Abstract

The beliefs that we receive through computer use and our trust in their sources might be justified or not, and I will argue that they are not prima facie justified if they threaten our autonomy to reflect afterward. Drawing on Brandom, I will talk about justification in terms of being “entitled” to a belief as a social status instituted by a practice of mutual recognition. I will argue that a lack of mutual recognition may create contexts where we either do not trust, preventing beliefs from being shared, or misplace trust, threatening that social norms may be one-sidedly enforced on our thought and behavior. When mutual recognition is achieved, on the other hand, we have a prima facie entitlement to accept beliefs and trust sources because it ensures respect for our autonomy to reflect, up to having second thoughts about our beliefs and retracting our trust. In light of my analysis of entitlement as a social status, failures of entitlement in our contemporary belief sharing practices that use intermediaries like computers will be able to be identified as historically situated failures of mutual recognition among communities. I will suggest that computers and software have to be designed for, and backed by, communities in which mutual recognition can already succeed. Then they could be tools facilitating contexts in which trust between users and programmers could develop at the same time as their autonomy to form and reform their own beliefs to think and act for themselves is respected.