I recently wrote a paper—“Caveat Auditor: Epistemic Trust and Conflicts of Interest” (2022)—arguing that a testifier’s incentives are epistemically relevant to our trust in them. People often have incentives to testify in ways that are at odds with the truth or their evidence, and sometimes they even have incentives to get you to believe what’s false or evidentially baseless. Those incentives are typically more important than a testifier’s expertise or knowledge. If you had to c...
