Trust in Testimony

Introduction Evolutionary biologists have emphasized the deceptive ploys that are likely to emerge in animal signaling systems (Dawkins & Krebs, 1978). In the context of human testimony, the risks of being misled are, if anything, even more pervasive: the testifier could be making an honest mistake, telling a deliberate lie, or presenting speculation as fact. In principle, children might deal with these multiple dangers by adopting a default stance of skepticism toward the potentially suspect offerings of testimony. More specifically, children could elaborate on a strategy that serves them well enough in infancy. They could rely on their own considerable powers of observation and analysis, withholding assent to any piece of testimony that is either inconsistent with, or not supported by, evidence that they have gathered for themselves. On this argument, children might hear, and indeed understand, all sorts of testimony (e.g., claims about the past, present and future, or about unobservables beings and events) but remain agnostic or skeptical about their truth-value. At most, they would accept only those claims that can be checked against and confirmed by their own first-hand observation. At first sight, it is not implausible that young children adopt this conservative strategy. Arguably, they have little need to place any trust in claims about events and situations that lie beyond either the familiar world of the here-and-now or their own immediate and remembered past. Such a strategy would certainly stop them from taking various fictitious or mythical claims too seriously. However, as we argue below, such caution would also lead children to resist the testimony of other people regarding various processes or properties that would be difficult for them to observe Trust in Testimony 3 first-hand. Yet, according to our account, analysis of the available data on children's conceptual development in the domains of psychology, cosmology, and biology indicates that children do trust and learn from such testimony. One plausible and attractive conceptualization of this type of trust in testimony is that the observations made by other people, including successive generations of scientists, dramatically augment but do not in any way transform, the observational powers of young children. Thus, by listening to, and making sense of, other people's testimony, children are offered data that they would not normally be able to gather for themselves. They gain, by proxy, access to data about microscopic processes, hard-to-observe cosmological regularities, and historically remote events. On this view, children's …