Listening

Listening to other people is one of the most difficult, but important things, anyone ever has to do. Almost everything we learn, we learn from other people. Our parents, our teachers, scientists, our religious and political leaders, television, radio, magazines and newspapers, and now the internet. So trust is essential for learning.

But we also have to learn who to trust. It's an impossible task. You can't test the truth of what one person says without a fixed reference to the truth. (Unless you're lucky enough to have personal experience with the subject and you trust yourself.) And all those references at some point were made by people as well, so really what we consider human "truth" or "knowledge" is mostly a tangled web with little foundation.

This is not meant to be discouraging. I'm just trying to show how important having trust is between people. When we have groups of people who seem to disagree with each other over almost everything, it shouldn't surprise us. We're just dealing with two separate webs.

However, I do believe in an objective world, that there is a way things really are. And that there must be some advantage if a group's beliefs are closer to this objective truth than another's. (Though this is just another assumption based on my trust in my web.)

Trust is necessary for knowledge. So I trust everyone. This doesn't mean I believe everything everyone believes is true, but I do believe that they believe it's true. Now, at times people clearly misrepresent themselves, and (implied understatement) human beings have been known to lie from time to time. Even so, I think this approach gets me closer to the truth than any other.

So the question I ask when I'm trying to figure out whom to trust is: Whom do they trust? Do they only trust people who think like they do and share the same experiences? Or are they willing to trust people who think differently and have their own experiences? Because the way I see it, the more people you are willing to trust, the better chance you have of actually hearing the person who's closest to the truth. Diversity is not only valuable because many of us believe that equality is a virtue. Diversity also has very real epistemic value.

So when you're trying to figure out who to trust, trust those who trust what people have to say about their own experiences. The only way we can learn is by trusting those who are not like us. Otherwise we only hear our own experiences reflected back at us, and we learn nothing new.