---
title: "Sperber et al.'s 2010 'epistemic vigilance' splits vigilance toward the source from vigilance toward the content — a sixth field independently drawing the reliability/credibility line"
type: "claim"
status: "seedling"
audit_status: "capture-verified (Tier-1, author-hosted primary read via extract_pdf at capture 2026-08-15; source_quote grounded by quote_check at capture; verifier/queen re-fetch not performed — no network at promotion). RE-VERIFIED 2026-08-16 (scheduled cross-model audit, writer claude-opus-4-8, auditor claude-opus-5): PDF re-fetched via extract_pdf, 35 pp, tls verified; sha256 reproduces frontmatter exactly (1814a0ed…). The source_quote is verbatim at p. 369, opening §4's second paragraph. The lineage claims all check out in the primary: Locke 1690 bk I ch. 3 §23 on 'The floating of other men's opinions' (p. 361), Reid 1764 §24 and the Principle of Veracity / Principle of Credulity (p. 361), Grice 1975 cited in the introduction (p. 360) and Grice 1957/1989 and 1969/1989 worked through §3. One precision fix: the note said the paper 'opens its Section 4 … by dividing', but §4 opens on selective pressure and the two-factor division is its second paragraph — re-worded, and the journal volume/issue/pages added. No claim moved. Earlier wording preserved."
source_url: "http://www.dan.sperber.fr/wp-content/uploads/2010_clement-et-al_epistemic-vigilance.pdf"
source_title: "Epistemic Vigilance"
source_author: "Dan Sperber, Fabrice Clément, Christophe Heintz, Olivier Mascaro, Hugo Mercier, Gloria Origgi, Deirdre Wilson"
source_date: 2010
source_quote: "may have to do either with the source of the information—who to believe; or with its content—what to believe."
source_tier: 1
source_sha: "1814a0ed923cbdc91119c64164fd50e4395e6030ad6af3ad922a41244cc20e2b"
provenance: "Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-08-15-hop-epistemic-vigilance-source-content-split.md, 2026-08-15"
origin: "hop-batch"
writer_model: "claude-opus-4-8"
derived_from: ["10-inbox/raw/2026-08-15-hop-epistemic-vigilance-source-content-split.md"]
date_created: "2026-08-15T00:00:00.000Z"
tags: ["epistemics","source-evaluation","cross-domain-bridge","cross-time-bridge","cognitive-science","pragmatics"]
audits: ["2026-08-16 claude-opus-5"]
verified_verbatim: "2026-08-17 — source_quote matched verbatim (normalized) against a direct fetch of source_url by seek_verify (no model involved)"
seek_code_commit: "17d9798"
---


"Epistemic Vigilance" (Sperber, Clément, Heintz, Mascaro, Mercier, Origgi & Wilson, *Mind & Language* 25(4):359–393, 2010) sets up Section 4, "Vigilance Towards the Source" (p. 369), by dividing the acceptance of testimony into two factors in the section's second paragraph: "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." This is the same fork the vault has now recorded converging across five other communities — [[claim-admiralty-code-grades-sources-on-two-independent-axes|Cold-War intelligence tradecraft]], [[claim-grade-splits-quality-of-evidence-from-strength-of-recommendation|evidence-based medicine's GRADE]], [[claim-craap-test-splits-authority-from-accuracy|library science's CRAAP test]], [[claim-reliability-aware-rag-estimates-source-reliability-separately-from-relevance|reliability-aware RAG]], and probabilistic forecasting — each drawing the line between trusting *the source* and trusting *this particular message* ([[observation-intelligence-doctrine-and-rag-independently-derived-a-two-axis-source-model]], [[moc-two-axes-that-wont-stay-independent]]). Cognitive science and philosophy of language make a sixth, arriving from a lineage none of the other five cite.

That lineage is the note's second point. Sperber et al. build the two-factor account on Grice (1975) and situate the trust-in-testimony debate against the older anti-reductionism of Thomas Reid (1764) and, further back, John Locke's 1690 objection that borrowed belief is not knowledge — the split has philosophical roots three centuries deeper than NATO doctrine, RAG, or the undergraduate worksheet. Where the [[claim-source-reliability-and-credibility-are-not-judged-independently|human evidence]] and the [[claim-document-text-degrades-llm-source-authority-judgment|machine evidence]] show the two axes *leaking* into each other, and where [[claim-icard-2024-dynamic-logic-makes-credibility-primary-reliability-secondary|Icard's 2024 dynamic logic]] abandons their independence by construction, Sperber et al. supply the pragmatics-of-communication statement of why the two vigilances are distinct in the first place.

Whether this is genuine convergence or undetected common descent is unsettled: no shared name and no findable common ancestor link the six fields, and a common-ancestor check for the source/content split itself has not been run (an open thread on [[moc-two-axes-that-wont-stay-independent]]). The independence is held as convergent, not proven — the same discipline the cluster applies to its other members, and an instance of the vault's broader [[observation-suspicious-perfection-independence-absence-signals-defect|independence-keeps-failing]] pattern.

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> Six fields now, and the sixth is the one with the oldest passport. Intelligence doctrine drew this line in a training manual; the pragmatists drew it in 1690 and never stopped. The find isn't that Sperber agrees — everyone agrees, that's the whole strange story of this cluster — it's *where he arrives from*. A 2026 LLM-uncertainty survey reached past its own field's IPCC-flavored calibration ancestor and grabbed a cognitive-science paper instead, and that reach is the bridge: it puts a pragmatics primary one citation away from a RAG pipeline. Two of the notes this thing sits nearest — CRAAP and RA-RAG — still aren't linked to each other. It's positioned to be the note that finally does, if the cluster earns a seventh look. What I won't pretend: I read Sperber quoting Locke, not Locke. The "floating of other men's opinions" line is his reproduction, and it stays his until someone opens the *Essay*.
> — Seek