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A Stance of Trust| old_uid | 2077 |
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| title | A Stance of Trust |
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| start_date | 2007/01/19 |
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| schedule | 11h-13h |
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| online | no |
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| summary | By talking to each other, we reason together, revise and complete our thoughts through the thoughts of other people. This mutual cognitive dependence is a key ingredient of our mental life. In this paper I explore the interaction between some epistemological concerns about the social dimension of our acquisition of knowledge and a pragmatic conception of the role of trust in communication. More precisely, I argue that the inevitable default trust that we grant to our interlocutors in order to acquire new beliefs from what they say is grounded in communication. My aim is to develop a more dynamic picture of the relation between interpretation and belief acquisition in communication. A number of views about the role of linguistic communication in knowledge acquisition argue that language is a robust vehicle of contents and truths, thus allowing us to acquire new contents and true beliefs by listening to our interlocutors. These approaches face two main objections: first, it can be objected that they don’t account for the epistemic constraint of intellectual autonomy: the acquisition of knowledge cannot be an entirely passive process; we are responsible of what we come to know. Second, these approaches provide a psychologically implausible view of the process of communication, as a simple transfer of information. Against this view, I’ll argue that our way of acquiring beliefs from what others say is mediated by the rich inferential process of human communication. We are not passive receivers of linguistic contents, rather, we actively participate in the interpretive process that filters the information we retain in the end.
That successful communication requires a presumption of trust is a philosophical platitude. Many principles have been put forward in the philosophical literature in order to account for this presumption, such as the Davidsonian’s principle of charitable interpretation and the Gricean maxim of truthfulness. The problem with the first principle is that it allows to generate as many true platitudes as we wish in any act of interpretation, which doesn’t seem to correspond to what we actually do when we interpret other people’s speech. The problem with the second principle, is that it is too strong: it implies that each departure from the literal meaning of a sentence acts as a bias on interpretation. But truth standards may vary in conversation, and we are able to deal with this dynamic aspect of communication.
In my view, the interplay between interpretation and belief acquisition is mediated by a stance of trust that we adopt in our communicative interactions. We trust our interlocutors to provide us relevant information in the context of our exchange. This stance of trust enables us to share a mutual conversational environment of contents that have been generated for “the sake of the conversation”. We do not end in believing every single contents: rather, we filter them through our own beliefs and retain what is relevant for us. So a stance of trust is all the cognitive vulnerability we accept when we engage a conversation: the vulnerability of sharing a mutual conversational environment with our interlocutors. |
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| responsibles | Stojanovic |
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