Epistemic trust

Epistemic trust is a person's readiness to take over knowledge conveyed in language. It is an attitude rather than a conclusion. Without it, no transmission occurs, however good the testimony is.

Epistemic vigilance is targeted watchfulness against possibly faulty or deceptive information. It runs while listening, mostly below awareness. It is the filter that decides what gets through.

Epistemic mistrust is the lasting doubting of the credibility and intentions of others. It is a stable disposition rather than a single judgment. It closes the channel that trust opens.

Mentalizing is the ability to read one's own and other people's actions as driven by underlying mental states. It is what lets a listener judge whether a speaker means well. It is learned early and can be damaged.

Caregivers convey the basic patterns of knowledge uptake in early development. What is learned there shapes how a person later treats strangers who claim to know something. Trust has a history before it has a subject.

Testimony is the transmission of beliefs and knowledge through the statements of other people. It is the ordinary route by which most of what anybody knows arrives. Everything else on this page concerns how that route is guarded.

Ostensive cues such as eye contact signal to the recipient that what follows is relevant and meant for them. They open the channel before any content arrives. In text and on screens they are simulated rather than present.

Credulity is the uncritical adoption of information without prior examination. It is the failure mode on one side. It is cheap in the short term and expensive over time.

Hypervigilance is a defensive posture against information, reinforced by adverse experience. It is the failure mode on the other side. Somebody who trusts nothing learns nothing.

Relevance theory analyses the conditions under which a statement is taken as relevant and worth processing. It explains why some sentences are attended to and others are skipped. It is the bridge between attention and trust.

Mentalization-based therapy uses the relationship itself to restore the capacity to read mental states. It appears here because it is the clinical evidence that epistemic trust can be broken and repaired. It is a property of persons, not only of arguments.

An epistemic peer holds comparable evidence and comparable ability in assessing it. The concept matters wherever two such people disagree. Then the ordinary indications of reliability say nothing.

It treats trust as an attitude of individual subjects in direct exchange with other people. It leaves out the unavoidability of dependence, the confidence a person has in their own judgment, the virtues and vices involved, groups and communities as bearers of trust, and the technical infrastructure that now stands between speaker and listener.

Epistemic dependence is the fact that nobody manages without the knowledge of others. Sources treat trust as an isolated attitude of an individual. The necessity behind it goes unexamined, which makes trust look optional when it is not.

Epistemic self-trust is the confidence a person places in their own judgment. Attention rests entirely on trusting external sources. Without the internal side there is no standard against which an external claim could be weighed.

Epistemic humility is the insight into the limits of one's own knowledge. Analysis is limited to filter functions such as vigilance and mistrust. Humility is what makes trusting reasonable rather than merely necessary.

Epistemic vulnerability is exposure to damage through misplaced trust. Texts analyse mistakes as failures to apply vigilance. The risk of being harmed by trusting well-formed falsehood is not modelled at all.

Epistemic insubordination is the active refusal to accept an authority's account. The literature covers passive attitudes and selective rejection. Active refusal, and when it is warranted, goes untreated.

Epistemic paternalism is influencing what somebody believes, for their own good. The sources look at relations between equals or between caregiver and child. Influence exercised from above, by an institution or a system, is absent.

Credibility attribution is the process by which a listener assigns reliability to a source. Texts assume ostensive cues have direct effects. The actual assignment, and what it responds to, is never traced.

An epistemic agent is a party with standing in the production and transmission of knowledge. Subjects are described as passive recipients of testimony. Their status as agents with obligations is not established.

Epistemic risk is the calculable probability and cost of being wrong. Trust is understood as a psycho-social state. Treating it as a risk decision changes what counts as reasonable trust.

Epistemic arrogance is overrating one's own capacity to judge. Refusal of trust is classified in one direction only, as hypervigilance. Refusal out of arrogance looks identical from outside and calls for a different response.

Epistemic alienation is a lasting estrangement from the sources a person would need. Studies remain within intact or disturbed interactions. The permanent condition of having no source one can accept is not modelled.

Expertise identification is the problem of recognising who actually has the competence. Texts presuppose that reliability in an epistemic peer can be recognised. How a layperson does that, without the expertise in question, is the unexamined step.

Epistemic passivity is uncritical uptake without any reflective step. Analysis focuses on active testing through vigilance. The far more common case, where nothing is tested at all, is left out.

Epistemic misconduct is misbehaviour in the handling of knowledge. Failure is modelled inside therapeutic contexts. Misconduct in ordinary knowledge transmission, by speakers and by listeners, is not named.

Epistemic culpability is blame for trust that was misplaced. Criteria stay within the frame of mistaken judgment. The ethical question of when somebody is at fault for believing is not raised.

An epistemic bubble is a network from which relevant evidence is absent. Studies concentrate on direct interaction between persons. Group-level effects on what an individual can encounter are outside the frame.

An echo chamber actively reinforces some voices and discredits others. Focus lies on individual hypervigilance or credulity. Active amplification as a property of the environment is not treated.

Natural pedagogy is the evolutionary account of why ostensive cues work. Texts name the cues without the developmental basis. Without it, the cues look like technique rather than like something deeply wired.

Attachment security is the early relational basis on which later trust rests. Therapeutic descriptions separate emotional closeness from epistemic decisions. The two are not separate, which is why trust is not fully a matter of reasons.

Epistemic sabotage is the deliberate undermining of somebody else's capacity to know. Mistrust is treated as individual misalignment. Sabotage as an intentional act by third parties is absent.

An epistemic community is a collective that holds and maintains knowledge. Interaction models rest on pairs of actors. Collective structures, and how trust attaches to them, are not modelled.

Trust revision is the formal updating of trust when new evidence arrives. Belief and mistrust appear as static states. Without a revision model there is no account of how trust should change, only of whether it exists.

An epistemic pact is the tacit agreement under which testimony is exchanged. Testimonial relations are understood as spontaneous acts. The implicit obligations on both sides go unnamed.

Epistemic resilience is the capacity of convictions to withstand false information. Focus lies on susceptibility. What makes a person or a community recover from being misled is not asked.

An information ecosystem is the whole technical and social arrangement through which information reaches people. Analysis stops at individual communication. The arrangement now includes ranking, retrieval and generation, none of which is present in the account.

Algorithmic ranking is the automated ordering of results. The sources treat human witnesses. The ordering that decides which witness is heard at all is not part of the model.

A filter bubble is algorithmic narrowing of what a person encounters. Analysis is restricted to personal perception. The machine's contribution to what reaches the listener is absent.

Information validation is the technical and documentary checking of claims. Verification is handled as a cognitive achievement of subjects. Validation performed by systems, before any person sees the result, is not treated.

A collective belief state is what a group holds together. Analyses are limited to individual subjects. Since trust in institutions and communities is where most practical reliance sits, the omission is substantial.

A search system now stands between the speaker and the listener. It selects, orders and increasingly writes the statement. The ostensive cues that once signalled a trustworthy speaker are simulated by an interface, and the vigilance that evolved for faces has nothing to work on.

By the three things a reader can check without expertise: state the limits of what you claim, say what the claim rests on, and change the statement when the evidence changes. Confidence without those three reads as competence and is not.