Knowledge on Trust? The Epistemology of Scientific Expert Testimony

社会认识论关注的是不同知识主体之间的多元认识关系。这一研究的一个核心问题是如何从他人的证词中获取知识。科学专家与外行之间的交流关系是一种特殊的证言关系，它对于理解科学与公众之间的知识传播过程和跨学科研究群体中的知识生产过程具有重要意义。尽管社会认识论中的证词辩论已经提出了一些建议，如何证明来自证词的知识是合理的，尽管听者的认知依赖，但如何证明外行人来自专家证词的知识的具体问题在文献中只得到很少和非系统的关注。拟议的研究项目旨在解释外行人如何从专家证词中获得科学知识，尽管他们与科学专家的认识不对称关系。研究的核心是认知信任的概念。提出的研究项目旨在探索，首先，外行人对专家知识的认知信任作为对专家的一种特殊态度的本质。其次，它将研究在外行-专家-关系的特定条件下，是什么（如果有的话）使认知信任成为一种可靠的知识获取方法。我们将特别强调一个假设，即只有放弃将专家证词解释为一种单方面信息传递的形式，而采用基于双边交流的方法，外行人的基于专家证词的信念才能被证明是合理的。

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.