Trust vs. Verification

In the last "Intermezzo" post, I said that I do not wish to fully subscribe to any philosophical system. However, that does not meant I have no belief system. For that matter, I believe it is impossible not to believe. Even the deepest skeptic believes in something (Descartes Cogito), though he may, sincerely or not, protest to the contrary. Is'nt this position of mine contradictory ? No to philosophical systems but yes to beliefs. Are'nt they the same thing ? Well, both terms are vague and have been used in very different ways. However, I think we can discern a difference and that this difference is worth making. To me, the word 'philosophy' refers to a way of saying things in an explicit and clear-cut way. At least, that is what it intends to do. But we can be clear and explicit only about those things we fully master and comprehend. In other words, we can do philosophy only on those areas where we feel we are in control. By contrast, the word 'belief' evokes things we do not fully control but which control us to a certain extent. It is a commonplace to say that 'beliefs are involuntary'. Therefore, I think we can never ecompass the full spectrum of our beliefs when we do philosophy. I do not mean we should not try. But when we claim to have succeeded, i.e. when we say 'this is my philosophy, i fully endorse it', I think it means that we are either doing bad philosophy (saying confused things) or making an incomplete account of our beliefs (we do not believe in what we say or there are important elements that are missing). Beliefs are among the most important things, because they have a such a massive impact on our decisions and thus on our behaviour, good or bad. Philosophy can never fully grasp them. But we have no better tool. So the best we can do is to go on doing philosophy, in the therapeutic sense envisioned by Wittgenstein or Socrates.

In that spirit, What can we say about Trust vs. verification ?

Doc, in your last comment (9:25 am Saturday), you say 'Trust is always subordinate to verified fact'. How could you say such a horrible thing ! To me, it sounds like an appropriate motto for the late KGB. Fortunately, as your last paragraph shows ('Trust relationships will be required for years to come'), you still see the value of trust. What you do not seem to see is that the above statement, if applied to the full, is the surest way to make any trust impossible. You seem to believe (and this is really a belief, because you do not seem to be able to control it) that increasing people's ability to verify will increase the general climate of trust. Well this is like saying that more guns will increase security.

Let me clarify. Trust is what you do when you enter a grocery store, buy a loaf of bread, and eat it. How do you know it is not going to poison you ? Verfication is what you do when, having noticed your bank balance looks low, you check your statement to see if there were any errors or, who knows, theft. Trust is inextricably intertwined with everything we do with other people. It is necessary for efficiency's sake, but is also closely associated with our emotional life, and, indeed, this is just the reason why it works. Trusting others comforts us. Wen feel secure in an environment we trust, and painfully insecure if we are not. Our own trust or mistrust also has a strong impact on others. Mistrust kills love. Publicly showing signs of mistrust to a colleague will humiliate him. Should we never verify, for the sake of preserving trust at all cost ? Certainly not. There are situations where you must verify like there are situations where violence must be used. But we should strive to keep them as rare as possible.

So far, we have dealt with trust and verification only at an interpersonal level; but this is the easy part. Few people will find anything controversial in we have said above. But let us now consider organizations. Companies, churches, political parties, armies, states and other leviathans frighten people and thus, the case for trust becomes harder to make. One way out of this apparent difficulty is to direct ones attention to the reason why these organizations are so chillingly poweful. The answer lies in a single word : Trust. An organization can coerce in one case out of a hundred only because, in the 99 others, it does not coerce and just relies on trust and voluntary compliance. Large organizations can command the loyalty and active cooperation of their employees because they trust their salary will be paid at the end of the month. In the vast majority of cases, this trust is well placed. Otherwise, it would not work.

Should we accept the argument, often made, that large organizations (states or big corporations depending on your political tastes) abuse trust and should therefore be curbed, if not destroyed ? I disagree and this is why. By any measure, we are today better fed, more secure, and generally happier than we have been at any moment in history (we will deal later with those who say otherwise). Also, there have never been more large organizations that there are today, and never so powerful and complex. Should'nt we conclude that the two things are linked and pause before we start bashing something that may be a critical part of our well-being ?

To summarize this argument and provide a measure of conclusion, I will appeal to a traditional theme of our culture (and one of my own beliefs) : freedom. I think that what is generally meant by this word can be interpreted as an account of the relationship between trust and verification : 'trust but ensure you can verify'. There is nothing worse than being forced to take something on trust because you cannot verify. And if you cannot because someone forbids you, this is sheer nightmare. The above maxim is, in my view, the most courageous way to behave in life. It is also probably the best way to build the most reliable kind of trust in the smallest amount of time. Observation of the last two centuries of our history seem to bear this out. Freedom, in the sense of 'Trust but ensure you can verify', was the foundation on which America was built and certainly the most influential trend in western civilisation at the end of the XVIIIth century (when Condorcet was writing, as Axiologist points out, we will come to that in a short while). What happend since then seems to me to warrant the conclusion that Freedom brought us Trust in far greater quantities than before and, hence, large organizations which happen to be the embodiment, the hypostasis, of trust in our society. From an ethical point of view, we have said earlier that Trust must be kept above verification in a hierarchy of values. My point here is that this is just another way to say what we usually mean by freedom.

But there is a danger in this view and LP exemplifies that danger. From 'Trust but ensure you can verify', it is easy to put excessive emphasis on verification and, almost unknowingly, end up saying 'Verify so that you have knowledge you can trust'. Condorcet and all the french 'enlightenment' is somewhere in between these two poles but moving towards the second. That is why I am quite wary of this branch of western thought. Coming back to the point, we may ask why the second statement is so bad ? First, as we have said, too much verification makes a lot of emotional damage and so undermines trust more than it forsters it. But there is something else. What dou you think about the word 'knowledge' contained in the statement 'Verify so that you have knowledge you can trust' ? To me, it looks like suspiciously like the kind of 'nonsensical' notions Logical Positivists wanted to outlaw. Knowledge, in the usual sense of a 'justified true belief' does not exist. As kant said, we have no access to things in themselves and so cannot have knowlege but only theories, more or less accurate. That is why, as we have tried to show in the latest "technical" post, logic is only applicable within theories but fails when we apply it to actual statements about the world. Logic, like knowkege, deals in true statements, and there are no true statements about the world, only some that are more accurate than others. Therefore, believing in the existence of knowledge is like believing in God; it is believing in something that does not exist but is the embodiement of an abstract (non existent) notion. The very syntax of 'Verify so that you have knowledge you can trust' betrays this. Normally, you trust a person. But here, we trust 'knowledge'. Like the cyclope misled by Ulysses into believing that 'Nobody' had blinded him, we have put 'Knowlege' in the place of a person. We have created a god.

Thus, when we say 'Verify so that you have knowledge you can trust', and put this maxim to use,

• We destroy whatever trust there is through the emotional harm we do.
• We create a false god.

Bottom line : we end up with nothing, as the false god, like all false gods, does not answer our prayers. No doubt some lose their mental balance in the process. No doubt some become angry and, trying to find someone responsible for their own mistakes, say that we are now unhappier than ever before and that it must be the fault of the powers that be.

Now I wish to end on a more uplifting note and pay tribute to the valiant efforts of Axiologist to cheer us up by pointing to a brighter future. I do think that when you manage to put things back in their proper places, as I have tried to do with "trust" and "verification", the sky does become clear again and you can start to think in a forward looking way again. Forget the Marquis de Condorcet. Believe me, I am french, I know him. He is way too confused and léger to be trusted. However, I entirely agree with you on the objective of building a rejuvenated set of ethical goals or, as you put it, in the figurative sense, a new "synthetic a priori". From this point of view, I even think we can make some use of logic, as it is the stuff "synthetic a-priori" is made of.