Chapter 12. Who to Believe: Epistemic Authority

In the previous chapters, we focused on how to build and evaluate our own arguments. However, in the modern world, we cannot be experts in everything. We rely on the “testimony” of others—scientists, historians, journalists, and doctors. This chapter explores Epistemic Authority: the study of when it is reasonable to defer our own judgment to the expertise of others and how to navigate an information ecosystem filled with conflicting claims and “fake news.”

Summary

This chapter…

• Analyzes the Nature of Evidence, comparing direct sensory experience with the “testimony” of others.

• Establishes Criteria for Experts, defining how a Reasonable Person identifies a legitimate authority and when to doubt one.

• Explores Mitigated Skepticism, finding the middle ground between believing everything and the “Global Skepticism” that claims we can know nothing.

• Investigates Strong Objectivity, applying Sandra Harding’s framework to understand how including diverse perspectives improves the reliability of knowledge.

• Evaluates Extraordinary Claims, using David Hume’s famous argument regarding miracles to test the limits of testimony.

Key Terms

• Consensus: General agreement among the vast majority of experts in a specific field.

• Disinformation: Factually incorrect information intentionally spread to deceive or manipulate (the technical definition of “Fake News”).

• Epistemic Authority: A person or institution recognized as a reliable source of knowledge or expertise.

• Extraordinary Claim: A claim that contradicts well-established physical laws or a massive body of existing evidence.

• Fake News: Information presented in the format of a news report that is factually false or misleading.

• Global Skepticism: The self-defeating philosophical position that knowledge is impossible.

• Lateral Reading: The practice of verifying a source by leaving the website and checking what other reliable authorities say about it.

• Miracle (Humean): A violation of the laws of nature by a supernatural or divine cause.

• Mitigated Skepticism: A balanced intellectual stance that requires evidence for claims but admits that knowledge is possible.

• Non-Reductionism: The view that we are justified in trusting testimony by default unless we have a specific reason to doubt.

• Phenomenal Conservatism: The principle that we should trust our experiences as they “seem” to us until we have evidence of error.

• Reductionism (Testimony): The view that we should only trust testimony if we have independent evidence of the speaker’s reliability.

• Sagan Standard: The principle that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”

• Strong Objectivity: The practice of improving accuracy by starting research from the lives and standpoints of marginalized groups.

• Testimony: Any information or “evidence” we receive from the communication of others (books, speech, media).