CDC Seminar: Liz Robinson - To Believe or Disbelieve what we’re Told? Understanding about Transfer of Knowledge

I shall contrast two different bases for judging whether or not an apparently well-intentioned  informant’s testimony is likely to be reliable. In the first, the informant serves as a proxy for the self, gaining the knowledge that we would gain if we had that same experience. For example, our informant looks out the window and tells us that the taxi has arrived. Assuming the informant is well-intentioned, it is reasonable to believe that the taxi has indeed arrived. Under circumstances such as these we can make an accurate evaluation of the truth of what we are told, but we gain only specific knowledge. For gaining generalizable and culture-specific knowledge such as names or function of objects, we need to determine whether our informant has characteristics indicative of being generally knowledgeable, such as having a history of accuracy. Our prediction of trustworthiness will be rough and ready, and could just be based on rules of thumb rather than understanding of knowledge transfer. I shall summarize experiments examining children’s understanding that a person with a history of inaccuracy will not necessarily be unreliable in the future (their errors might be due to circumstances that no longer hold), while a person with a history of accuracy will not necessarily be reliable (they might have had external help that is no longer available). Taking such circumstances into account demands understanding of knowledge transfer.