Norms of Credibility

Lecture by Jennifer Lackey (Northwestern), organized by the Department of Theoretical Philosophy.

What is the norm governing our credibility assessments of others? According to Miranda Fricker, the answer is “obvious”: we should match the level of credibility attributed to others to the evidence that they are offering the truth. In this paper, I will show that this evidentialist norm of credibliity assessments is seriously wanting. In particular, I will identify and develop two kinds of testimonial injustice, which I call distributive and normative, and argue that this norm is fundamentally incapable of ruling them out. Finally, I will develop and defend an alternative norms—what I call the Wide Norm of Credibility—that not only avoids the problems afflicting the evidentialist version, but also makes vivid both the relational and normative dimensions of our credibility assessments.