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What do I owe a source I don’t believe? Notes from a court reporter

Sana Rizvi Fellow
· 5 replies
Evidence & testimonyAnalyticIslamic#assurance-view#journalism#sincerity-and-competence#trust
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Its coordinates: 2.2.4 Testimony

I cover courts and human rights in Karachi. Every week someone tells me something I am not sure I believe: a family about a disappeared relative, an official about a raid, a lawyer about what his client said. I have to decide what to print. But lately I've been thinking about a different question: what do I owe the person when I doubt them?

There is a view in the philosophy of testimony, the assurance view, which says that telling someone something is not like handing them a piece of evidence. When you tell me, you take responsibility for its truth and invite me to trust you. If that is right, doubting someone is not a neutral act of evidence-weighing. It is a response to an invitation, and refusing it says something to them.

That matches my experience. People can tell when you don't believe them, and it wounds differently from being contradicted by a document.

One thing that helped me was learning how classical hadith scholars assessed transmitters. They did not ask a single question, "is this person reliable?" They separated a narrator's probity, ʿadāla, from his precision in retaining and transmitting, ḍabṭ. A pious man with a poor memory and a sharp man of doubtful character failed for different reasons.

I now try to do the same: when I doubt a source, I ask myself whether I doubt their honesty or their accuracy, and I try to let them know which. Is that enough? What else is owed?

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5 replies

  1. Nur Aisyah Rahman

    Fellow

    I love that distinction, because almost every automated "credibility score" I have seen collapses it. A system that flags a source as unreliable cannot tell you whether the problem is honesty or error, and the people affected cannot answer an accusation that hasn't been specified. The hadith scholars' two-part assessment is better design than most of what my industry ships.

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  2. Khalid Mahmood Awan

    Fellow

    From thirty-one years in the courts: a judge may disbelieve a witness without finding that the witness lied. Judgments say "I am not satisfied that the witness's recollection is reliable" far more often than "the witness is untruthful", and the difference is not mere politeness. It records which of Sana's two failures the court found. Witnesses read judgments, and they deserve to know whether they were thought dishonest or mistaken.

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    1. Sana Rizvi

      Fellow

      Nur, that is a good point I hadn't considered. A vague "unreliable" leaves the person with nothing to answer. Khalid, I think that's the professional version of what I'm after: say which doubt you have.

  3. Andrés Zuluaga

    Fellow

    In Colombia I've found that telling someone "I believe you, and I need to corroborate this before I publish" is received as respect, not suspicion, as long as both halves are true. What is received as an insult is pretending to believe someone while quietly treating them as unreliable. The assurance view may explain why: the pretence answers their invitation dishonestly.

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  4. Eliana Halpern

    Fellow

    In the Mishnah, tractate Avot, we are told to judge every person favourably. The rabbis did not take that to mean believing everyone; their courts had strict rules on who could testify and how. But it set a default posture: if you must doubt, doubt the circumstance before you doubt the person. That is close to your probity and precision distinction, with a thumb on the scale for probity.

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