Information Evaluation

Chapter 2

Epistemic Trust

2.1. Introduction

In this chapter, I would like to take a broader perspective of information evaluation and see how it relates to the general epistemological question of the role of trust in knowledge. My perspective is that of social epistemology, i.e. the branch of modern epistemology which looks at the role of social processes in the formation and justification of knowledge. There are at least three aspects of the social dimension of knowledge which are of interest to epistemologists¹:

1) individual – how individuals’ beliefs are formed, and how they evaluate social sources of information;

2) collective – how social decision-making processes – such as assemblies or juries – operate, and how social aggregation of beliefs can yield accurate epistemic results;

3) systemic – what are the systemic and institutional constraints which steer the dissemination of information in a specific domain?

Social evaluation of information depends on all these dimensions. At an individual level, it is important to understand which indicators of information reliability an individual can use responsibly in the absence of direct expertise on the subject, in order to evaluate the epistemic quality of a piece of information. At a collective level, a group making decisions on the basis of information must share rules and procedures for consensus-reaching. At a systemic level, a system needs to be constructed in such a way as to take account of the weight of the different sources ...