Hugh Desmond (2022), Social Epistemology 36(5): 586–600 — DOI-10.1080/02691728.2022.2104758
Key takeaways
- Stubborn, seemingly irrational distrust of scientific experts can be reconstructed as valid reasoning. Low-status people are objectively vulnerable to collective decisions, so they can justifiably distrust high-status experts whom they do not trust to have their interests at heart.
Seeded from the abstract and a skim, before the reading in NOTE-113. What follows is what the work says about itself.
Distrust of scientific experts often persists despite supporting evidence, demonstrated competence and displays of goodwill, and it is usually put down to irrationality. Desmond instead proposes a logic of “status distrust”. Because low-status individuals are objectively exposed to the outcomes of collective decision-making, they can be justified in distrusting high-status experts when they lack confidence that those experts care about their interests. On this view social status indicates who will be distrusted. The paper spells out the implications for work on trust in science and on expert communication.
Standing in the record
Filed from the 2026-09-26 sweep of the papers-feed tracker for philosophy: 140 seconds of active reading over 1 session. It was filed Deferred, unread. NOTE-113 is the close reading of 2026-09-26, and it placed the work: Active — worth reading as a compact, clearly structured rationalising account of distrust in experts that connects the trust literature (Baier, Hawley) with the sociology of professions and prestige; its §6 argument scheme is the citable part, but it shows only validity, not soundness.
When seeded, before the reading in NOTE-113, the entry gave a priority for a deeper reading: medium — t=140s is high for this batch and the argument is clean. The skim captures its structure, so a deeper reading only needs §6’s formal argument and §5’s evidence.
What the seeding asked a deeper reading to check (NOTE-113 is that reading):
- It is a rationalising (non-debunking) account of science denial. Check whether §6’s premises are argued to be true in real cases or only shown to be valid; the text says it establishes only that valid reasoning can underlie such distrust.
- It is relevant to the social epistemology of expertise and to AI-governance debates about trust in technical elites.
- Check the precision-medicine case study (§5) for whether any empirical evidence connects status to distrust or whether it is illustrative only.
Access when seeded: philarchive.org is behind Cloudflare. Read the author’s accepted manuscript (PhilArchive DESSDO-4, 26 pp., “Forthcoming in Social Epistemology”) through a Wayback Machine copy: the abstract, the introduction, all section heads, §6 and the §8 conclusion. Crossref gives the journal online date 2022-08-23. PhilArchive record (via Wayback): added 2022-08-24, archived 2022-08-27. Page numbers below are the manuscript’s, not the journal’s.