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种认识关系。这一系列研究的一个核心问题是从S的其他证词中获取知识。科学专家与外行人之间的交往关系是证言的一种特例，对于理解科学与公众之间的知识传播过程以及跨学科研究小组中的知识生产过程具有重要意义。尽管社会认识论中的证言之争引发了许多关于如何在听者S认知依赖的情况下从证言中获得知识的建议，但外行的S知识如何从专家证言中被证明是合理的这一具体问题在文献中几乎没有得到系统的关注。本研究旨在解释外行人如何从专家证言中获得科学知识，尽管他们与科学专家的认识论关系不对称。调查的核心是认知性信任的概念。本研究旨在探讨外行人S对专家知识的认知信任作为对专家的一种特殊态度的性质。其次，它将考察在外行-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。本文将特别强调这一假设，即只有放弃将专家证词解释为一种单方面的信息传递形式，转而采用基于双边沟通的方法，外行的S专家证词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.