Epistemic trust and authority

Abstract

Epistemic trust refers to the mental or intellectual bond between the Self and Others, which takes two forms. First, it concerns the participants’ mutual trust that they share a common ground for understanding, communication and interpretation of their social reality. Second, it arises from the explicit awareness that the participants differ with respect to their understanding of their common ground and are willing to learn from an epistemic authority. Authority is a voluntary symbolic relation between the Self and Others. It contrasts with power, which refers to a relation of coercion that enforces obedience. The growing democratization of institutions and liberalization, as well as growing distrust of professionals, scientists and politicians, together with the emphasis on the rights of individuals and minority groups, has led to a crisis of authority.

1. Trust and distrust as heterogeneous concepts

Trust and distrust among individuals, groups and their sociocultural environments belong to central concepts defining human interaction and communication. These concepts regulate, both unreflectively and reflectively, social activities in their heterogeneous and multifaceted relations. Scholars of anthropology and sociology, as well as developmental and clinical psychology, have written a great deal on forms of trust and distrust, whether with respect to fatalism in peasants, business and marketing, child fears, patients with mental and physical illnesses and otherwise. Very often, ‘trust’ is not clearly distinguished from other notions, such as familiarity (Luhmann, 1988), confidence (Giddens, 1990; Luhmann, 1988; Seligman, 1997) and faith (Seligman, 1997). Like other social concepts, trust makes no sense in isolation, but only in relation to its opposite, whether that is distrust, mistrust, suspicion or danger; and it is comprehended in networks of other concepts, such as social capital, belief, solidarity, reciprocity and security. Related to networks of concepts in different languages, cultures and sociopolitical systems, the term ‘trust’ is highly polysemic. Individuals develop its meanings through the process of socialization and communication. Trusting God, parents, friends, institutions, professionals or the future involves different forms of trust in interactions, relationships and communication. In a heterogeneous and complex society like ours, trust is very much person- and content- specific. For example, one may trust the other individual with respect to a specific activity, such as professional competence, but not regarding personal integrity. One might not reveal to others personal aspects of one's life, affiliation with particular social groups, interpersonal relations and so on. Contemporary society is characterized by services and transactions in which people do not interact with each other as whole persons but make only specific dealings in their roles as accountants, doctors, shopkeepers and so on. Historically, differentiation in society and the division of labor have led to the formation of social groups, associations and institutions in which people remain anonymous. They are bound together by impersonal relations, producing multiple, yet complementary, features of trust. Simmel (1950: 318) views trust as ‘one of the most important synthetic forces within society’. For him, trust is above all a fundamental psychosocial feeling (Watier, 2002; Watier and Marková, 2004). It is apprehended instantaneously and, hence, quite often without the awareness of those concerned.

2. Epistemic trust

Among the heterogeneous meanings mentioned above, epistemic trust and distrust refer to the mental or intellectual bond between the Self and Others, which takes two mutually interrelated forms. First, it refers to the participants’ mutual trust that they share a common ground for understanding, communication and interpretation of their social reality. The participants must have an implicit trust that they share, at least partly, their understandings of interactions and joint activities. During cooperative activities, whether in sport, work or leisure, participants can coordinate their complementary activities with minimum speech or gestures, which they spontaneously understand and interpret. For example, single words or phrases like ‘up’, ‘tighten’ and ‘to the left’ during a cooperative activity express intuitive anticipations of one another's intentions resulting in synchronized joint actions in and through unprompted trust. Participants usually do not attend to details of coordinated interactions and do not notice the complexity of such spontaneous engagements with one another. This interactive sensitivity, which has developed in human history and culture, has become a feature of common sense and of trust in the shared social world, specific to diverse human societies.

In contrast to the mutual and synchronized commonsense understanding of participants’ joint cooperative activities, the second form of epistemic trust stems from the explicit awareness that participants differ with respect to their understanding of their common ground. Due to their different experiences, knowledge, age and social status, the participants’ grasps of their social reality are asymmetrical. If they wish to diminish differences in knowledge and experience, and to expand the common ground for understanding, they must adopt epistemic trust manifesting itself as willingness to learn from one another. Alternatively, humans may negotiate their epistemic trust/distrust regarding available evidence in order to establish the common ground for understanding. Otherwise, they may reject epistemic trust in one another.

Learning from others is a rational and efficient manner of acquiring knowledge. Lay citizens, unlike eminent scientists, do not usually make fundamental discoveries and inventions about nature and society. Instead, they learn from experts, teachers, the media, or from ‘ordinary Others’ such as peers and parents, or from traditions transmitted over generations. Therefore, epistemic trust of the ‘Other’ in learning is a substitute for the Self's lack of capacity to discover and comprehend knowledge on his/her own. Epistemic trust has obtained an institutional function in various domains of life, such as education, management, politics, religion and elsewhere, where experts are placed in ‘the position of trust’ and expected to function as reliable sources of knowledge in their specific fields. In an ideal case of sociocultural learning, the epistemic authority of an educator originates from his/her expertise and capacity to transmit knowledge or justified beliefs in a dynamic process of learning in trust. In a less-than-ideal case, epistemic authority gets involved, voluntarily or involuntarily, with beliefs and ideological self-interests of institutions or specific groups. When political and ideological strategies of institutions and experts imbued with power and self-interests interfere with learning, the role of epistemic authority becomes ambiguous and untrustworthy.

3. Authority versus power

The Russian–French philosopher Alexandre Kojève explained authority as a voluntary symbolic relation between the Self and the Other, which could be an individual or an institution with high prestige. Authority has emerged in human history; it exists in all cultures, societies and in their institutions, such as governments of states, religious establishments and all hierarchically structured organizations. Authority, which is a voluntary symbolic relation, contrasts with power, which refers to an involuntary relation with the Other. It can be brute and involve physical or social violence. Power implies coercion and enforces obedience, including the legal or moral supremacy of governing bodies or institutions exercising power in specific spheres.

Kojève (2004/2014) emphasized the voluntary feature of epistemic authority: it is a relation of interdependence between the Self and Others in which an individual, group or institution has an emblematic influence over another individual or group. Such relations are not permanent; they may undergo changes and therefore, like charisma, authority is perishable.

Arendt (1977a) also insists that authority must not be confused with power. Although both power and authority are hierarchical relations, if someone with authority uses coercion, that implies that authority has failed (Arendt, 1977a; Kojève, 2004/2014). Despite that, power and authority are often intermingled in daily life, and it may be difficult to view them as separate phenomena. For example, the Self may become deeply involved with a powerful political, religious or ideological leader, whom the Self also appreciates as an epistemic authority. Such a powerful leader may profoundly influence the Self's convictions, passions and actions. The authority may captivate others by the power of ideas that he/she represents, or by his/her personal characteristics.

Referring to this issue, Moscovici (1988/1993) suggested that we need to distinguish two kinds of epistemic authority: mosaic and totemic leaders. The charisma of a mosaic leader stems from the spreading of belief and doctrine. Examples of such leaders are Moses, Socrates, Gandhi, Marx and Lenin. These leaders enchant their followers by the passion of conviction; they propagate their ideas that promise a better future of the humankind. Such ideas, being morally superior to other perspectives, enchant groups and masses. In other words, these leaders influence masses by the authority of their ideas. The second kind of leader, the totemic leader, is represented by persons like Stalin, Hitler and Napoleon. Although they also present ideas promising a better future for the masses, the doctrine that these leaders spread is primarily attached to them as individuals, and they build cults around their personalities. Their charisma is tied to them as individuals, and they represent the symbol or the totem. Totemic leaders present themselves as ‘personal saviours of the masses’ (Moscovici, 1988/1993: 226). They have the political and the state power to destroy their opponents. They also create myths around themselves by claims that they can lead the masses out of crisis, arousing, at the same time, collective emotions that are accompanied effectively by songs, marches and dances. In such circumstances, hypnotized by the authority of a charismatic leader, the Self or the group also views such leaders as powerful. In the attempts of individuals, groups and masses to intersubjectively share experiences with the leader and to identify with him/her, both authority and power become fused. In practice, both charisma and power may instigate group belongingness and social identification, which may imply that the Self includes Others as part of his/her own Self.

4. The crisis of epistemic authority

Ever since the late 1960s and 1970s, the scrutiny of state establishments and private institutions led to protests in various social strata against the old order of ‘authority’, which was often conceived as a one-sided power, rather than as a voluntary recognition of mutual trust (Arendt, 1977a; Gordon, 1999; Nisbet, 1966; Sennett, 1980; Wynne, 1985). The growing democratization of institutions after World War II, and subsequent liberalization in education, politics, health and therapeutic services, has encouraged the idea that the Self is an interdependent authority that should reject the authority of Others in their various forms. This perspective places emphasis on the claim that humans are born as equal individuals and that they have the same rights to make their choices and decisions about matters that concern them. This movement has kept on expressing demands for granting voices to citizens in education, moral liberties and freedom of choice in various spheres of life. It has been further encouraged by growing distrust of professionals and scientists, and in particular of politicians interfering with science and education. As suspicions concerning the hiding of knowledge about biological risks, economic problems and ‘new deaths’ caused by HIV/AIDS and mad cow disease (Lambert, 2005), and most recently, coronavirus 19, have become widespread, epistemic trust has eroded.

5. Epistemic trust, risk and fear

In science, the trust‒risk dichotomy emerged in the 16th and 17th centuries together with the first mathematical models calculating risk attached to probabilities. Epistemically, trust and risk refer to an expectance of behavior of the Other, whether of individuals or institutions. Trust‒risk has become a fundamental concept in economics, marketing, banking and all forms of investment. Trusting others means taking risks. Although auditing has had a very long history, it has achieved a distinctive status of a ritual called ‘the audit society’ (Power, 1997). As advanced economic systems had to cope with more risks as well as fiscal crises, more auditing, control and formalized accountability came to be viewed as a necessary contribution to democracy and as a confidence-raising measure (Anderson and Dedrick, 1990), as well as a bureaucratic solution to the ‘legitimation crisis’ (Habermas, 1975). Accountability and a total control have become apparent in all public relations in which individuals could abuse their positions of trust. Another dichotomy, trust‒fear, has a much longer history. It has been always present in daily life due to menaces from strangers, rulers or environmental dangers. However, since the beginning of the 21st century, the generalized distrust in society has become related to fear, paranoia, conspiracy, secrecy and deception. It represents the shift in the meaning of the dichotomy of trust versus distrust towards trust versus fear. This has been documented by numerous publications referring to conspiracy and secrecy in American culture (see e.g., Fenster, 1999), conspiracy theories in American history (Knight, 2003), paranoia within reason (Marcus, 1999), the age of anxiety (Parish and Parker, 2001) and indeed paranoid society (Campion-Vincent, 2005). It seems that this phenomenon touches on all sectors of society and augments the ambiguity and confusion that characterize our epoch. Socialization into fear involves suspicion and distrust in communications of authorities; it induces uncertainty.

Since crucial medical and economic problems have become politicized, epistemic distrust dominates international and global problems, such as pandemics, ecological disasters and wars, in which the trust‒fear dichotomy prevails.

All this has undermined the status of the existing authorities and placed emphasis on the rights of independent individuals and minority groups. Relations of hierarchy in various spheres of social life have crumbled and have become substituted by demands for equality and autonomy of humans. The idea that all humans are born with the capacity for rational thought and judgement seems to have contributed to the abandonment of the epistemic authorities of experts, such as teachers, judges, policemen and politicians (Zagzebski, 2012). Zagzebski notes that, while organizations or professional bodies are sometimes referred to as ‘epistemic authority,’ this notion has been disappearing in recent years due to the emphasis on egalitarianism and the freedom of the individual.

6. The degradation of epistemic authority in education

The tendency to abolish hierarchies in various domains of life has become particularly visible in professional services that were traditionally hierarchical, such as teacher‒pupil and doctor‒patient services. Arguments that teachers and students should share epistemic authority have become widespread: not only do students learn from teachers, but, equally, teachers learn from students, particularly about social justice. It has been proposed that, if education is run in a non-authoritarian manner, this will provide a basis for a non-authoritarian society of the future (Oyler, 1996). New models of ‘progressive professions’ maintain that sharing authority should improve cooperation with students and the building of trust, which is essential for any organizations in which people develop knowledge and understanding. Students should be granted some choice about what they want to learn (Hurn, 1985), and this would enable the development of their intellectual and moral autonomy. Teachers should be encouraged to eradicate hierarchical systems in classrooms, to deconstruct authority and introduce participatory interactions (Pace and Hemmings, 2007). While all this may sound progressive, many problems occur in practice. How can an expert teacher or professional treat a pupil, who is in the class to learn, as having equal experience, knowledge, social sensitivity and other features? Cases of students who, for one reason or other, do not accept the educator as an epistemic authority are often discussed by the media, professionals, parents or teachers themselves (Arendt, 1977b; Minogue, 2010). For example, students from a ‘working class’ background might reject the epistemic authority of a ‘middle class’ teacher who, in the students’ view, knows nothing about life outside the school; women students might reject the male teacher; students from ethnic minorities might not approve of a teacher from the dominant majority, and so on.

An expansion in the use of the internet and social networking has become a new resource of information and a new form of epistemic authority. Moreover, social media create opportunities for creating relationships; new means of communication have transformed family lives, the roles of peer groups and the meaning of friendships (Lister et al., 2009). These media not only provide different ideas for learning, self-development and self-display, but they offer adventures and risks for children and young people. They compete with the established forms of learning and socializing, and, in many respects, the new forms have taken over the roles of epistemic authority and trust (Livingstone, 2008).

With her profound interest in political and social phenomena, Arendt (1977a) pointed out that one should no longer ask what authority is, but what authority was, because authority has disappeared from the modern world. According to her, tradition, religion and authority are three concepts that are interconnected. Of these, authority, more than others, secures stability. Although she viewed the crisis of authority to be political in its origin, it has spread into other domains; it has transformed family relations and child-rearing practices.

The fast-changing world of technological advancements brings about challenges to adults’ roles regarding epistemic authority. With respect to the rejection of epistemic authority in schools, Arendt (1977b) commented that it was adults, rather than pupils, who abolished authority. In her view, it is absurd to treat children as a minority oppressed by the adult majority, and she noted that, by discarding authority, ‘the adults refuse to assume responsibility for the world into which they have brought the children’. Arendt's argument can be understood along the following lines. By treating pupils as epistemically equal to adults, the teacher deprives them of experiencing epistemic authority. Epistemic authority is a voluntary dialogical relation between the Self and the Other based on respect for the teacher, from whom the pupil is willing to learn. Consequently, depriving pupils of epistemic authority means denying them the opportunity of learning from someone who is more knowledgeable and more experienced than themselves. Learning from epistemic authority contributes to a relative certainty and stability required in meaningful daily life. If pupils do not experience and do not learn this, when they become adults, they will be unable to transfer such experience and knowledge to the future generation. They will not know what it means to be in the role of epistemic authority, and to have ‘responsibility for the world’, both of which come with maturity, knowledge and experience.

7. Conclusion

Throughout human history, epistemic trust and epistemic authority have been vital both for the development of common sense in human interactions and relationships and for the advancement of science. The epistemic authority of science has been always viewed as a threat to political, religious and ideological masters who, from their positions of power, continuously interfered with scientific discoveries. One can recall struggles of scientists over centuries as political and religious institutions denounced their work and obstructed scientific discoveries due to their ideological convictions. Vucinich (2001) provides a colorful history of the stages in acceptances and condemnations of Einstein's theory of relativity during the period from 1917 until 1991 in the Soviet Union corresponding to Marxist ideological transformations. These stages went together with internal economic and political struggles, with the ways in which Marxism interpreted and reinterpreted science, and exercised control over the country.

In contemporary democratic as well as non-democratic systems, dominated by profound international problems such as pandemics, economic disasters and ecological catastrophes, epistemic authority reappears as an actor in two diverse roles. On the one hand, fundamental medical and economic problems have become politicized, and self-interests, markets and the greed not only of politicians but also of professionals come to light. For example, recent shameful cases of two eminent medical scientists in the UK during the COVID-19 pandemic exposed their personal self-interests and hypocrisy, which undermine public trust in epistemic authority. On the other hand, the epistemic authority of doctors and paramedical staff acting with the highest ethical standards and with commitment to improve the human condition have shown that relations of epistemic trust and epistemic authority continue to be most productive phenomena in human society.