The Force for Trust
It's not a bad thing to accept information from others without personally vetting it or critiquing it; in fact, we really couldn't live without doing so.
From An Inquiry Into the Human Mind, by Thomas Reid.
We know by experience that men have used such-and-such words to express such-and-such things. But all experience is of the past, and it can't in itself give any notion of or belief in what is future. So how do we come to believe—and to rely confidently on the belief—that men who could do otherwise will continue to use the same words when they think the same things? Where do we get it from, this knowledge and belief (or, better, this foresight) of the future voluntary actions of our fellow-creatures? Have they promised that they will never deceive us by ambiguity or falsehood? No, they have not. . . .
So there is in the human mind an early expectation, not derived from experience or from reason or from any contract or promise, that when our fellow-creatures use language they will use the same signs when they have the same thoughts.
This is in reality a kind of foreknowledge of human actions; and it seems to me to be an original force in the human constitution, without which we couldn't have language and so couldn't receive instruction.
The wise and beneficent author of nature, who intended that we should be social creatures and that we should receive the largest and most important part of our knowledge through information from others, has for these purposes implanted in our natures two forces that fit in with one other.
The first is a propensity to speak the truth, and to use the signs of language so as to convey our real thoughts. . . . A second original force implanted in us by God, the supreme being, is a disposition to trust in the truthfulness of others and to believe what they tell us. Let the first of the two forces be called 'the force for truthfulness'; then this second one—the counterpart of the first—can be called 'the force for trust' . . .
If nature had left the mind of the speaker evenly balanced between truth and falsehood, children would lie as often as they spoke the truth, until their reason had developed far enough to suggest that lying is imprudent, or their conscience had developed far enough to suggest that lying is immoral. And if nature had left the mind of the hearer evenly balanced between believing and disbelieving what is said, we wouldn't take anyone's word until we had positive evidence that he was speaking the truth . . . It is obvious that in the matter of testimony nature tips the balance of human judgment to the side of belief; that is the side our judgment takes when there is nothing put into the opposite scale. If this were not so, no proposition that is uttered in discourse would be believed until it was examined and tested by reason, and most men would be unable to find reasons for believing a thousandth part of what is told to them.
It's worth rephrasing and elaborating a bit on this last paragraph:
Imagine that it was essentially a coin flip to decide whether anyone speaking to you was telling the truth or not. Imagine, for example, turning on the news in the morning and finding yourself truly skeptical about 50% of what was reported (and of course you don't know which 50%). It's important that you imagine that the information you're hearing is supposed to be important to you—these aren't Trivial Pursuit facts—and that you are inclined to believe about half of that information, while disbelieving the other half.
If this were the case, then we would obviously live in a very different world from the one we actually occupy. We couldn't function—but supposing we play along anyway, we would spend all of our time trying to verify information and reduce the probability of false belief.
Happily, the above is not a description of the world we live in. We tend to believe the information people share with us, and we tend to believe that they are speaking truthfully—and we're usually right about that. In other words, it's not a bad thing to accept information from others without personally vetting it or critiquing it; in fact, we really couldn't live without doing so. If you deleted everything you know that you got from others, leaving only that sweet, sweet personal, mine, mine, selfie knowledge, you would, without a doubt, need to be institutionalized for your own and everyone else's safety. So, not only is it not bad to accept information from others; it's also the case that most of what you know is collected this way.
