C. Thi Nguyen

Some cognitive domains, like the moral, aesthetic, and religious, seem to demand a special kind of intellectual autonomy. We should, it is thought, think for ourselves and not trust others. This call for autonomy seems to support a radical intellectual self-sufficiency. In particular, the fact that our peers disagree with us can be disregarded by the fully intellectually self-sufficient person. I argue against radical intellectual self-sufficiency. I argue, instead, that our basis for self-trust in these domains should also extend to trusting others. So long as we do not have a good account of our own reliability in these domains, our general cognitive similarity to others ought to lead us to weight their testimony, and so weight their disagreement. We should be epistemically humble in the face of disagreement. Furthermore, epistemic humility here is a form of intellectual autonomy, for we discover the evidence of disagreement and think through its consequences for ourselves.

According to most accounts of trust, you can only trust other people (or groups of people). To trust is to think that another has goodwill, or something to that effect. I sketch a different form of trust: the unquestioning attitude. What it is to trust, in this sense, is to settle one’s mind about something, to stop questioning it. To trust is to rely on a resource while suspending deliberation over its reliability. Trust lowers the barrier of monitoring, challenging, checking, and questioning. Trust sets up open pipelines between yourself and parts of the external world. Trust permits external resources to have a similar relationship to one as one’s internal cognitive faculties. This creates efficiency, but at the price of exquisite vulnerability. We must trust in this way because we are cognitively limited beings in a cognitively overwhelming world. Crucially, we can hold the unquestioning attitude towards objects and technologies. When I trust my climbing rope, I stop worrying about its reliability. When I trust my online calendaring system, I simply go to the events indicated, without question. But, one might worry, how could one ever hold such a normatively loaded attitude as trust towards mere objects? How could it ever make sense to feel betrayed by an object? Trust is our engine for expanding and outsourcing our agency—for binding external processes into our practical selves. Thus, we can be betrayed by our smartphones in the same way that we can be betrayed by our memory. When we trust, we try to make something a part of our agency, and we are betrayed when our part lets us down. To unquestioningly trust something is to _let it in_—to attempt to bring it inside one’s practical functioning. This suggests a new form of gullibility: agential gullibility, which occurs when agents too hastily and carelessly integrate external resources into their own agency.

Aesthetic hedonism—the view that aesthetic value consists in pleasure—has faced serious objections in recent years, including James Shelley’s influential argument that it cannot account for the possibility of overvaluing an aesthetic object. Shouldn’t a hedonist aim for as much pleasure as possible? We propose an improved version of aesthetic hedonism that focuses on the whole of aesthetic life rather than isolated encounters with aesthetic objects. This shift reveals good reasons for the hedonist to care about correct evaluation, even when it leads to short-run losses in pleasure.