Abstract
What is the norm governing our credibility assessments of others? According to Miranda Fricker, the answer is “obvious”: we should match the level of credibility attributed to others to the evidence that they are offering the truth. In this paper, I will show that this evidentialist norm of credibility assessments is seriously wanting. In particular, I will identify and develop two kinds of testimonial injustice, which I call distributive and normative, and argue that this norm is fundamentally incapable of ruling them out. Finally, I will develop and defend an alternative norm—what I call the Wide Norm of Credibility—that not only avoids the problems afflicting the evidentialist version, but also makes vivid both the relational and normative dimensions of our credibility assessments.
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Notes
- 1.
For the sake of ease of expression, I will speak simply of norms of credibility. But this should be understood as the norms governing our assessment of speakers’ credibility and the corresponding acceptance of their testimony.
- 2.
- 3.
Anderson (2012) identifies structural epistemic injustices that may have locally, non-prejudicial causes, and require structural remedies. I am convinced by Anderson’s arguments, and hence I do not think that all instances of testimonial injustice require a local, prejudicial origin. Nevertheless, I will, for the most part, grant this aspect of Fricker’s view in what follows.
- 4.
Fricker elsewhere adds that the prejudicial stereotypes that are relevant to testimonial injustice are those that also (i) have a negative valence, and (ii) stem from an “ethically noxious” motivation. Fricker (2007, p. 34) (i) and (ii) have been challenged on both empirical and philosophical grounds (see, for instance, Munroe (2016)), and so I will not focus on them in what follows.
- 5.
I will drop the “conditional” in referring to the EN in what follows. I will also assume that the hearers in question are making judgments of speakers’ credibility when they should be.
- 6.
Of course, reliability is not the same as infallibility, so it is possible to regard someone as reliable even in a very narrow domain and yet still consistently reject a number of her reports.
- 7.
I am grateful to Kathryn Pogin for this way of putting this point.
- 8.
José Medina (2011) has insightful and compelling work on credibility excesses, but he does not discuss them specifically in relation to hearers themselves, which I regard as one of the most important forms of such excesses. I will say more about this below. Davis (2016) also discusses how crediblity excesses can lead to testimonial injustice, but she focuses on phenomena such as typecasting and compulsory representation.
- 9.
There is a further objection to EN1 to note here. To see this, consider again the sexist male scientists, and suppose that not only do they give their female co-workers the appropriate level of credibility, they also believe accordingly. In particular, the men believe the women to be reliable and they believe that p when the women report that p. At the same time, suppose that the male scientists always illegitimately take men in general, rather than just themselves, to be more reliable than women and, as a result, do not believe that p because the women testified that p, but, rather, because their fellow male scientists believe that p. This is the case, despite their not having any good reason to prefer one source to the other. Here there is the right credibility assessment of S, the right belief (that p), but a route to belief that is epistemically and morally deviant. This deviant route renders the men open to epistemic and moral criticism—for ignoring relevant evidence and wronging the women in their capacity as knowers—and subjects the women to testimonial injustice—for not being believed due to the systematic prejudices of their co-workers. In particular, even though the men share the same beliefs as the women, they do not share them because the women testified to them. And not being believed simply because one is a woman, even when one’s hearer shares one’s belief, clearly wrongs one as an epistemic agent. At a minimum, then, the EN1 will need to be modified as follows:
EN1*: For every speaker, S, and hearer, H, if H makes a credibility assessment of S, then H should match it to the evidence that S is offering the truth, and believe, disbelieve, or withhold accordingly on a basis that includes S’s testimony.
In what follows, I will leave it implicit that the speaker’s testimony needs to be part of the basis for the hearer’s relevant doxastic state.
- 10.
See Dunning and Kruger (1999).
- 11.
Source: https://psmag.com/we-are-all-confident-idiots-56a60eb7febc#.s4dkyy2lr, accessed on 5 August 2015.
- 12.
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jul/18/daniel-kahneman-books-interview, accessed on 5 August 2015.
- 13.
- 14.
I’m excluding evidence ruling out that the defendant was the last person with the lucid baby.
- 15.
I should make clear that my conception of social identity here is broader than Fricker’s, including features like expertise in addition to race, gender, and so on. Given this, she might deny that this is an instance of testimonial injustice in her sense. Since my central purpose in this paper is to expand the notion of testimonial injustice, rather than to specifically argue that Fricker’s view is inadequate, I am less interested in showing that Fricker is wrong about having such a narrow conception of social identity and more focused on developing notions of testimonial injustice that have clear epistemological and moral significance.
- 16.
There are similarly vivid cases of expertise-excess testimonial injustice involving arson. See, for instance, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/09/07/trial-by-fire
- 17.
Medina (2011) makes a similar point in defending his “proportional view of testimonial injustice,” though he arrives at this conclusion through quite different arguments.
- 18.
Medina agrees: “Credibility is indeed not a finite good that can be in danger of becoming scarce in the same way that food and water can…” (Medina 2011, p. 19). Similarly, he writes, “The credibility excess assigned to some can be correlated to the credibility deficits assigned to others not because credibility is a scarce good (as the distributive model wrongly assumes), but because credibility is a comparative and contrastive quality, and an excessive attribution of it involves the privileged epistemic treatment of some (the members of the comparison class, i.e. those like the recipient) and the underprivileged epistemic treatment of others (the members of the contrast class, i.e. those unlike the recipient). An excessive attribution of credibility indirectly affects others who are, implicitly, unfairly treated as enjoying comparatively less epistemic trust. In my view, this is due to a disproportion in credibility an authority assigned to members of different groups. Credibility is not a scarce good that should be distributed with equal shares, but excesses and deficits are to be assessed by comparison with what is deemed a normal epistemic subject” (Medina 2011, p. 20).
- 19.
Of course, by proper distribution I do not mean equal distribution. When I develop my Wide Norm of Credibility later in the paper, I will make clear how I think credibility should be distributed.
- 20.
I develop this in greater detail in Lackey (unpublished).
- 21.
For discussions involving what I call normative defeaters, approached in a number of different ways, see BonJour (1980, 1985), Goldman (1986), Fricker (1987, 1994), Chisholm (1989), Burge (1993, 1997), McDowell (1994), Audi (1997, 1998), Williams (1999), Lackey (2008), BonJour and Sosa (2003), Hawthorne (2004), and Reed (2006). What all of these discussions have in common is simply the idea that evidence can defeat knowledge (justification) even when the subject does not form any corresponding doubts or beliefs from the evidence in question.
- 22.
For a very nice development of the notion of “should have known,” see Goldberg (2015).
- 23.
I’m grateful to Kevin McCain for pressing this objection.
- 24.
- 25.
For an extended discussion of this case, see http://www.buzzfeed.com/katiejmbaker/the-police-told-her-to-report-her-rape-then-arrested-her-for#.avG329Yj8
- 26.
See Brewer (1999).
- 27.
For very helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper, I’m grateful to Kevin McCain, Baron Reed, and audience members at the Social Norms and Epistemology Conference at St. Louis University, the Epistemic Norms Conference in Leuven, Belgium, the Institut Jean Nicod, the Intellectual Humility and Public Deliberation Workship at the University of Connecticut, Western Michigan University, the University of Groningen, Miami University, and the 2017 Bled Epistemology Conference.
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Lackey, J. (2018). Credibility and the Distribution of Epistemic Goods. In: McCain, K. (eds) Believing in Accordance with the Evidence. Synthese Library, vol 398. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95993-1_10
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