Credibility

Credibility is the degree of readiness in an audience to accept a statement as valid. It is a relation rather than a property of the speaker. It is granted and can be withdrawn.

Ethos is, in classical rhetoric, the moral integrity and character of the speaker. It is the oldest account of why somebody is believed. It locates credibility entirely in the person speaking.

Believability attaches to the statement rather than to the person. A trustworthy person can make an implausible claim and an untrustworthy one a correct claim. The two are routinely conflated.

Trustworthiness is the dimension of credibility that concerns whether a source intends to inform rather than to mislead. It is separate from competence. A source can be honest and wrong.

Logos stands in classical rhetoric for the soundness of the argument. It is the component that can be checked without knowing the speaker. It is also the component most often replaced by the other two.

Pathos is the emotional force of a statement. It moves an audience without bearing on whether the claim is true. It is the fastest of the three and the least reliable.

Confirmation bias is the tendency to accept information that fits existing beliefs and to scrutinise information that does not. It operates on the listener rather than the speaker. It decides much of what credibility is granted to.

The attribution process is the assessment by which recipients assign credibility to a source. It is where the decision actually happens. The rhetorical tradition describes what the speaker offers and stops short of what the listener does with it.

It describes the speaker's resources: character, argument, emotion. It leaves out everything that removes credibility once granted, everything measurable about a source's actual track record, the position from which somebody speaks, and the networks and systems through which statements now reach anybody.

A defeater removes a justification without disproving the claim. Public discussion works with rules of rhetoric rather than with units of information. Credibility that can only be built and never undercut is not a usable model.

Epistemic trust is the listener's attitude. Discussion treats credibility as a property of the speaker. Locating it in the speaker makes it impossible to explain why the same source is believed by one audience and not another.

Epistemic vigilance is the listener's protective filter. Sources concentrate on the speaker's persuasive intent. The filter is what the persuasion has to pass, and it responds to different things than rhetoric addresses.

Hermeneutical injustice occurs when somebody lacks the concepts to make their experience intelligible. Focus lies on affective attitudes rather than on missing interpretive categories. Without the category, the statement cannot be made credible however it is delivered.

An undercutting defeater attacks the ground of a claim rather than the claim itself. Only direct contradiction is considered. Undercutting is the more common and the harder to notice.

A rebutting defeater supplies counter-evidence against the claim. Models concentrate on the art of speaking rather than on evidence in justificatory relations. The distinction from undercutting decides what a reply has to do.

Testimonial truthfulness is the sincerity of the speaker. Texts mix it with the factual correctness of what is said. A sincere speaker who is mistaken is truthful and unreliable at once.

Statement reliability is the measurable consistency of somebody's testimony over time. The speaker's character overshadows it. A track record is checkable and a character is asserted.

Calibration is matching how much you trust a source to how often it has been right. Procedures for it are never named. Without calibration, credibility is a feeling with a vocabulary.

An epistemic agent is a party with formal standing as a producer of knowledge. Discussion uses vague notions of person. Standing carries obligations, and vagueness removes them.

Testimonial acceptance is the sequence by which trust is assigned when information arrives. The sequence is never analysed step by step. Each step is a place where the assignment can be examined or manipulated.

Epistemic discrediting is targeted activity aimed at devaluing a source. Credibility is depicted statically. It is in fact contested, and the contest is a recognised tactic.

A testimonial filter is a criterion for excluding unreliable statements before belief forms. Criteria are absent. Without them, filtering happens anyway, by impression.

Credibility loss is the measurable decline of trust in a source. Sources study how trust is built. Decline follows different and faster rules than accumulation.

Peer disagreement is the case of two equally credible sources contradicting each other. Sources treat credibility as a single-case judgment. The disagreement case is where the single-case judgment fails.

Epistemic dependence is the necessity of relying on the reports of others. The picture of autonomous processing conceals it. Credibility matters precisely because independent checking is not available.

Virtue epistemology examines the intellectual character of the knower. Classical approaches confine themselves to the speaker's rhetoric. The listener's virtues decide as much as the speaker's.

An epistemic bubble is an information network from which counter-evidence is absent. Focus lies on individual conviction. Credibility granted inside a bubble is granted without the alternatives ever appearing.

An echo chamber actively reinforces some sources and discredits others. Confirmation bias is located purely in the individual. The reinforcement is a property of the environment and operates on everybody in it.

Epistemic modesty is the acknowledgment of one's own limits by the one claiming authority. Claims to authority are taken as given. Modesty is the most reliable outward sign that a claim is worth taking seriously.

The burden of proof allocates who must supply evidence. Sources describe trust as a static state. Allocation decides what happens when neither side supplies anything.

A testimonial network is the web of statements passing between many parties. Only direct speaker-to-listener statements are considered. Almost nothing reaches anybody by that route any more.

Epistemic risk is the calculable cost of granting credibility wrongly. Misplaced trust is not treated as a risk decision. Treating it as one changes how much evidence a claim needs before it is accepted.

The duty to justify makes acceptance conditional on being able to give grounds. Uptake is treated as acceptance. Without the duty, believing and knowing are the same act.

Epistemic negligence is failing to check adequately, without any intent to deceive. Attention goes to deliberate deception. Negligence causes more false belief than deception does.

The credibility gap is the distance between how reliable a source actually is and how reliable it is taken to be. It is not measured. It is the quantity that every other term on this page contributes to.

Source competence is the subject-matter capability of an informant. Ancient rhetorical categories obscure it. Competence and character are independent and are constantly treated as one.

Standpoint theory holds that social position shapes what somebody can know and be heard on. Credibility is thought of universally. In practice it is granted unevenly by position, and the uneven part is not modelled.

Epistemic paternalism is intervening in somebody's belief formation to protect them from error. It lies outside the rhetorical frame. Every editorial and algorithmic selection exercises it.

Bayesian updating adjusts credibility by how often a source has proved right. Qualitative description dominates. The formal version says by how much a single failure should reduce trust, which intuition does badly.

Epistemic resilience is the durability of a knowledge system against false information. Studies assess the moment of conviction. Durability is a property of the system rather than of the moment.

Pragmatic encroachment holds that credibility requirements rise with what is at stake. The dependence on risk is not included. It explains why the same source is good enough for one decision and not for another.

Methodical doubt is planned scepticism used as an instrument. Accounts use psychology instead. Doubt applied deliberately is a procedure, and procedures can be taught.

Informant reliability is the statistically recorded hit rate of a source. Emphasis lies on rhetorical skill. A hit rate is the only form of credibility that survives changing audiences.

Epistemic indiscretion is the violation of confidentiality norms in handling knowledge. Trust factors are examined, breaches are not. A source that cannot keep what it is told loses credibility for reasons unrelated to accuracy.

Credibility on the web is granted by a reader who cannot check and by a system that ranks. Both respond to what can be verified rather than to how confidently it is stated. Naming the basis of a claim, its limits and its author is the whole of the practical advice.