Knowledge on Trust? The Epistemology of Scientific Expert Testimony

• Applicant: Dr. Jon Leefmann
• Subject Area: Theoretical Philosophy ; Practical Philosophy
• Term: from 2018 to 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 396775817

Social Epistemology is concerned with the manifold epistemic relations between different subjects of knowledge. One question central to this strand of research concerns knowledge acquisition from other´s testimony. The communicative relation between scientific experts and laypersons is a special case of testimony, which is important for understanding processes of knowledge transmission between science and the public and processes of knowledge-production in interdisciplinary research groups.Even though the testimony debate in Social Epistemology has brought about several suggestions how knowledge from testimony can be justified despite the hearer´s epistemic dependence, the specific question of how a layperson´s knowledge from expert testimony can be justified has gained only little and unsystematic attention in the literature.The proposed research project intends to explain how laypersons can gain scientific knowledge from expert testimony despite their epistemically asymmetric relation with scientific experts. Central to the investigation is the concept of epistemic trust. The proposed research project aims to explore, first, the nature of the layperson´s epistemic trust in expert knowledge as a special attitude taken towards the expert. Second, it will investigate what (if anything) makes epistemic trust a reliable method for knowledge acquisition under the specific conditions of the layperson-expert-relationship. Special emphasis will be put on the hypothesis that a layperson´s expert testimony based beliefs can only be justified, if the interpretation of expert testimony as a form of unilateral information transmission is abandoned in favor of a bilateral communication based approach.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants