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 It is granted and can be withdrawn.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.

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. Credibility that can only be built and never undercut is not a usable model.

Epistemic trust is the listener's attitude. Locating credibility 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. The filter is what 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. Without the concepts, the statement cannot be made credible however it is delivered.

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

A rebutting defeater supplies counter-evidence against the claim. The distinction from undercutting decides what a reply has to do.

Testimonial truthfulness is the sincerity of the speaker. A sincere speaker who is mistaken is truthful and unreliable at once.

Statement reliability is the measurable consistency of somebody's testimony over time. 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. Without calibration, credibility is a feeling with a vocabulary.

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

Testimonial acceptance is the sequence by which trust is assigned when information arrives. 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 contested, and the contest is a recognised tactic.

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

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

If good news built trust as fast as bad news destroys it, the matched pair in the first two rows would score alike.

Peer disagreement is the case of two equally credible sources contradicting each other. The disagreement case is where judging each source on its own fails.

Epistemic dependence is the necessity of relying on the reports of others. Credibility matters precisely because independent checking is not available.

Virtue epistemology examines the intellectual character of the knower. The listener's virtues decide as much as the speaker's.

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

An echo chamber actively reinforces some sources and discredits others. 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. Modesty is the most reliable outward sign that a claim is worth taking seriously.

The burden of proof allocates who must supply evidence. Allocation decides what happens when neither side supplies anything.

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

Epistemic risk is the calculable cost of granting credibility wrongly. Treating misplaced trust as a risk decision changes how much evidence a claim needs before it is accepted.

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

Epistemic negligence is failing to check adequately, without any intent to deceive. 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 the quantity that every other term on this page contributes to.

Source competence is the subject-matter capability of an informant. Competence and character are independent.

Standpoint theory holds that social position shapes what somebody can know and be heard on. In practice credibility is granted unevenly by position.

Epistemic paternalism is intervening in somebody's belief formation to protect them from error. Every editorial and algorithmic selection exercises it.

Bayesian updating adjusts credibility by how often a source has proved right. 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. Durability is a property of the system rather than of the moment of conviction.

Pragmatic encroachment holds that credibility requirements rise with what is at stake. 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. Doubt applied deliberately is a procedure, and procedures can be taught.

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

Epistemic indiscretion is the violation of confidentiality norms in handling knowledge. 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.