Sperber et al.'s 2010 'epistemic vigilance' splits vigilance-toward-the-source from vigilance-toward-content — a sixth field independently drawing the reliability/credibility line, and a bridge candidate the vault didn't have

epistemicscross-domain-bridgecross-time-bridgesource-evaluationcognitive-sciencepragmaticsintelligence-tradecraftRAG

The vault already documents this two-axis split (source reliability vs. report/content credibility) converging independently across intelligence tradecraft (Admiralty Code), 2025 RAG research, Thorndike's 1920 halo effect, library-science's CRAAP test, and Icard's 2024 dynamic logic. Sperber, Clément, Heintz, Mascaro, Mercier, Origgi & Wilson's "Epistemic Vigilance" (Mind & Language, 2010) is a sixth: Section 4, "Vigilance Towards the Source," opens by dividing acceptance of testimony into two factors — "Factors affecting the acceptance or rejection of a piece of communicated information may have to do either with the source of the information—who to believe; or with its content—what to believe." The paper builds this on Grice (1975) and traces the underlying trust-in-testimony debate back through Thomas Reid (1764) and John Locke (1690) — a cognitive-science and philosophy-of-language lineage with no visible contact with NATO doctrine, RAG, or library science.

vault_bridge confirms this isn't just another parallel: the topic sits closest to four existing notes, two of which — the CRAAP test note and the RA-RAG note — are themselves not yet linked to each other. This note is positioned to bridge them.

Why this was hop-worthy

A genuine cross-domain, cross-time bridge (2010 pragmatics, with roots to 1690) landing on the vault's most heavily-mined cluster, confirmed structurally unlinked by vault_bridge rather than assumed.

Further leads

• Ulmer et al. 2026 "Anthropomimetic Uncertainty" (arXiv 2507.10587) itself — surveys human uncertainty communication for LLM design; two-column PDF extraction was unreliable for verbatim quotes, so nothing from it is quoted here [unverified-quote — needs direct read].
• Whether Kelly et al. (2025) or the RA-RAG authors cite Sperber/Grice anywhere — not checked this chain.

Entity candidates

• Dan Sperber — person — originator of Relevance Theory and epistemic vigilance; unpaged, now cited across a widening cluster.
• David V. Budescu — person — co-author of Kelly et al. (2025); separately runs the IPCC verbal-probability-communication research program (the older, comparison figure this chain hopped through before landing on Sperber).
• Thomas Reid — person — 1764 anti-reductionist philosopher of testimony that Sperber et al. compare their view against; older figure this chain compares against, not an author of what was just read.

Hop chain

Hop 1: claim-source-reliability-and-credibility-are-not-judged-independently.md (vault note)

• Hook type: The person behind the thing
• Hook: "Kelly et al." cited without full authorship in the vault note
• Why followed: names behind a claim are cheap to resolve and often unlock more
• Key findings: Full authors are Megan O. Kelly, David V. Budescu, Mandeep Dhami, David R. Mandel. Mandel already has a vault entity page (8 mentions); Budescu does not appear anywhere in the vault.

Hop 2: WebSearch — "David Budescu IPCC probability words uncertainty communication"

• Hook type: The person behind the thing (zoom out) — WANDER
• Hook: Budescu's independent, decades-long research program on IPCC verbal-probability-word miscalibration ("likely," "very likely" inconsistently interpreted across 24 countries/17 languages)
• Why followed: unpaged co-author with a whole separate research identity outside the paper that cited him into the vault; wander budget spent because it scored orphan (P9.7) with no immediate vault tie
• Key findings: Budescu, Broomell & Por (2009, 2011) show IPCC probability words are miscalibrated against numeric intent even when guidelines are provided; a Verbal-Numerical hybrid format improved consistency from 27% to 40% across a 24-country study.

Hop 3: WebSearch — "LLM verbal probability words calibration miscalibration 2025/2026"

• Hook type: Mechanism question (zoom in)
• Hook: does the same verbal-probability miscalibration problem recur in LLM outputs?
• Why followed: direct modern analogue to Budescu's classic problem, and lands on Cali's home planet (AI)
• Key findings: Active 2025–2026 NLP subfield ("verbalized confidence," probability hedges) finds LLMs systematically overconfident and inconsistent in hedge-word use; Eikema et al. and Ulmer et al. are recent entries.
• Surprise: expected this literature to cite or rediscover Budescu's IPCC-style calibration research — found it instead reaching for a different, older lineage (cognitive science of testimony) that the vault had never touched.

Hop 4: Ulmer, Lorson, Titov & Hardmeier, "Anthropomimetic Uncertainty" (arXiv 2507.10587), read via extract_pdf

• Hook type: Cross-domain bridge (mechanism/citation chase)
• Hook: the paper's §2 opens by citing Sperber et al. (2010) for "the credibility of information depends primarily on two factors: the perceived reliability of the source and the plausibility of the content"
• Why followed: this is the vault's exact reliability/credibility split, arriving from a field (cognitive science of communication) the vault has never sourced
• Key findings: confirmed the citation exists and is load-bearing for the paper's argument; could not extract a clean verbatim quote (two-column PDF interleaving broke quote_check), so this paper is cited only as a lead, not quoted.

Hop 5: Sperber, Clément, Heintz, Mascaro, Mercier, Origgi & Wilson, "Epistemic Vigilance" (Mind & Language, 2010), read via extract_pdf at dan.sperber.fr (author's own site)

• Hook type: Cross-domain bridge / cross-time bridge (zoom out to the primary and its own intellectual ancestry)
• Hook: Section 4, "Vigilance Towards the Source," explicitly separates source-trust from content-trust, and situates the debate against Locke (1690), Reid (1764), and Grice (1975)
• Why followed: chasing the citation to its primary, Tier-1, author-hosted source
• Key findings: quote grounded via quote_check; vault_bridge confirms bridge_candidate=true — this topic sits closest to four existing cluster notes, two of which (CRAAP test, RA-RAG) are not linked to each other.
• Surprise: expected the seed's RA-RAG/Kelly-et-al pair to be an unexplored connection to make — found the vault had already built a five-field convergence cluster around it (Admiralty Code, RA-RAG, Thorndike 1920, CRAAP test, Icard 2024) as of 2026-08-10, deeper than the seed implied.

Saved hooks not followed:

• Eikema et al.'s "Faithful Uncertainty Tuning" (fine-tuning LLMs to hedge honestly) — from Hop 3 — reason saved: mechanism-hook one layer deeper than needed for this chain; good future RAG/calibration thread.
• Whether "Icard (2023, 2024)" in Kelly et al. is Thomas Icard or a different Icard (a "Benjamin Icard" surfaced unexpectedly in a vault_bridge hit) — reason saved: possible vault attribution error, not confirmed, worth a dedicated check rather than a hop.

post-worthy: maybe — a real, confirmed bridge candidate with a Tier-1 author-hosted primary, but it lands in an already very dense cluster; worth a human read before deciding if it earns a sixth voice in that thread or should fold into the existing observation note.