Scientific Experts, Epistemic Wisdom and Justified Trust

Trust in science is a multifaceted phenomenon. The goal of our essay is to shed light on the kind of trust that citizens or laypeople should place in scientific experts as public problem-solvers. Our thesis is that such form of trust in science, which we call epistemic-pragmatist public trust, has unique features that prompt an ad hoc account. Traditional accounts of epistemic public trust are predicated on two conditions: citizens are justified in trusting scientific experts if the latter (a) are endowed with scientific competence and (b) are honest in rendering their testimony. We show that it is easy to find examples in which those conditions are met, and yet citizens are justified in not trusting scientific experts as public problem-solvers. We argue, therefore, that a further condition is needed to account for epistemic-pragmatist public trust: epistemic wisdom, namely, the ability to apply universal knowledge to highly specific public problems.