A Korean Perspective on Epistemic Trust and Collective Testimony — Epoche C1
Introduction: The Presumption of Testimonial Reliability Most of what any of us knows, we know because someone told us. The dates of battles, the composition of distant stars, the state of our own bloodwork — none of it is checked first-hand; it is taken on testimony, the technical term epistemologists use for knowledge conveyed by someone's saying so, whether in speech, print or institutional pronouncement. The classical question about testimony, posed in the eighteenth-century exchange between David Hume and Thomas Reid, is what entitles a hearer to believe what she is told. Hume's answer, in the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding , was reductionist: testimonial justification must be earned, reduced to the hearer's own observation-based evidence that testifiers of this kind, on subjects of this kind, tend to be right. Reid's answer was the opposite: nature has paired a principle of veracity (we are built to speak truly) with a principle of credulity (we are built to believe), and the hearer therefore enjoys a standing entitlement to believe what she is told. The modern descendants of Reid's position — developed by C. A. J. Coady and, in a famous formulation, by Tyler Burge — hold what Burge calls the Acceptance Principle: a person is entitled to accept something presented to her as true, and intelligible to her, unless there are stronger reasons not to. Those 'stronger reasons' are what epistemologists call defeaters — pieces of counter-evidence, about the speaker or the claim, that cancel the default entitlement. One clarification is owed at the outset, because the compressed version of this essay blurred it. The default-acceptance view is standardly called anti-reductionism, not reliabilism. Reliabilism is a general theory of justification — the view that a belief is justified when produced by a process that tends to yield truth — and it can be recruited to support default acceptance (if testimony is in fact a reliable process, beliefs formed on it are thereby justified), but the two are distinct claims. What matters here is the shared upshot: on the dominant picture, the hearer's position is essentially passive — believe unless flagged otherwise. This presumption underpins daily epistemic practice, and without some such presumption our social and intellectual lives would grind to a halt. This essay nonetheless argues against default acceptance, especially for collective testimony — the testimony of governments, corporations, scientific institutions and perceived majorities — by combining Miranda Fricker's account of epistemic injustice with an examination of the Korean cultural organisation of trust. The Thesis: Undermining Default Acceptance through Epistemic Injustice Fricker's Epistemic Injustice (2007) begins from an observation that the classical debate ignored: credibility is not handed out by an impartial mechanism. Hearers assess speakers through perceptions saturated with social stereotype, and when a stereotype embodies prejudice against the speaker's social identity, the speaker receives less credibility than her evidence and competence merit. Fricker calls this a credibility deficit, and the wrong it constitutes — being downgraded as a knower because of who one is — testimonial injustice. Her touchstone example is Tom Robinson in To Kill a Mockingbird : a black defendant whose true testimony cannot be believed by a white jury in 1930s Alabama because racial prejudice has already discounted him. The lesson for the theory of testimony is structural, not anecdotal: the 'default' settings by which hearers accept or reject testimony are themselves products of social power, and therefore cannot be presumed innocent. Fricker's own emphasis falls on deficits, and she is cautious about the mirror-image case; she suggests that inflated credibility is rarely an injustice to the speaker , who after all benefits. But José Medina has argued, in what he calls a proportional view, that excess and deficit are two faces of one economy: credibility judgements are comparative, so systematically over-crediting the powerful — the official, the expert-by-position, the majority — is precisely what under-crediting the marginal consists in. This extension matters most where testimony is collective. When the testifier is not a fallible individual but a ministry, a broadcaster, a national research team or 'what everyone says', the ordinary cues of individual sincerity are unavailable, the aura of authority is at its maximum, and the risk Medina identifies — unearned credibility excess — is at its height. Jennifer Lackey's work supplies the complementary philosophical ground for resisting the default: against pure anti-reductionism she argues that hearers need positive reasons, not merely an absence of defeaters, since a hearer who accepted intelligible assertions from a wholly unknown source with no evidence of its competence would be believing irresponsibly. My claim assembles these pieces: the normativity of testimonial reliability — the question of when a hearer ought to believe — is not settled by a blanket presumption but is intertwined with the hearer's own epistemic agency and the ethical responsibilities inherent in social trust. Antithesis: The Korean Context of Collective Trust and its Challenges Korean social life gives this abstract problem an unusually sharp form. The word uri (우리) means 'we' or 'our', but its grammar reveals a distinctive construction of the self: Koreans standardly say uri nara ('our country'), uri jip ('our house'), even uri nampyeon ('our husband') where English demands 'my'. The social psychologists Sang-Chin Choi and Soo-Hyang Choi, analysing this discourse, argue that uri is not a mere plural but a primary social unit: the boundary of the 'we' comes first, individual selves are positioned within it, and warmth, loyalty and trust flow along its lines — bound up with cheong (정), the deep affective attachment that develops inside long-standing relationships. Wi