ETD

• belief
• deference
• hinge
• trust
• Wittgenstein

This essay is centered on what role trust plays in belief formation. My first claim is that, to form beliefs, a trustful attitude is prior in various ways to a distrustful or indifferent attitude, sympathetically to the Wittgensteinian idea that the basic form of our games is one of trust. My second claim is that, in order to properly cash out this latter idea, the notion of believing someone and the notion of believing-that are to be adequately distinguished. Chapter 1 is devoted to presenting the contemporary literature on trust in social epistemology, introducing the two claims of the essay and making a positive case in their favor. Chapter 2 addresses the debate on deference in its semantical and epistemological aspects; it further shows that deference is a pivotal and essential mechanism of belief formation – in agreement with my first claim – and that deference is to be spelled out as a form of trust in epistemic authority in which, crucially, believing someone does not straightforwardly entail believing-that – in agreement with my second claim. Chapter 3 is designed to bridge these considerations with the contemporary debate in hinge epistemology. I argue that hinge transmission is better understood when conceived of as involving a mechanism of believing someone that involves trust in authority. I further show that the propositional attitude we entertain towards hinges is best interpreted as one of trust.