So we can now see that Hume and Reid had really completely different pictures of how human testimony works. So for Reid, there's an innate hard-wired principle that makes us trust other people. But for Hume, we have to have evidence that other people are likely to be right before we can trust them. So we've got an innate trust in testimony on Reid's side. We've got to have independent evidence that the person testifying is likely to be right on Hume's side. So which of these two pictures is right? Which one should we accept? Here's why Reid thought his picture was the right one. He asked us to imagine small children and think about the extent to which they trust the testimony of other people. And he points out that it looks like the principle of credulity is strongest in small children. They're very much disposed to trust the testimony of other people. They'll believe whatever you tell them. And Reid thought, this is incompatible with Hume's picture of testimony. So here's what Reid said. If credulity were the effect of reasoning and experience, as Hume claims, it must grow up and gather strength, in the same proportion as reason and experience do. But, if it's the gift of nature, it will be strongest in children, and limited and restrained by experience, and the most superficial view of human life shews, that the last is really the case, and not the first. So, in other words, if Hume's picture were right, the principle of credulity will be weakest in children because they don't yet have any experience of the reliability of other people's testimony, but, in fact, the principle of credulity is strongest in children who have no experience at all of the reliability of other people. They're the most trusting, whereas adults are more skeptical and less trusting. This is the opposite of what you'd expect if Hume's picture were right, so rather than being based on experience, he reconcludes our trust must be based on a gift of nature, as he puts it. Here's a way of setting out his argument. We'll look at what the main assumptions involved are. First, he assumes the principle of credulity is strongest in children. Second, he points out that if our trust and testimony were based on experience as Hume claims it is, it would be weakest in children. And on that base, he concludes the principle of credulity is innate and not based on experience. Now, there's a bit of a wrinkle here. You might have noticed this, because it looks like Reid is talking about what children, in fact, do. He's talking about the fact they do trust other people's testimony, whereas it looks like Hume is talking about what people ought to do, they ought not trust testimony without evidence that other people are likely to be right. But I think we can appreciate Reid's point here if we take him to be saying, look, children trust other people's testimony, they don't have any evidence that other people are likely to be right, and it doesn't seem to be anything wrong with that. It's really counterintuitive to say that children ought not be so trusting. In fact, Reid claims, if we did abide by Hume's principles, then he says, no proposition that is uttered in discourse would be believed and such distrust and incredulity would deprive us of the greatest benefits of society and place us in a worse condition than that of the savages. It's scary stuff if we were as skeptical and doubting as Hume suggests that we should be. So I think that's the big dispute between Hume and Reid on the matter of testimony, is trusting other people something innate as Reid argues, or do we need evidence of the reliability of testimony before we're gonna trust it as Hume claims. An interesting thing is that Hume and Reid also seem to disagree on the reliability of human testimony and the extent to which testimony really is a reliable source of information about how truthful people really are. So in addition to the principle of credulity, Reid also said that there's a principle of veracity. He defined it as a propensity to speak the truth so as to convey our real sentiments. And he went on to say that lying is doing violence to our nature. So just as we're naturally trusting creatures, Reid says, we're also naturally honest creatures. So Hume would have challenged this. He would have challenged this idea that we're hard-wired for honesty, and the way he would have challenged it is by appealing to all the different kinds of situations in which human beings end up testifying falsely. Three kinds of examples that you can find in his essay on miracles. So he first points out that people often have a motive to lie when they have an interest in what they affirm, because there are advantages, he says, to starting an imposture among an ignorant people. So think here of the kind of lies that politicians tell. Second, he says human beings are prone to believe the tales of travellers because human beings generally find the feelings of surprise and wonder agreeable. So when someone tells you this crazy story from some faraway land, you enjoy that feeling of surprise and wonder and it inclines you toward believing what they're saying. And in Hume's day, there's surprising stories coming into Europe from all over the world, a lot of them completely inaccurate. Third, Hume says that human beings are prone to testify, to assert things, regardless of whether they have good evidence for what they're saying, because of, quote, the pleasure of telling a piece of news so interesting, of propagating it, and of being the first reporters of it. Gossip and rumor, this is how they spread. We enjoy telling other people news even when we don't have very good evidence for it. So what we can see is that Hume and Reid have very different pictures of how we relate to one another when it comes to our beliefs and opinions and how we ought to relate to one another when it comes to our beliefs and opinions. So for Reid, there's this innate, hard-wired principle of credulity and this innate hard-wired principle of veracity. It means that we're naturally trusting and naturally honest creatures. The testimony of others is a natural, an indispensable source of information, whereas for Hume the picture is much more problematic. Testimony isn't always reliable. And we can only trust testimony, we've got evidence that the person testifying is likely to be right. So in a really important sense for Hume, we're always left on our own when it comes to forming beliefs and opinions.
