While the band Oingo Boingo was perhaps too strange to achieve pop superstardom, their song “Weird Science” remains one of the more prescient songs about the concerns of science over the past few decades. It is perhaps too easy to understand why people do not trust science or scientists in the contemporary world. From fraudulent papers and misguided worldviews to harmful exercises in research forced upon people through the power of government coercion, there are a lot of ways in which both the theory and practice of science falls short of any sort of proper standard. When people who ask others to trust the science–and by implication, themselves–but engage in corrupt and dishonest ways, trust in science itself is quite naturally diminished within society as a result. Yet even beyond the reasons not to trust weird or corrupt science, there are several different classes of reason why people do not understand or trust the intentions of others, and it is worth exploring those so that we can have some idea of what separates our intentions from the response to them that we want.

The first obvious barrier to people trusting our intentions is that we may not always know or acknowledge the fullness and complexity of our intentions. People tend to think that their intentions -are pure and good when that is not often the case. This is not to say that no one ever has pure or honest intentions that are honestly admitted and acknowledged, but frequently people have mixed intentions that are only admitted or acknowledged in part. To the extent that we only admit the good side of our intentions even if less praiseworthy motives can easily be inferred or recognized by others, we lose credibility in the eyes of others. To be sure, it is unpleasant to admit less than praiseworthy aspects of our intentions, but if other people can easily recognize that we have selfish or greedy motives for a given course of action, it does us little good to deny that we support something at least in part because it gratifies our own desires or serves our interests if others can discern those motives easily. Instead, we should be quick to admit what others already know and recognize and point out the side of our motives that may not be as obvious as a counterweight to this.

The second obvious barrier to people trusting our intentions is our inability to communicate our intentions to others. As we have previously stated, other people may be able to infer aspects of our intentions that we do not acknowledge or have any conscious awareness of, but there are aspects of our goals that may not be as obvious. It can be difficult to communicate what is inside of us to other people in a way that other people may understand us without perhaps understanding us all too well. We do things for reasons, and although it might be better to help other people understand where we are coming from and the context of our motivations and intentions, it can also be scary to open ourselves up and to be vulnerable, not least when that can be used against us by others. It is for this reason that we tend to minimize the less praiseworthy aspects of our intentions, because of our fear that people will latch on to the negative and minimize the positive, to our loss.

A third class of reasons, which has already been hinted at before, is that even if we admit and acknowledge the fullness and complexity of our intentions and motivations and communicate them ably, other people simply may not trust in us. This gap in trust between how other people view us and how we view our own trustworthiness can be immense. We can view ourselves as being obvious authorities whom everyone needs to trust and respect while others view us as unprincipled and corrupt (the reverse is also frequently true). Once trust is lost, it can be nearly impossible to recover, because the memory of past evil deeds continually hangs over the relationship and the feelings that are attached to it. Where there is no reconciliation, no repentance and restoration, there is the continual reminder of the problems of the past and the fears that they will be repeated. In such an atmosphere to rebuild trust is nearly if not completely impossible. This mistrust need not be one of active evil being perpetuated, but can also involve the absence of good which is promised, which may lead others to both minimize the good that we claim will be the result of their plans and point to evils that are not openly discussed or brought into the light.

Admittedly, these three reasons are not purely separated, but there are at least a few fields of inquiry that these three reasons why our intentions might not be accepted at face value by others are involved with. All of the reasons, and especially the last, deal with the thorny matter of trust. There are simply a lot of reasons why people do not trust what others are trying to tell them, and it is largely in vain for people to insult others as being conspiratorial when trust is absent. It is not the responsibility of people to trust blindly; it is rather the responsibility of those who want to be trusted to give good reasons for others to trust them, to take the risk of putting their faith in the veracity of what they are told. Other prominent fields that these answers deal with are epistemology, the branch of philosophy that deals with one’s knowledge and how one knows what one knows. Self-knowledge can be an elusive form of knowledge for many people. Communication is, of course, a perennial struggle for many of us (myself included). It is striking that when we examine even something as simple as exploring some of the more obvious reasons why people might not understand our intentions, they deal with a strong set of themes related to the beat of my writing as a whole. Perhaps such fields are not so separate after all.