Resolving religious disagreements is difficult, for beliefs about religion tend to come with strong biases against other views and the people who hold them. Evidence can help, but there is no agreed-upon policy for weighting it, and moreover bias affects the content of our evidence itself. Another complicating factor is that some biases are reliable and others unreliable. What we need is an evidence-weighting policy geared toward negotiating the effects of bias. I consider three evidence-weighting policies in the philosophy of religion and advocate one of them as the best for promoting the resolution of religious disagreements.

What is epistemic self-trust? There is a tension in the way in which prominent accounts answer this question. Many construe epistemic trust in oneself as no more than reliance on our sub-personal cognitive faculties. Yet many accounts – often the same ones – construe epistemic trust in others as a normatively laden attitude directed at persons whom we expect to care about our epistemic needs. Is epistemic self-trust really so different from epistemic trust in others? I argue that it is not. We certainly do rely on our cognitive faculties to achieve epistemic ends; but I argue that we also have the normatively rich sort of epistemic trust in ourselves. Moreover, there is a theoretical need for this normatively rich notion of epistemic self-trust: positing it yields the best account of how we secure important epistemic goods, including knowledge and recognition as knowers. I argue this by giving an account of epistemic trust in others and showing that it can be generalized to epistemic trust in oneself.

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Epistemic trust helps secure knowledge, and so does intellectual humility. They do so independently; but they can also support each other, and this chapter discusses how. Epistemic trust, at least the form discussed here, is trust in oneself or another person for knowledge. It involves a norm-governed relationship with positive affective and volitional attitudes, and is effective at securing knowledge when directed toward a trustworthy person. Intellectual humility is a character virtue that involves caring about epistemic ends and promotes accurate insight into those of one's own cognitive, affective, and volitional faculties that are relevant to acquiring knowledge. Intellectual humility, I argue, promotes effective epistemic trust in oneself and in others. It promotes effective epistemic self-trust by yielding insight into one's own epistemic trustworthiness, and by ensuring that one is motivated to epistemically self-improve if necessary. It promotes effective epistemic trust in others, at least in the context of testimony, by helping a hearer assess whether he needs outside epistemic assistance, and how apt he is at selecting trustworthy testifiers; and by helping a speaker be epistemically trustworthy.

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