This is the draft version of a very nice paper (24 page PDF) on the role of trust in knowledge. It's the sort of paper that would reward the time taken to tease apart and diagram the concepts covered (but download it now; this version likely won't last long). The question is this: can you rely on someone who tells you something is true? Two things could go wrong: either the speaker is simply mistaken ('pollution') or the speaker is deliberately misleading you ('deception'). The extent to which we can trust people depends on our ability to detect pollution or deception in their messages? And this is what the paper explores at greater length. The applications to education and learning I think should be clear: to the extend that we can no longer depend on authority, learners need to develop their own capacity to evaluate trust. Our inability to do so is the cause of many of the great social ills of our time. Image: phylogeny figures, Ekins, et.al., via Handfield, Social Epistemology. Related: Spot the Troll.
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