2.2 Internalism vs.

externalism
Philosophers who agree that trust can be rational (in a truth- or end-directed way or both)
tend to disagree about the extent to which reasons that make it rational must be accessible to
the trustor. Some say that these reasons must be available to this person in order for their
trust to be rational; in that case, the person is or could be internally justified in trusting as
they do. Others say that the reasons need not be internal but can instead be external to the
trustor and lie in what caused the trust, or, more specifically, in the epistemic reliability of
what caused it. The trustor also needn’t have access to or be aware of the reliability of these
reasons. The latter’s epistemology of trust is externalist, while the former’s is internalist.
Some epistemologists write as though trust is only rational if the trustor themselves has
rationally estimated the likelihood that the trustee is trustworthy. For example, Russell
Hardin implies that if my trust in you is rational, then
I make a rough estimate of the truth of [the] claim … that you will be trustworthy under
certain conditions … and then I correct my estimate, or “update,” as I obtain new evidence
on you. (2002: 112)
On this view, I must have reasons for my estimate or for my updates (Hardin 2002: 130),
which could come from inductive generalizations I make about my past experience, from my
knowledge that social constraints exist that will encourage your trustworthiness or what have
you. Such an internalist epistemology of trust is valuable because it coheres with the
commonsense idea that one ought to have good reasons for trusting people (i.e., reasons
grounded in evidence that they will be trustworthy) particularly when something important is
at stake (E. Fricker 1995). One ought, in other words, to be epistemically responsible in
one’s trusting (see Frost-Arnold 2020).
Such an epistemology is also open to criticisms, however. For example, it suggests that
rational trust will always be partial rather than complete, given that the rational trustor is
open to evidence that contradicts their trust on this theory, while someone who trusts
completely in someone else lacks such openness. The theory also implies that the reasons for
trusting well (i.e., in a justified way) are accessible to the trustor, at some point or another,
which may simply be false. Some reasons for trust may be too “cunning” for this to be the
case. Relevant here is the reason for trusting discussed by Philip Pettit (1995): that trust
signals to people that they are being held in esteem, which is something they will want to
maintain; they will honor the trust because they are naturally “esteem-seeking”. (Note that
consciously having this as a reason for trusting—of using people’s need for esteem to get
what you want from them—is incompatible with actually trusting (Wanderer and Townsend
2013: 9), if trust is motives-based and the required motive is something other than self-
interest.)
Others say that reasons for trust are usually too numerous and varied to be open to the
conscious consideration of the trustor (e.g., Baier 1986). There can be very subtle reasons to
trust or distrust someone—for example, reasons that have to do with body language, with
systematic yet veiled forms of oppression, or with a complicated history of trusting others
about which one can’t easily generalize. Factors like these can influence trustors without
them knowing it, sometimes making their trust irrational (e.g., because it is informed by
oppressive biases), and other times making it rational.
The concern about there being complex reasons for trusting explain why some philosophers
defend externalist epistemologies of trust. Some do so explicitly (e.g., McLeod 2002). They
argue for reliabilist theories that make trust rationally justified if and only if it is formed and
sustained by reliable processes (i.e., “processes that tend to produce accurate representations
of the world”, such as drawing on expertise one has rather than simply guessing; Goldman
1992: 113; Goldman and Beddor 2015 [2016]). Others gesture towards externalism (Webb
1993; Baier 1986), as Baier does with what she calls “a moral test for trust”. The test is that
knowledge of what the other party is relying on for the continuance of the trust relationship
would … itself destabilize the relation. (1986: 255)
The other party might be relying on a threat advantage or the concealment of their
untrustworthiness, in which case the trust would probably fail the test. Because Baier’s test
focuses on the causal basis for trust, or for what maintains the trust relation, it is externalist.
Also, because the trustor often cannot gather the information needed for the test without
ceasing to trust the other person (Baier 1986: 260), the test cannot be internalist.
Although an externalist theory of trust deals well with some of the worries one might have
with an internalist theory, it has problems of its own. One of the most serious issues is the
absence of any requirement that trustors themselves have good (motivating) reasons for
trusting, especially when their trust makes them seriously vulnerable. Again, it appears that
common sense dictates the opposite: that sometimes as trustors, we ought to be able to back
up our decisions about when to trust. The same is true about our distrust presumably: that
sometimes we ought to be able to defend it. Assuming externalists mean for their
epistemology to apply to distrust and not just to trust, their theory violates this bit of common
sense as well. Externalism about distrust also seems incompatible with a strategy that some
philosophers recommend for dealing with biased distrust. The strategy is to develop what
they call “corrective trust” (e.g., Scheman 2020) or “humble trust” (D’Cruz 2019), which
demands a humble skepticism toward distrust that aligns with oppressive stereotypes and
efforts at correcting the influence of these stereotypes (see also M. Fricker 2007). The
concern about an externalist epistemology is that it does not encourage this sort of mental
work, since it does not require that we reflect on our reasons for distrusting or trusting.
There are alternatives to the kinds of internalist and externalist theories just discussed,
especially within the literature on testimony.[12] For example, Paul Faulkner develops an
“assurance theory” of testimony that interprets speaker trustworthiness in terms of trust-
responsiveness. Recall that on a trust-responsiveness theory of trust, being trusted gives
people the reason to be trustworthy that someone is counting on them. They are trustworthy
if they are appropriately responsive to this reason, which, in the case of offering testimony,
involves giving one’s assurance that one is telling the truth (Adler 2006 [2017]). Faulkner
uses the trust-responsiveness account of trust, along with a view of trust as an affective
attitude (see section 4), to show “how trust can ground reasonable testimonial uptake”
(Faulkner and Simpson 2017: 6; Faulkner 2011 and 2020).
He proposes that A affectively trust S if and only if A depends on S Φ-ing, and expects his
dependence on S to motivate S to Φ—for A’s dependence on S to be the reason for
which S Φs …. As a result, affective trust is a bootstrapping attitude: I can choose to trust
someone affectively and my doing so creates the reasons which justify the attitude. (Faulkner
and Simpson 2017: 6)
Most likely, A (the trustor) is aware of the reasons that justify his trust or could be aware of
them, making this theory an internalist one. The reasons are also normative and non-
evidentiary (Faulkner 2020); they concern what S ought to do because of A’s dependence,
not what S will do based on evidence that A might gather about S. This view doesn’t require
that A have evidentiary reasons, and so it is importantly different than the internalist
epistemology discussed above. But it is then also subject to the criticisms made of externalist
theories that they don’t require the kind of scrutiny of our trusting attitudes that we tend to
expect and probably ought to expect in societies where some people are stereotyped as more
trusting than others.
Presumably to avoid having to defend any particular epistemology of trust, some
philosophers provide just a list of common justifiers for it (i.e., “facts or states of affairs that
determine the justification status of [trust]”; Goldman 1999: 274), which someone could take
into account in deciding when to trust (Govier 1998; Jones 1996). Included on these lists are
such factors as the social role of the trustee, the domain in which the trust occurs, an “agent-
specific” factor that concerns how good a trustor the agent tends to be (Jones 1996: 21), and
the social or political climate in which the trust occurs. Philosophers have tended to
emphasize this last factor as a justification condition for trust, and so let me elaborate on it
briefly.