction at the crucial moment, by tiny, imponderable events, by a barely perceptible current of air, a leaf falling to the ground, a glance exchanged across a great crowd of people. Even in retrospect we cannot see what things were really like before that moment and how this or that world-shaking event came about. The most precise study of the past scarcely comes any closer to the unimaginable truth than, for instance, a far fetched claim such as I once heard made by an amateur historian Alfonse Huyghens, who lived in the capital of Belgium and had been pursuing his research on Napoleon for years; according to him, all the cataclysmic events caused by the Emperor of the French in the lands and realms of Europe were to be traced solely to his color blindness, which made him unable to tell red from green. The more blood flowed on the battlefield, this Belgian scholar told me, the greener Napoleon thought the grass was growing [Campo Santo, 14]


Traveling is for Sebald a way to access the past, through the patient observation of the public traces of collective memory (buildings, museums, monuments…) and the strong emotional experience of being misplaced so present in the traveler’s state of mind. In his first fictional work, Vertigo, he describes this feeling while traveling in the North of Italy, on the footsteps of Stendhal and Kafka. In his reconstruction of Stendhal’s transalpine campaign in 1800 when he was seventeen years old, Sebald writes about the emotional impact on Beyle’s memory of the vision of the dead horses in the battlefield:

He was so affected by the large number of dead horses lying by the wayside, and the other detritus of war the army left in its wake as it moved in a long-drawn-out file up the mountains, that he now has no clear idea whatsoever of the things he found so horrifying then. It seemed to him that his impressions had been erased by the very violence of their impact. For that reason, the sketch below (see photocopies) should be considered as a kind of aid by means of which Beyle sought to remember how things were when the part of the column in which he found himself came under fire near the village and the fortress of Bard […] Beyle furthermore writes that even when the images supplied by memory are true to life, one can place little confidence in them [Vertigo, 6,7]

A feeling of a strong emotion linked both to presentiment, recollection and oblivion of the past pushes Sebald to repeat a journey from Vienna to Verona through Venice, seven years after a first trip during which a sudden sense of unease made him flee from a restaurant in Verona in a rush and take the first night train to Innsbruck. After a detour to Riva del Garda and Milano he finally comes back to Verona:

[I] found myself opposite the Pizzeria Verona, from which I had fled headlong that November evening seven years before. The lettering of Carlo Cadavero’s restaurant was still the same, but the entrance was boarded up, and the blinds on the upper floors were drawn, much as I had expected, as I realized in that instant. The image that had lodged in my mind when I fled Verona, and which had recurred time after time, with extreme clarity, before I was able to forget it, now presented itself to me again, strangely distorted – two men in black silver-button tunics, who were carrying out from a rear courtyard a bier on which lay, under a floral-patterned drape, what was plainly a body of human being. Whether this dark apparition was superimposed on reality for a mere moment or much longer, I could not have said when my sense returned to daylight and the people, quite unconcerned, passing the pizzeria, which had evidently been shut for some time. [Vertigo, 128]

The reader reconstructs through the pages that during the evening that Sebald spent at the Pizzeria Verona seven years before, an accident took place to one of the owners of the restaurant while hunting in the countryside. The image of the corpse, probably elicited by the name of the other owner, Carlo Cadavero, made Sebald flee away in a presentiment to be in the “moment immediately before a disaster”.
Austerlitz, his only entirely fictional work, is the story of a man who, by almost unconsciously following fleeting memories returning to him and strange feelings he sensed in particular places, recollects, 50 years after, his childhood in Prague and his Jewish origins erased by his adoptive Methodist Welsh parents. While studying the architectural history of the Liverpool station, Austerlitz starts to feel: “the scraps of memory beginning to drift through the outlying regions of my mind” […]:
Memories like this came back to me in the disused Ladies’ Waiting Room of Liverpool Street Station, memories behind and within which many things much further back in the past seemed to lie, all interlocking like the labyrinthine vaults I saw in the dusty gray light and which seemed to go on and on forever. In fact I felt that the waiting room where I stood as if dazzled contained all the hours of my past life, all the suppressed and extinguished fears and wishes I had ever entertained, as if the black and white diamond pattern of the stone slabs beneath my feet were the board on which the endgame would be played and it covered the entire plane of time. [Austerlitz, 136]

Like the vertigo of looking at an object from an awkward perspective, the recollection of the past goes through the disordered sensation of whirling images, objects and words floating in our minds. Remembering is thus reconstructing, but not in a narrative mode: like the recollection of space and time of a cabinet des curiosités, the past emerges from complex patterns to vanish away again once we try to make sense of it.
The absence of a narrative mode and the mixture of genders that characterize Sebald’s work do not seem to dissolve the narrator’s self, which is strongly present through all his peregrinations, nor the ethical dimension of memory that seems to haunts all his work, as a German grown up in the invisible, unexplained sense of horror of the aftermaths of the Second World War. A moral imperative of saving the individual’s experience of the “silent catastrophe” pervades all of his works as if only the recollection of a subjective perspective could make sense of our relation to History. While visiting the fortress of Breendonk near Antwerp, used as a penal camp by Germans until 1944 and then, almost left untouched and transformed in a national memorial and a museum of the Belgian Resistance, he writes:
No one can explain exactly what happens within us when the doors behind which our childhood terrors lurk are flung open. But I do remember that there in the casemate at Breendonk a nauseating smell of soft soap rose to my nostrils, and that this smell, in some strange place in my head was linked to the bizarre German word for scrubbing brush, Wurzelbürste, which was a favorite of my father’s and which I had always disliked (Austerlitz, 25)

linking the historical presence of horror he physically experiences in Breendonk to the unpleasant memory of his childhood with a silent father who never mentioned the facts of the war. As André Aciman has written of him: "Sebald never brings up the Holocaust. The reader, meanwhile, thinks of nothing else."
Sebald fears the loss of individual memory in the contemporary too dense urban societies. About some burial rituals and ghost presences in Corsica, he writes:

To remember, to retain and to preserve was vitally important only when population density was low, we manufactured few items and nothing but space was present in abundance. You could not do without anyone then, even after death. In the urban societies of the late twentieth century, on the other hand, where everyone is instantly replaceable and is really superfluous from birth, we have to keep throwing ballast overboard, forgetting everything that we might otherwise remember: youth, childhood, our origins, our forebears and ancestors. For a while the site called the Memorial Grove recently set up on the Internet may endure; here you can lay those particularly close to you to rest electronically and visit them. But this virtual cemetery too will dissolve into the ether, and the whole past will flow into a formless, indistinct, silent mass. And leaving a present without memory, in the face of a future that no individual mind can now envisage, in the end we shal ourselves relinquish life without feeling any need to linger at least for a while, nor shall we be impelled to pay return visits from time to time [Campo Santo, 33]

A writer of memory, “The Einstein of Memory” as he has been called, Sebald fits Strawson’s description of episodic mind, and at the same time makes us feel the centrality of memory in our life, the uniqueness of our recollections and the moral obligations of our remembering. The call for narrative as the only way to make sense of ourselves, so overstated in contemporary philosophy and literary theory, seems to collapse by a closer look at one case, among others, of anti-narrative stance towards the past.

References:
J. Bruner (1987) Acts of Meaning, Cambridge, Harvard University Press.
J. Campbell, (1994) Past, Space and Self, Cambridge, Harvard University Press.
D. Dennett (1988) “Why everyone is a novelist”, Times Literary Supplement, 16-22 September.
I. Hacking (1995) Rewriting the Soul, Princeton, Princeton University Press.
L.P. Hinchman , S.K. Hinchman (1994) Memory, Identity, Community: The Idea of Narrative in the Human Sciences, Suny Series in Philosophy of Social Science.

Margalit, A. (2002) The ethics of memory, Cambridge, Harvard University Press.
A. McIntyre (1981) After Virtue, London, Duckworth.
U. Neisser (1982) (ed.) Memory observed: Remembering in natural contexts, San Francisco, Freeman.
U. Neisser, N. Harsch (1992) “Phantom Flashbulbs: False recollections of hearing the news about Challenger. In E. Winograd, U. Neisser (eds.) Affect and accuracy in recall: Studies of “flashbulbs memories”, Cambridge UP.

P. Ricoeur (1983-1985) Temps et récit, 3 voll., Paris Seuil
P. Ricoeur (1985) “Narrated Time,” Philosophy Today, Vol. 29, no.4, 263
P. Ricoeur (1990) Soi-meme comme un autre, Paris, Seuil.
P. Ricoeur (2000) La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli, Paris, Seuil.
D. C. Rubin (1986) Autobiographical Memory, Cambridge University Press.
O. Sacks (1985) The man who mistook his wife for a hat, London, Duckworth.
D. L. Schacter (1996) Searching for Memory, New York, Basic Books.
M. Schechtman (1997) The Constitution of Selves, Cornell University Press.
G. Strawson (2004) “A Fallacy of our Age”, Times Literary Supplement, 15-21 October .
G. Strawson (2004) “Against Narrativity”, Ratio, 412-450.
C. Taylor (1989) Sources of the Self, Cambridge University Press.
H. White (1984) “The Question of Narrative in Contemporary Historical Theory”, History and Theory, pp. 1-33.






[1] Cf. for example U. Neisser , E. Winograd (1992) Affect and accuracy in recall: Studies in “Flashbulbs Memories”, Cambridge University Press; I. Hacking (1995) Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory, Princeton University Press.
[2] The distinction between episodic vs semantic memory is due to E. Tulving (cf. E. Tulving, 1972: “Episodic and Semantic Memory” in E. Tulving and W. Donaldson (eds) Organization of Memory, New York, Academic Press. I here refer to the episodic memory through the broader notion of autobiographical memory (cf. D. Rubin [1986] Autobiographical Memory, Cambridge UP) because I will introduce further distinctions among kinds of subjective experiences of the past.
[3] Freud was aware of this distinction, that has been experimentally investigated by G. Nigro and U. Neisser (1983) “Point of view in personal memories”. Cognitive Psychology, 15, 467-482.
[4] Cf. Avishai Margalit (2003): The Ethics of Memory, Harvard University Press.
[5] Cf. U. Neisser (1967) Cognitive Psychology, New York, Appleton-Century-Crofts; D. C. Rubin, M. Kozin (1984) “Vivid Memories”, Cognition, 16, 81-95.
[6] U. Neisser, N. Harsch (1992) “Phantom Flashbulbs: False recollections of hearing the news about Challenger. In E. Winograd, U. neisser (eds.) Affect and accuracy in recall: Studies of “flashbulbs memories”, Cambridge UP.
[7] Cf. L.P. Hinchman , S.K. Hinchman (1994) Memory, Identity, Community: The Idea of Narrative in the Human Sciences, Suny Series in Philosophy of Social Science.
[8] Cf. H. White (1984) “The Question of Narrative in Contemporary Historical Theory”, History and Theory, pp. 1-33.
[9] Cf. C. Taylor (1989) Sources of the Self, Cambridge University Press; M. Schechtman (1997) The Constitution of Selves, Cornell University Press.
[10] Cf. G. Strawson (2004) “A Fallacy of our Age”, Time Literary Supplement, October 15th . Cf. a longer version of the same article (2004): “Against Narrativity”, Ratio, XVII, 4, pp. 428-52.

An illustration of Episodic Memory

John Peto (1854-1907). Old Souvenirs A nice illustration of episodic memory.

What Does it Mean to Trust in Epistemic Authority?

DRAFT-DO NOT QUOTE
Paper presented at the 7th Annual Roundtable in Philosophy of Social Science, Barnard College, Columbia University, New York, March 11-13 2005.



“There must be a minimal degree of trust in communication for language and action to be more than stabs in the dark”
Sissela Bok, Lying
“Mais qu’y a-t-il donc de si périlleux dans le fait que les gens parlent, et leurs discours indéfiniment prolifèrent?”
Michel Foucault, L’ordre du discours
“I learned an enormous amount and accepted it on human authority, and then I found some things confirmed or disconfirmed by my own experience”
Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty

Consider this case. At high-school in Italy many years ago I heard my teacher of Latin say: “Cicero’s prose is full of synecdoches”[1]. I had a vague idea of what a synecdoche was, and ignored until then that one could characterize Cicero’s writing in this way. Nevertheless, I relied on my teacher’s intellectual authority to acquire the belief that Cicero’s prose is full of synecdoches, and today have a more precise idea of what my teacher was talking about. Was I justified in any sense in uncritically accepting that pronouncement by deferring to my teacher’s authority? Let us have a closer look at the example. Many things were going on in this apparently trivial case of belief acquisition. I was sitting in a classroom, aware of being in a social institution – school- dedicated to knowledge transmission, and I had been properly instructed to believe what people say in school. While listening to the teacher, I was simultaneously learning a fact, that Cicero’s prose was full of synecdoches, and acquiring a linguistic concept, that is, the word “synecdoche” (or, if not acquiring it, at least acquiring a rule about its appropriate use, or, better, enriching its meaning). I was learning a fact and learning a language meaning at the same time. My reliance on Italian educational institutions was strong enough to accept this on pure deferential bases.

Or consider another example. I was born in Milan on February 8th 1967. I believe this is true because the office of Vital Records in the Milan Municipal Building registered few days after that date the testimony of my father or my mother that I was indeed born on the 8th of February in a hospital in Milan, and delivered a birth certificate with this date on it. This fact concerns me, and of course I was present, but I can access it only through this complex, institution-mediated form of indirect testimony.

Or else: I know that smoking causes cancer, I’ve been told this and it was enough relevant information for me to make me quit cigarettes 10 years ago. I don’t have the slightest idea of the physiological process that a smoker’s body undergoes from inhaling smoke to developing a cellular process that ends in cancer. Nevertheless, the partial character of my understanding of what it really means that smoke causes cancer doesn’t refrain me to state it in conversations and to rule my behavior according to this belief.

Our cognitive life is pervaded with partially understood, poorly justified, beliefs. The greater part of our knowledge is acquired from other’s people spoken or written words. The floating of other people’s words in our minds is the price we pay for thinking. Traditional epistemology warns us of the risks of uncritically relying on other people’s authority in acquiring new beliefs. One could view the overall project of classical epistemology - from Plato to the contemporary rationalist perspectives on knowledge - as a normative enterprise aiming at protecting us from credulity and ill-founded opinions. Various criteria, rules and principles on how to conduct our mind have been put forward as a guarantee to preserve the autonomy and freedom of thought necessary to the acquisition of knowledge. Just as an example, a great part of Locke’s Essay concerning Human Understanding is an attempt to establish principles of regulation of opinions, stated in terms of obligations on one’s own “epistemic conduct”, that strengthen our intellectual autonomy. According to Locke, four major sources of false opinions threaten our mind:

I. Propositions that are not in themselves certain and evident, but doubtful and false, taken up for principles
II. Received hypotheses
III. Predominant passions or inclinations
IV. Authority

(Locke, Essay, Book 4, XX, 7)

Reliance on other people’s authority is thus viewed as a major threat to the cognitive autonomy that distinguishes us as rational thinkers. Exposure to received beliefs increases our risk of being “infected by falsity”, the worst danger against which the overall epistemological enterprise was built.

Yet, the massive trust of others that permeates our cognitive life calls for an epistemic treatment, and has become a central issue in contemporary debates in philosophy of knowledge and social epistemology. A number of approaches have been put forward in order to account for the epistemic reliability of the “division of cognitive labour” so typical in contemporary, information-dense societies.
Most analyses that have been recently proposed in social epistemology, concentrate on the evidential grounds for trusting other people’s authority: Trusting someone’s authority on a given matter means assessing her trustworthiness on that matter. Trustworthiness depends on both competence and benevolence. In order to assess other people’s trustworthiness one needs evidential criteria of their competence and their benevolence. For example, a scientist who trusts the authority of a colleague on a certain experimental data grounds her judgment in her knowledge of her colleague’s previous records in that scientific domain (such as the number of publications in the relevant reviews of the domain, or the number of patents, etc.) plus the beliefs that she is self-interested in being truthful for the sake of their future collaborative work.[2] Yet, this “reductionist” analysis, that I will detail later, misses some central intuitions about the presumptive character of our trust in others and its motivational dimension. Trust in testimony has a spontaneous dimension that doesn’t seem to be based on rational assessment of other people’s truthfulness. Also, an evidential analysis of epistemic authority doesn’t account for cases of partial understanding, as in the examples above, in which the overt asymmetry between the epistemic position of the authoritative source and the interlocutors is such that it cannot be treated by appealing to evidential criteria only. Here, my aim is to explore some treatments of the more familiar notion of trust in social sciences, moral and political philosophy in order to understand to what extent the notion of epistemic trust may be illuminated by these analyses. I will contrast evidential vs. motivational analyses in social sciences and claim that motivational analyses can find their places in an epistemology of trust. Motivational analyses have often been described as non-cognitive. Take, for instance Lawrence Becker’s distinction between cognitive vs. non cognitive treatments on trust: “Trust is ‘cognitive’ if it is fundamentally a matter of our beliefs or expectations about others’ trustworthiness; it is non cognitive if it is fundamentally a matter of our having trustful attitudes, affects, emotions, or motivational structures […] To say that we trust others in a non cognitive way is to say that we are disposed to be trustful of them independently of our beliefs or expectations about their trustworthiness” [Becker 1996, 44, 60].[3] I will oppose this distinction by arguing that in the case of epistemic trust a motivational analysis of trust can be cognitive, that is, it can shed some light on our mental processes of acquisition of beliefs and knowledge. In particular, I will try to ground the cognitive bases of our epistemic trust in our communicative practices. My purpose here is to explore a broader notion of epistemic trust, one that could account of what is common in cases as different as the blind trust of the patient in her doctor, the trust needed in collaborative intellectual work and the everyday trust needed to sustain our ordinary conversations.
Intellectual trust is a central question of contemporary epistemological concerns. Yet, most debate around this notion fails to provide a proper analysis of the notion and only superficially bridge it to the parallel social, political and moral treatments of trust. The result is a lack of explanatory power of this notion in epistemology. Often one has the feeling that talking of trust in epistemology is just a way of evoking the need to varnish our study of knowledge with some moral and social considerations.[4] My belief is that intellectual trust deserves more attention, and its intricate relation with the notion of trust in use in social science needs to be better disentangled.
On the other hand, sociological and moral theories of trust in authority fail to make the distinction between epistemic vs. political authority and present themselves as simultaneously accounting for the two concepts.
There are some obvious parallels between the notion of epistemic trust and that of social and political trust. Trust in authority poses a similar puzzle in both cases. How can someone - an institution or an individual - legitimately impose her/its will on other people’s and have a right to rule over their conducts? How is this compatible with freedom and autonomy? And why should we trust an authority to impose us a duty to obey for our own good?
Much ink has been spilt on this apparent paradoxical relation between trust in authority and freedom. And of course an equivalent puzzle can be reformulated in the case of intellectual trust: How can it ever be rational to surrender our reason and accept what another person says on the basis that she is saying this? What does it mean to grant intellectual authority to other people?
The very notion of ‘authority’ in philosophy is notoriously ambiguous between the authority that someone exercises on other people’s beliefs and the authority that someone exercises on other people’s actions.[5] As Friedman has rightly pointed out: “A person may be said to have authority in two distinct senses: For one, he may be said to be ‘in authority’, meaning that he occupies some office, position or status which entitles him to make decisions about how other people should behave. But, secondly, a person may be said to be ‘an authority’, meaning that his views or utterances are entitled to be believed” [Friedman, 1990, p. 57].
In both cases, the appeal to authority calls for an explanation or a normative justification of the legitimacy of the authoritative source, a legitimacy that must be acknowledged by those who submit to it. Still, I think that trust in epistemic authority and in political authority are two distinct phenomena that deserve a separate treatment.
As I said above, most accounts of epistemic trust ground its legitimacy in the evidential bases we have to assess other people’s trustworthiness. Motivational accounts in the case of knowledge seem desperately unable to avoid the risk of credulity and irrationality that accompanies prima facie any a priori trust in others as a source of knowledge.
In what follows, I will briefly sketch evidential vs. motivational approaches to trust as they are discussed in social sciences and then try to use this distinction to gain a better understanding of epistemic trust.

Evidential accounts of trust
A common view of trust in contemporary social science reduces it to a set of rational expectations about the likely behaviour of others in a future cooperation with us. Take the definition that Diego Gambetta gives in his influential anthology on trust: “Trust (or, symmetrically, distrust) is a particular level of the subjective probability with which an agent assesses that another agent or group of agents will perform a particular action, both before he can monitor such action (or independently of his capacity ever to be able to monitor it) and in a context in which it affects his own action. When we say we trust someone or that someone is trustworthy, we im­plicitly mean that the probability that he will perform an action that is beneficial or at least not detrimental to us is high enough for us to consider engaging in some form of cooperation with him. Correspondingly, when we say that someone is untrustworthy, we imply that that probability is low enough for us to refrain from doing so” [Gambetta, 1988, p. 218]. Thus trust is a cognitive notion, a set of beliefs or expectations about the commitment of the trusted in behaving in a determinate way in a context that is relevant to us. Following the literature, I call these analyses reductive and evidential. They are reductive accounts because they don’t set trust as a primitive notion, but reduce it to more fundamental notions such as beliefs and expectations. They are evidential because they make trust depend on the probabilities we assign to our expectations towards other people’s actions towards us. I may trust or distrust on the basis of some evidence that I have about someone else’s future behaviour. As it has been stressed by contemporary literature on trust in social science, trust must be distinguished from pure reliance. Trust is an interesting notion in social sciences only insofar as it explains the implicit commitment that it imposes on a relationship. If it were just a matter of assessing probabilities of another person’s behaviour without taking into account the effect of her behaviour on our own actions, it would not be so different from general inductive reasoning. I trust on a certain level of stability of the social world around me. I trust the person that I cross when walking on the street not to assault me. This is the minimal level of trust that a society should be able to arrange in order to perpetuate. I need to rely on some regularities of the social world in order to act. But the interest of the notion of trust in social sciences is that it takes into account not only social regularities but also commitments.
A recent explanation of trust that takes clearly in account expectations about other people’s commitment – and not simply regularity - is found in Russell Hardin’s analysis of trust as a encapsulated interest, that is, trust as belief that it is in the interest of the trusted to attend the truster’s interests in the relevant matter [cf. Hardin 2002].
Thus, evidential accounts of social trust try to reduce it to justified expectations upon the objective probability of other people’s commitments.
The key-aspect of evidential accounts that I would like to contrast with motivational accounts is that trust is viewed as a cognitive attitude, as knowledge or belief, for which we can find a rational justification in terms of the capacity we have to read and assess the commitments of others.

What about evidential accounts of intellectual trust? An evidential theory of intellectual trust assigns probabilities to our expectations on our interlocutors’ truthfulness on a subject matter. And of course truthfulness is a matter of competence as well as of benevolence. But competence and benevolence are very different things. Competence seems to be a more objective trait than benevolence: I can trust you on your willingness to help me translating Herodotus even if I don’t defer to your competence in Ancient Greek. Competence doesn’t depend on your commitment to be trustworthy to me.
Most evidential accounts of intellectual trust explore the dimension of competence more than that of benevolence. The epistemological literature on assessing expertise insists on what are the cognitive strategies that we can adopt in order to assess the reliability of doctors, lawyers, witnesses, journalists, etc. Alvin Goldman argues that there exist “truth-revealing situations” [6] in which a novice can test the competence of the expert even if she doesn’t know how the expert has come to collect her evidence. For example, the weather today is a truth-revealing situation of the expertise of the weather forecast that I have read yesterday on the New York Times. If the NYT weather forecast were systematically lower in predicting whether than the Yahoo weather forecast, I would have evidence to trust the latter more than the former even if I don’t have the slightest idea about how a weather forecast is produced. That’s our commonsense practice in order to calibrate our informants’ expertise even if we are novices in their domain of expertise. If my doctor’s therapy against my stomach ache is inefficacious, I am in a truth revealing situation to assess her competence. Of course, not every domain of expertise admits truth-revealing situations: A large portions of formal sciences such as mathematics of physics don’t. In these cases, there exist alternative strategies that allow us to assess the reliability of the overall social process that sustains the epistemic dependence of laymen to experts. Such strategies have been investigated by various authors, for example Philip Kitcher who names the overall project of describing the strategies of granting expertise to others as The study of the organisation of cognitive labour. As he points out: “Once we have recognized that individuals form beliefs by relying on information supplied by others, there are serious issues about the conditions that should be met if the community is to form a consensus on a particular issue – questions about the division of opinion and of cognitive effort within the community and issues about the proper attribution of authority” [Kitcher, 1994, 114]. For example, I can have methods to track your past records within a particular domain and grant you authority on the basis of your “earned reputation” in this domain[7]. Or I can grant you authority due to your better epistemic position: I call my sister in Milan and she tells me that it is raining there and I believe her because I am able to assess her better epistemic position about the weather in Milan. These accounts insist on the rational bases of our trust in other people’s epistemic authority and appeal to a conceptual framework similar to that of the evidential accounts of trust in social sciences by using the language of rational decision theory or of microeconomics[8].
Evidential accounts of trust in authority illuminate the reasons why we reliably appeal to experts in specialized domains. But, as I said, trust in epistemic authority doesn’t seem to reduce only to assessment of expertise. Nor have we always the choice to trust or distrust. The examples that I give at the beginning of this paper show that it is not always a matter of deciding to defer to other people’s authority: It just happens that the very nature of some of our beliefs is deferential, and that’s not a phenomenon that seems to be captured by these accounts.

Motivational accounts of trust
Many authors in social science and moral philosophy claim that evidential accounts fail to provide an appropriate picture of trust, by appealing only to a set of rational expectations on other people’s motivations to commit to cooperation. Our commitment to trust is not only cognitive, that is, based on the degree of our beliefs about the future actions of the trusted. Trust involves also a motivational, non-representational dimension that may depend on our deep moral, emotional or cultural pre-commitments. Thus, in the paper I have mentioned above, Becker speaks of our trust as non-cognitive if it is a disposition to be trustful “independently of our beliefs or expectations about their trustworthiness” [p. 50]. In a book entitled Authority Richard Sennett defines trust in authority as an emotional commitment. And in a seminal paper, Annette Baier defines trust as the accepted vulnerability to another’s possible but not expected ill will toward one, and explores the varieties of moral, emotional and cultural grounds on which we accept this vulnerability. On the same line, Otto Lagerspetz says: “trust is not the fact that one, after calculating the odds, feels no risk: It is feeling no risk without calculating the odds” [1998] These accounts try to capture the idea that in many circumstances our trust in others cannot be converted into subjective estimates of risk, because the margins of ignorance or uncertainty are too broad for such estimates to be possible. Also, as Baier points out, “trust can come with no beginnings, with gradual as well as sudden beginnings and with various degrees of self-consciousness, voluntariness and expressness” [Baier, 1986, p.240]. That is, the child who trusts her mother, the patient who trusts her doctor, the novice scientist who trusts the truth of the main results in her domain without having gone through the details of the proofs, have different degrees of control and thus of choice on their trustful attitude. As the anthropologist Maurice Bloch says in his explanation of the role of deference in rituals: “We are permanently floating in a soup of deference” Most of the time we are not aware of the reason we have to trust. We simply do so[9].
The moral philosophical literature on motivational trust tries to establish to what extent such trustful attitudes are morally justified. Baier’s conclusion is that they are insofar as there are minimal reasons to think that the trusted exerting her authority on us is caring for the goods we want her to care for. For example it is justified to trust our partner in the treatment of our child even if we don’t approve or understand her actions, if we have reasons to think that she cares for the child.
A more empirical literature in social psychology and economics tries to establish the effects of motivational trust on stabilizing cooperation and reliability in negotiations and in everyday life.
What about the epistemic implications of motivational accounts? Do they illuminate in any sense our trust in epistemic authority? At a first glance, motivational accounts seem better equipped to explain a broader spectrum of cases than evidential accounts do. A motivational dimension seems to be involved in the asymmetrical deferential relations of trust in epistemic authority that I’ve tried to suggest in my previous examples. Indeed, trust in epistemic authority doesn’t seem to be a matter of choice in the most straightforward examples: The child who trusts her mother when she tells her that she needs to breathe air to survive - even if she cannot see air and cannot figure out what is the role of oxygen in our survival - doesn’t have the choice to be skeptical, as well as the patient who is told by her doctor that she has contracted a potentially lethal disease. Also, we find ourselves committed to trust the intellectual authority of other people just because we are part of the same linguistic and epistemic community, we share the same institutions and we acknowledge a “division of cognitive labour” in our community. But if we accept the principle that a certain amount of “default” trust - or spontaneous trust - is needed to sustain our cognitive life in a social environment, how do we avoid the risk of credulity that such a trustful disposition seems to imply? And if the motivational trust that sustains our social relations may be based on moral, cultural or emotional pre-commitments, what about the pre-commitments underlying the motivational trust that sustains our cognitive relations? Moral commitments to trust in other people’s intellectual authority typically ground the adhesion to the most irrational beliefs. Religious beliefs or allegiance to a guru’s thoughts are often justified in terms of moral or emotional commitments. But that’s exactly the kind of beliefs that an epistemological account of trust should try to ban in order to avoid the risk of gullibility imputed to a default trustful attitude towards the words of others.

Reidian accounts of epistemic trust

Another way to argue for the role of motivational trust in knowledge acquisition is to see it as an innate disposition to accept what other people tell us. And indeed many authors have argued that a natural tendency to trust others is the only way to justify testimonial knowledge. The locus classicus of this position is Thomas Reid’s defense of trust in testimony: We are justified in believing what other people say because we, as humans have a natural disposition to speak the truth and a natural disposition to accept as true what other people tell us. Reid calls these two principles, “that tally with each other”[10], the Principle of Veracity and the Principle of Credulity. But the match between these two principles, that Reid considers self-evident, is far from being clear. The principle of veracity is not well correlated to truth: It just affirms that people are disposed to say what they believe to be true, which does not mean that they say what it is actually true[11]. Thus, an appeal to a natural trustful disposition doesn’t suffice to justify our epistemic trust and protect it from credulity.
Reid affirms that if we deny any legitimacy, or at least, naturalness to our trust in others, the result would be skepticism. We believe “by instinct” what our parents and teachers say long before having the capacity to critically judge their competence. But that is just a way of acknowledging the pervasiveness of the lore of inheritance and upbringing to shape one owns’ concepts and beliefs without explaining it. It is a fact that we are influenced by others, not only in infancy but in the acquisition of most of our beliefs. But acknowledging this fact is not sufficient explanation of why we are justified to comply with our trustful tendencies.
Modern defences of a Reidian epistemology[12] appeal to the existence of natural language as the material proof that the two principles (credulity and veracity) indeed tally with each other: Most statements in any public language are testimonial and most statements are true; if they were not it is difficult to imagine how a public language could have ever stabilized. [cf. Coady, 1992]. The very possibility of a common language presupposes a general truthful use of speech.
Tyler Burge relies on the “purely preservative character” of linguistic communication to argue that we have a priori justification to rely of what we understand other to be saying. Language, as memory, is a medium of content preservation[13].
I have discussed these positions elsewhere[14]. Here let me just mention that, although these positions give us some hints of the ‘passive’, non-intentional trust that characterizes our role of cognizers in a social community, their appeal to some structural features of language is less convincing in solving the paradox of epistemic trust, that is, how it is compatible with intellectual autonomy. That is, what concerns us here is: “how intellectual autonomy is possible, given what we know about the power of one’s inheritance and surroundings to shape one’s concepts, opinions and even the way one reasons?” [Foley, 2001: 128]
Epistemic trust out of self-trust
A different line of defense of the legitimacy of trust in others has been recently pursued by Richard Foley in his book on Intellectual Trust in Oneself and in Others [Cambridge, 2001]. Foley derives it from the justification we have to trust ourselves. We grant a default authority in our intellectual faculties to provide us with reliable information about the world. This is our only way out of skepticism. But if we have this basic trust in our intellectual faculties, why should we withhold it form others? We acknowledge the influence that others had in shaping our thoughts and opinions in the past. If acknowledging this fact doesn’t prevent us to grant authority to ourselves, it should not prevent us to grant authority to others, given that our opinions wouldn’t be reliable today if theirs were not in the past. And even in cases of interaction of people from different cultures whose influence upon our thinking is poor or nonexistent, we can rely on the general fact that our cognitive mechanisms are largely similar to extend our self-trust to them [cf. Foley 2004, ch. 4]. This strategy of simulation of other minds leads Foley to a sort of “modest epistemic universalism” according to which “It is trust in myself that creates for me a presumption in favor of other people’s opinions, eve if I know little about them”[15] [cf. ibidem p.108].
I find Foley’s position attractive as it preserves intellectual autonomy and ends in justifying just the minimal trust necessary to sustain our epistemic life, avoiding the “deferential incontinence” and thus gullibility that is imputed to Reidian solutions. But Foley’s analysis lacks the motivational dimension that I think an explanation of epistemic trust should include in order to account for very heterogeneous cases such as deliberate deference to an intellectual authority, passive trust to the authority of our cultural heritage and default trust that we grant to others in spontaneous conversation. What his account misses is the idea that in many contexts trusting others doesn’t seem to be depend on what we know or discover about them, as for instance that they are similar to us. Rather, trusting others is a matter of commitment to their trustworthiness in the social as well as in the epistemic cases. One could go further, and suggest that we owe this kind of commitment even to self-trust, that is, that the authority on my own mental states does not depend on something that I discover about myself. Self-trust is the product of a responsible and deliberative commitment about the consequences of assuming some beliefs as my beliefs. Richard Moran defends this line in his recent book, Authority and Estrangement[16]. According to Moran, this act of commitment is constitutive of my self-knowledge. I would not expand further, but I think it shows how problematic is to ground our trust in authority in self-trust. How can we capture the motivational dimension of epistemic trust we need to have a full-fledged notion of trust in authority? As we have seen, we cannot follow moral/social accounts of trust and ground a motivational account in emotional or moral pre-commitments, because this would unavoidably lead to irrationality. Still, grounding it in some innate dispositions or deriving it from self-trust misses the whole point of understanding the nature of our commitment to trust in other people’s authority.
In the last section, I will explore a different strategy, and consider one on the most straightforward contexts in which commitment, trust and knowledge bloom together, that is, human communication.
Conversation, trust and communication
One fundamental fact about the social transmission of knowledge that is surprisingly under-exploited in the epistemological literature on intellectual authority is that every social contagion of beliefs goes through a process of communication that ranges from street-level conversation to more institutionalized settings of information exchange. Our almost permanent immersion in talks and direct or indirect conversations is the major source of cognitive vulnerability to other people beliefs and reports, even when the exchange is not particularly focused on knowledge acquisition[17]. Communication is a voluntary act. Each time we speak we are intentionally seeking the attention of our interlocutors and thus presenting what we have to say as potentially relevant for them. Each time we listen, we intentionally engage in an interpretation of what has been said, and expand cognitive effort in order to make sense of what our interlocutor had in mind. In this last section of my paper, I will argue that it is the intentional, voluntary character of human communication that guarantees our intellectual autonomy even in those cases in which our epistemic position obliges us to defer to other people’s authority. And the making and breaking of epistemic trust is related in many ways to our conversational practices.
There are many different styles of discourse that imply different degrees of reciprocal trust. Of course, the set of norms and assumptions that we tacitly accept when engaging in intellectual conversation[18] are not the same we endorse in a party conversation where the common aim we tacitly share with our interlocutors is entertaining and social contact. Still, a basic reciprocal commitment, I will claim, has to take place in any genuine case of communication. And the cognitive dimension of this basic commitment has interesting consequences for our reciprocal trust.
Intentional analyses of communication have been a major contribution to philosophy of language and pragmatics in the last 40 years. We owe to Paul Grice[19] the modern pragmatic analysis of linguistic interpretation as the reconstruction of the speaker’s intentions. Simply decoding the linguistic meaning of the words conveyed in an act of communication is not enough to make sense of what the speaker wanted to tell us. Successful communication involves cooperation among interlocutors, even when the ultimate aim of one of the parties is to deceive the other: Without at least a common aim to understand each other, communication would not be possible. Thus communication is a much richer and constructive activity than simply decoding a linguistic signal. According to Grice, we infer what the speaker says on the tacit assumption that she is conforming to the same set of rules and maxims that guide our cooperative effort to understand each other. Among these maxims, two of them are worth considering for the present purposes: One is a maxim of quality of the information conveyed: “Do not say what you believe to be false” that Grice considers as most important. This doesn’t mean that the participants in a conversation are actually truthful. But they act as they were telling the truth, that is, they conform to the maxim, otherwise the minimal common aim to understand each other would not be realized. So they need at least to pretend to be cooperative. On the hearer’s side, the presumption that the speaker is conforming to the maxim doesn’t imply that the hearer comes automatically to believe what the speaker says. She interprets the speaker on the presumption that the speaker is conforming to the maxims, and that leads her to infer what she meant, even if, later, she may be led to revise her presumption on the basis of what she knows already or what she has come to believe during the conversation.
The other maxim that I would like to consider is that of relevance. Contemporary pragmatic theories have developed a notion of relevance as the key notion that guides our interpretations. For example Sperber and Wilson’s pragmatic approach, known as Relevance Theory, says that each act of communication communicates a presumption of its own relevance. A relevant piece of information, in a given context, is one that optimizes the balance between the cognitive effort I have to invest to process it and the benefits I have to entertain it in my mind. A potential communicator presents herself as having something to say that is relevant for us, otherwise we would not even engage in conversation. Communication is a very special case of behavior. It is always intentional and it requires, to be successful, to be recognized as intentional. I don’t automatically give attention to every cognitive stimulus that is potentially relevant for me, but I cannot refrain to allocate at least a minimal attention to an overt act of communication that is addressed to me, because the very fact that it is addressed to me is a cue that it worth attention. The presumption of relevance that accompanies every act of intentional communication is what grounds our spontaneous trust in others. I trust a communicator who intentionally asks for my attention to convey something that is relevant for me, and adopt a stance of trust that will guide me to a relevant interpretation of what she has said (that is, an interpretation that satisfies my expectations given what she says and what she may assume we are sharing as common ground contextual information). In this rich and constructive process of building new representations and hypothesis on the presumption that they will be relevant for me, the speaker and the hearer are both responsible for the set of thoughts they generate in conversation, that is, what Sperber and Wilson call their “mutual cognitive environment”. But the hearer doesn’t automatically accept as true the whole set of common ground thoughts that have been activated in the conversation. She may decide to entertain them in her mind for the sake of conversation, and trust the speaker that this is relevant information for her. Our mutual cognitive environments, that is, the set of hypotheses and representations that we activate in our mind when we communicate in order to understand each other, do not overlap with the set of what we actually believe. In conversation, our interior landscape enriches itself of new representations that have been created on the presumption of their relevance for us, a presumption we are justified to have because we have been intentionally addressed by our interlocutor. We trust our interlocutor in their willingness to share a mutually relevant cognitive environment, that is, to build a common ground that maximizes understanding and favors the emergence of new, relevant thoughts. But our previous knowledge and a more fine-grained check of the content communicated can end up in rejecting much of what has been said. Trusting in relevance of what other people say is the cognitive vulnerability that we accept in order to activate in our mind new thoughts and hypothesis that are shared with our interlocutors. There is never an automatic transfer of beliefs from one’s head to another’s. The “floating of other men’s opinions in our brains”[20] is mediated by a process of interpretation that make us activate a number of hypothesis on the presumption, guided by the hearer, that they will be relevant for us. These online thoughts that serve the purposes of conversation are not accepted by default as new beliefs. They are worth considering given the trust we make in our interlocutors. There may be even worth repeating without further checking because of their relevant effects in certain conversational contexts. But they can be easily discharged if their probability is too low given what we know about the world or what we have come to know about the interlocutor. We trust our interlocutors to be relevant enough to be worth our attention. Our trust is both fundamental and fragile: It is fundamental because I need to trust in other people’s willingness to be relevant for me in order to make sense of what they are saying. It is fragile because a further check can lead me to abandon most of the hypotheses I generated in conversation and withdraw credibility to my interlocutor.
Our mental life is populated by a bric-à-brac of drafty, sketchy semi-propositional representations that we need in order to sustain our interpretations of the thousands of discourses to which we are permanently exposed. We accept some of them as beliefs, we use others in our inferences and we throw a lot of them as pure noise. This doesn’t make us gullible beings: We trust others to cooperate in generating relevant sets of representations, and we share with them the responsibility of these representations. Of course, our epistemic strategies vary in the course of our life. The trust of a child in the relevance of what her parents say may lead her to automatically believing the content of what is said, that is, understanding and believing may be simultaneous processes in early childhood[21]. As we grow up, we develop strategies of checking and filtering information.
A presumption of trust in other people’s willingness to deliver us relevant information is thus the minimal default trust we are justified in having towards testimony. This stance of trust ends up enough often to an epistemic improvement of our cognitive life[22].
But our efforts in interpretation are not always rewarded. Trust in relevance guides our process of interpretation and may lead us to invest supplementary effort in trying to make sense of what our interlocutor is talking about. It is on the basis of our default trust, that we often invest too many resources with the only aim of making sense what the other person is talking about. Sometimes my supplementary efforts are rewarded, sometimes they end up in a too generous interpretation of what I was told. The overconfidence people sometimes have in the relevance of esoteric discourse depends on the direct proportionality between the effort people invest in interpreting others and the trust they have to receive relevant information. Trust in relevance may act as a bias that leads us to over-interpret or excessively rationalize what others say.
In a beautiful novel by Jerzy Kosinsky, Being There, adapted as a perhaps better known film with Peter Sellers, Chance Gardiner is a mentally impaired gardener who becomes an heir to the throne of a Wall Street tycoon, a presidential policy adviser and a media icon just by pronouncing few, enigmatic sentences about gardening.
As a result of a series of fortuitous accidents, Chance finds himself living in the house of Mr. Rand, a Wall Street tycoon and a close friend of the President of United States. In a dialogue with the President visiting Mr. Rand’s house, when asked to comment about the bad season at Wall Street, Chance says: “In a garden, growth has its season. There are spring and summer, but there are also fall and winter. And then spring and summer again. As long as the roots are not severed all is well and will be well” (p. 54). Looking for a relevant interpretation, and trusting (in this case mistakenly) to Chance’s willingness to be relevant, the President interprets it as an important statement about the fundamental symmetry between nature and society, and quotes him on television the day after.
We all have experiences of over-trust generated out of an over-investment in interpretation. And, conversely, an excessive investment in interpreting what a person says that reveals ill-founded may make our withdraw of trust more definitive.
Trust and comprehension are thus intimately related. An epistemology of trust should account for this relation. Our first epistemic objective in acquiring knowledge from others is to understand what they say and make sense of their thoughts within the context of ours. We are never passively infected by other people’s beliefs: we take the responsibility to interpret what they say and share with them a series of commitments on the quality of the exchange. The social dimension of knowledge is grounded in our cognitive activity as interpreters, an activity we always share with others.

References:
Baier, A. [1986] “Trust and Antitrust”, Ethics, vol. 96, no. 2, pp. 231-260.
Becker, L.C. [1996] “Trust as Non-cognitive Security about Motives”, Ethics, 107, 43-61.
Blais, M. [1987] “Epistemic Tit for Tat”, Journal of Philosophy, 7, pp. 363-75.
Coady, C.A.J. [1992] Testimony, Clarendon Press, Oxford.
Elgin, Catherine [1996] Considered Judgment, Princeton University Press
Foley, Richard [2001] Intellectual Trust in Oneself and Others, Cambridge University Press.
Gambetta, D. [1988] Trust. Making and Breaking Cooperative Relations, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, on line edition at: http://www.sociology.ox.ac.uk/papers/trustbook.html
Goldman, A. [1991] "Epistemic Paternalism: Communication Control in Law and Society," The Journal of Philosophy 88: 113-131.
Hardin, Russell [2002] Trust, Russell Sage Foundation, New York.
Holton, R. [1994] “Deciding to Trust, Coming to Believe”, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 72, pp. 63-76.
Kitcher, P. [1992] “Authority, Deference and the Role of Individual Reason” in E. McMullin (ed.) The Social Dimension of Scientific Knowledge, University of Notre Dame Press.
Kitcher, P. [1994] “Contrasting conceptions of social epistemology” in F. Schmitt (ed.) Socializing Epistemology, Rowman & Littlefield, pp. 111-134.
Lackey, Jennifer [1999] “Testimonial Knowledge and Transmission” The Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 49, n. 197, pp. 471-490
Lagerspetz, O. [1998] Trust. The Tacit Demand, Kluwer.
Matilal, B.M., Chakrabati, A. (1994) Knowing from Words, Kluwer Academic Publishers
Moran, Richard [2001] Authority and Estrangement, Princeton University Press
Raz, Joseph [1986] The Morality of Freedom, Clarendon Press, Oxford
Raz, Joseph [1990] (ed.) Authority, New York University Press
Recanati, Francois [1997] “ Can We Believe What We Do not Understand?” Mind and Language, 12, 1,
Sennett, R. [1980] Authority, W. W. Norton, London.
Sperber, Dan [1997] “Intuitive and Reflexive Beliefs”, Mind and Language, 12, 1, pp. 67-83.
Sperber, Dan, Wilson, D. [1986/1995] Relevance: Communication and Cognition, Basil Blackwell, Oxford.


[1] This example is a reformulation of a Francois Recanati’s example in his paper: “Can We Believe What We Do Not Understand?” Mind and Language, 1997, that I have discussed at length in another paper: “Croire sans comprendre”, Cahiers de Philosophie de l’Universite de Caen, 2000. The problem of deferential beliefs was originally raised by Dan Sperber in a series of papers: “Apparent Irrational Beliefs”, “Intuitive and Reflexive Beliefs” Mind and language, 1997.
[2] Another possible rational motivation to be trustworthy in the case of science is the high cost of cheating in the scientific community and the fear of risking permanent exclusion (see M. Blais [1987])
[3] It is interesting to notice that Becker liquidates much of the recent debate around the epistemic role of motivational trust by introducing credulity, as the disposition to believe what another person says and to banish skeptical thoughts, and reliance, as a disposition to depend upon other people in some respects (pp. 45-46), both of them that lie outside the reach of a rational motivation to accept other people’s intellectual authority.
[4] Take for example Hardwig analysis in his paper: “The Role of Trust in Knowledge”. There are exceptions to this critics, as for example R. Foley’s book Intellectual Trust in Oneself and Others (Cambridge UP, 2001) in which a detailed analysis of trust in the authority of others is provided in ch.4.
[5] For an analysis of this ambiguity, cf. R. B. Friedman (1990) “On the Concept of Authority in Political Philosophy” in J. Raz (ed.) Authority, New York University Press.
[6] Cf. A. Goldman "Epistemic Paternalism: Communication Control in Law and Society," The Journal of Philosophy 88 (1991): 113-131.
[7] Kitcher [1992] defines this kind of authority: “earned authority”.
[8] Cf. for an example of use of the economics framework A. Goldman and M. Shaked [1991] and P. Kitcher [1993] ch.8.
[9] Bloch explains rituals as a collective moment of awareness of the deference to the tradition. Cf. M. Bloch (2004): “Rituals and Deference”, in H. Whitehouse and J. Laidlaw (eds.) Rituals and Memory: Towards a Comparative Anthropology of Religion, Altamira Press, London.
[10] Cf. Reid [1764] Inquiry into the Human Mind, § 24.
[11] See on this point K. Leherer: “Testimony, Justification and Coherence”, in Matilal & Chakrabarti (eds.) pp. 51-67.
[12] For an overview of contemporary Reidian epistemology, see R. Foley [2001]
[13] Cf. T. Burge: “Content Preservation”, Philosophical Review, 102, pp. 457-487.
[14] Cf. G. Origgi [2004] “Is Trust an Epistemological Notion?”, Episteme, vol. 1, n.1, pp. 1-12.
[15] As Foley says, a stronger epistemic universalism would imply that other people’s opinions are necessarily prima facie credible. Cf. ibidem, p. 107.
[16] Cf. R. Moran [2001] Authority and Estrangement, Princeton University Press, especially ch. 2.
[17] On the fortuitous character of lot of our knowledge, cf. R. Hardin: “If it Rained Knowledge”, Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 33, pp. 3-24; and [2004] “Why Know?’ manuscript. Cf. also Jennifer Lackey: “Knowledge is not necessarily transmitted via testimony, but testimony can itself generate knowledge” [Jennifer Lackey (1999) “Testimonial Knowledge and Transmission”, The Philosophical Quarterly, 199, p. 490, vol. 49 n. 197]

[18] For an analysis of the mutually accepted norms that rule intellectual conversations, see P. Pettit and M Smith [1996] “Freedom in Belief and Desire”, The Journal of Philosophy, 93, 9, pp. 429-449.
[19] Cf. P. Grice [1957] Meaning, …
[20] Cf. J. Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. John W. Yolton, London 1961, 1, p. 58
[21] Interesting recent results in developmental psychology show that even young children are not gullible and have strategies for filtering information. See F. Clément, P. Harris, M. Koening (2004) “The Ontogenesis of Trust”, Mind&Language, vol. 19, 4, pp. 360-379.

[22] D. Sperber and D. Wilson have explained the details of the correlation between relevance and truth in D. Sperber, D. Wilson (2002): “Truthfulness and Relevance” Mind,