A Question of Trust



Most intelligence organisations in the world have a counter-intelligence wing which tries to find out if their own members are handing out secrets across the fence. But one might claim that there should also be a counter-counter-intelligence to keep a tab on the people in the counter-intelligence. Some might yet feel that it is arbitrary to stop at this point, and that one should have a counter-counter-counter-intelligence, and this process could go on ad infinitum. Nevertheless, most intelligence organisations are satisfied with simply having a counter-intelligence wing. This is not to say that they know that the people in the counter-intelligence are not leaking out secrets across the borders, but that they have sufficient reason to trust them not to do so. In other words, what really counts here is not 'knowledge' but 'reasonable trust' (RT).

This can easily be extended to many other areas of our social existence. Here is one example : do you really know that your parents are who they tell you that they are, namely, your parents? At most, you have come to develop (for various reasons) a RT in them, and on its basis you believe that they are not deceiving you or lying to you. And the same goes for an infinite variety of 'facts' around you. Speaking for myself, I have never been to Mongolia, but I have a RT in cartographers, politicians and travellers around the world on the basis of which I believe that they are not involved in a gigantic conspiracy to delude me into thinking that a zone of land called Mongolia exists when it actually does not. Another example is neo-Darwinism which I accept (though I might dispute some of its alleged implications) in spite of the fact that I have never even observed the helical structure of the DNA under a microscope, not to mention not having taken an extended course in evolutionary biology. So if a person who does not accept neo-Darwinism were to confront me on the matter of the evolutionary history of the world, I would not, strictly speaking, have at my disposal the adequate tools to engage in a detailed discussion on this matter. I could only tell her that I have a RT in evolutionary biologists which leads me to affirm some of the tenets of current neo-Darwinism. (The debate would then, of course, shift to the question of why I have this RT. That is, it is now the question of what precisely counts as 'reasonable' in the expression 'reasonable trust'.)

So if you accept what cosmologists say about the first three minutes of the universe without being able to solve differential equations, what economists write about removing world hunger without understanding what inflation rates are, what politicians claim about new modes of legislation while believing that they are not 'transparent' enough, what the doctors offer as a diagnosis of your diseased liver without understanding anything of medicine, what journalists report on a civil war in a distant country without having any straightforward means to verify these reports, what your friend says he did yesterday evening when he was in Milan while you have no acquaintance there, what your astrophysicist describes about the nature of 'dark matter' while you have never taken even an elementary course in astrophysics, you should remember that in all these activities you are aspiring towards knowledge, but this knowledge is based on the presupposition of mutual trust.

If you decide that you shall count as knowledge only something that you can empirically verify for yourself, you may have to burn down whole libraries not only of sociology, political theory and medicine, but also of number theory, quantum cosmology and marine biology. This trust, of course, is not an absolutely static 'foundation' of the enquiry : it is constantly evolving so that sometimes we lose trust, at other times we regain it, and yet at other times, it grow from strength to strength.