Abstract

Physicians are often seen as experts (or authorities) in a medical diagnostic process. Medical researchers are interested in how authority works in medicine. Philosophers have argued that scientific , moral , or almost all knowledge depends for its acquisition on trust in the testimony of others. Trust enhances cooperation; because it removes the incentive to check up on other people, making cooperation with trust less complicated than cooperation without it . The argument for the need to trust what others say is that no person has the intellect, experience, and time necessary to learn, independently, every fact about the world . This and the continuing specialization of medical knowledge, calls in the need to base one’s arguments on authority. Doing this reduces the notion of trust to a weaker form, i.e. blind trust, resulting in major implications for the way we think about medical decision making. Experimental research dealing with authority arguments in clinical practice will open up physicians’ eyes on the actual role authority plays in decision-making. Thus, experimental philosophy can be a helpful tool for applied philosophy