The mix of risk and opportunity is so complex in many of the circumstances involved that it is extremely difficult for individuals to know how far to vest trust in particular prescriptions or systems, and how far to suspend it. How can one manage to eat "healthily," for example, when all kinds of food are said to have toxic qualities of one sort or another and when what is held to be "good for you" by nutritional experts varies with the shifting state of scientific knowledge?

QUESTION: How does one decide which expert prescriptions to trust when scientific consensus itself shifts over time? This raises the question of whether any stable grounds for epistemic trust exist.

Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Moderni…, loc. 354