Trust and the epistemic goods

Trust is immensely important to us: without it, as Annette Baier famously put it, many things we care about would be unsafe. Trust is also a mean to many ends that we value. Without trust, our lives would be less successful, more difficult – arguably even barely livable. A special kind of trust is epistemic trust. Epistemic trust is the kind of trust at play in the epistemic domain, i.e., the kind of trust involved in the exchange and social acquisition of epistemic goods. Epistemic trust is also of great importance to us. We need epistemic trust for intellectual flourishing. Fallible and limited epistemic creatures as we are, we have no option but to rely on the competence, expertise, and guidance of other epistemic agents to extend our grasp of reality.

It is very natural to think of epistemic trust as an effective instrument or promising way to target knowledge and truth (Keren, 2014). My doctor, say, tells me that vaccines are safe. Suppose she is an outstanding informant: competent, honest, and moved by good will towards her patients (Jones, 1996). Trusting my doctor’s word is very clearly a chance for learning for me. By aligning to my doctor’s view, and by allowing my belief to be grounded on epistemic work that my doctor has performed, I will be in the position to add an important item to my knowledge repertoire (Grundmann, forthcoming; Hardwig, 1985). By believing my doctor, I will end up knowing something that I would not otherwise have known.

But what about epistemic goods (arguably) different than knowledge? E.g., what about understanding (Dellsén, 2017; Elgin, 2017; Hills, 2016)? Knowledge is certainly very valuable to us. And yet sometimes we demand more than simply knowing that something is the case. Especially when stakes are high, we want to understand why things are the way they are and not otherwise (Grimm, 2021). We want to see how things fit together. What is the role of epistemic trust in this process? Can epistemic trust contribute to understanding?

At least prima facie, epistemic trust and understanding seem to pull in different directions. When my doctor tells me that vaccines are safe and I believe her, it seems as if I am thereby giving up on the effort of making up my own mind about the matter. It seems as if I am giving up on the effort to understand that (and why) vaccines are safe. This suspension of individual inquiry, or at least so it seems, is what trusting my doctor epistemically is about. If I made my own mind about the safety of vaccines, or so the intuition goes, I would not have to trust her. Trust, or so it seems, would become superfluous.

And yet on closer inspection, this intuition turns out to be misguided. On the one hand, it is grounded on a poor conception of the nature of understanding; and on the other hand, it presupposes a monolithic conception of epistemic trust.

Understanding is a mediated epistemic state. We understand reality, or phenomena, via epistemic mediators, that is, representational systems, that account for these phenomena (accurately enough) (Greco, 2014; Malfatti, 2019, 2022, 2025). Sometimes, to be sure, as understanders we are ourselves the authors or creators of the epistemic mediators that we deploy to make sense of things. However, this is not the rule. In many cases, the epistemic mediators involved in understanding are already at our disposal. They are somewhere to be found in our epistemic environment. When we read Thucydides’ reconstruction of the Peloponnesian war, e.g., we have no option but to take his word seriously if we want to understand why and how Sparta defeated Athens. The lesson to draw from this is that very often, when it comes to understanding, we are what Bernard of Chartres once called “dwarfs on the shoulders of giants”: we see things clearly not (only) because of our own capacities, but (also and crucially) because of the outstanding mediators that other trustworthy and competent agents designed or came up with, that inhabit our world and that we have learned to navigate.

Once we acknowledge the mediated nature of understanding, a space of possible coexistence between understanding and epistemic trust beings to emerge. The issue is not anymore whether epistemic trust is compatible with understanding; the issue becomes what kind of epistemic trust understanding involves.

Epistemic trust is usually spelled out in terms of trust for the truth of a certain proposition. Clearly, this is not the kind of trust involved in understanding. Many epistemic mediators involved in understanding are not true. Some are not propositional (Elgin, 2017; Potochnik, 2017). Understanding via an epistemic mediator, then, is not a matter of believing it; it is much more a matter of being able and stably disposed to use the mediator in question to pursue our cognitive and epistemic aims. If this is what understanding requires, inviting others to trust us for the sake of understanding is not a matter of inviting them to believe us. It is much more a matter of inviting them to take a certain epistemic mediator seriously as a promising resource for further inquiry and exploration of reality. Accepting to trust one in this sense is very much like accepting to put a pair of new glasses on and be ready to see what reality looks like through their lenses (Malfatti, 2025a).

References

Dellsén, F. (2017). Understanding without Justification or Belief. Ratio, 30(3), 239–254. https://doi.org/10.1111/rati.12134

Elgin, C. Z. (2017). True Enough. MIT Press.

Greco, J. (2014). Episteme: Knowledge and Understanding. In Virtues and Their Vices. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199645541.003.0014

Grimm, S. (2021). Understanding (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). Edward N. Zalta.

Grundmann, T. (forthcoming). Expert Authority and the Limits of Critical Thinking. Oxford University Press.

Hardwig, J. (1985). Epistemic Dependence. The Journal of Philosophy, 82(7), 335–349. https://doi.org/10.2307/2026523

Hills, A. (2016). Understanding Why. Noûs, 50(4), 661–688. https://doi.org/10.1111/nous.12092

Jones, K. (1996). Trust as an affective attitude. Ethics, 107(1), 4–25.

Keren, A. (2014). Trust and belief: A preemptive reasons account. Synthese, 191(12), 2593–2615.

Malfatti, F. I. (2019). Can Testimony Generate Understanding? Social Epistemology, 33(6), 477–490. https://doi.org/10.1080/02691728.2019.1628319

Malfatti, F. I. (2022). Understanding phenomena: From social to collective? Philosophical Issues, 1, 253–267.

Malfatti, F. I. (2025a). Disagreements in Understanding. Philosophical Studies. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-025-02326-8

Malfatti, F. I. (2025b). The Social Fabric of Understanding (Springer).

Potochnik, A. (2017). Idealization and the Aims of Science. University of Chicago Press.

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