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Reid said we are built to believe what we are told. Was he right, or was Hume?

Alistair Gow Fellow
· 5 replies
Evidence & testimonyAnalyticModern EuropeanEmpiricismC. A. J. CoadyDavid HumeThomas Reid#credulity#developmental-psychology#scottish-enlightenment#testimony
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Its coordinates: 2.2.4 Testimony

Most of what I know, I was told. For decades at a Leith surgery, patients and doctors told me things and I believed most of them; I told them things and they believed most of those. It never occurred to me to ask what entitled either of us.

Now I'm reading the two great Scots on the question, and they disagree in a way that seems to matter.

Hume, in the section of the Enquiry on miracles, says our reliance on testimony rests on experience: we have observed that people's reports usually conform to the facts, and our confidence is proportioned to that experience. No experience of reliability, no reason to believe.

Reid answers that we come equipped with two matched principles: a propensity to speak the truth, and a propensity to trust what others say. Children, he says, believe without limit until they meet with deceit, and only then learn caution. Trust is the starting point, and experience teaches us where to restrict it, not whether to have it.

Coady argued that Hume's view cannot work as stated: most of us have never checked anything like enough reports to ground our trust in testimony generally, and many of the checks we have made themselves rely on testimony.

I'm asking for argued answers, not a survey. Who was right? Is there a third option? And does anyone know what the psychologists who study children actually find?

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5 answers

  1. Emeka Anyaoha

    Fellow

    The developmental psychology splits the difference in an interesting way. Paul Harris's work, summarised in Trusting What You're Told (2012), suggests that young children are trusting but not indiscriminate. By preschool age many already prefer informants who have been accurate in the past over ones who have been wrong. So Reid is right that trust comes first and comes early, and Hume is right that experience of reliability shapes it very quickly. The default is real; so is the monitoring.

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    1. Alistair Gow

      Fellow

      Emeka, that is exactly what I hoped someone would know. Trust first, with monitoring switched on almost at once, sounds very like my old surgery. And Titilayo, I'll take your caution: Reid wrote as if he were describing all humankind from Aberdeen and Glasgow, which is a habit of his century.

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  2. Titilayo Adeyemi

    Fellow

    A caution about "we are built to". Reid's principles are presented as features of human nature. But languages draw the line between seeing and being told in different places; in Yoruba, for instance, what you were told is not straightforwardly something you know. Perhaps the disposition to trust is universal while the status we give what we are told is cultural. That would make the question less "Reid or Hume" than "which part of each".

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  3. Derek Hollis

    Fellow

    A Bayesian gloss, for what it's worth. Reid gives you a prior: high initial trust in what people tell you. Hume gives you the updating: evidence about particular speakers and kinds of report moves that trust up and down. The real disagreement is whether the prior itself needs justifying. Reid says it's a first principle that can't be justified without circularity; Hume seems to think it's learned. I side with Reid on the prior and with Hume on everything after.

  4. Hamza Qureshi

    Fellow

    Courts are oddly agnostic between them. A witness gets neither Reid's trust nor Hume's suspicion as a starting point; the burden of proof does the work, and credibility is assessed afresh each time. That is probably sensible for courts, and a disastrous way to raise a child.

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