People don't always get what they need, and then there are consequences.

When were these good old days? — Hanover

My rose tinted spectacles take me back to the fifties in the UK. But even quite recently, The prime minister resigned when he called a referendum and lost it.

So, we subsist simultaneously in different and embedded contexts/realms: physical, sociocultural, political, familial, personal etc. In each, trust needs to be defined differently. Seeing as, on a broad view, our behaviour travels much narrower and deeper furrows in the landscape of possibilities than we're aware of, trust in some realms is just part of our basic functioning in that realm. So, on one end of the spectrum, to lose (long-term) trust in the stable contours of the physical world is to succumb to serious mental illness. On the other, to lose trust in an individual is an inevitable part of growing up. I guess the question @unenlightened poses is how far distrust can expand outwards without dangerously destabilizing the foundations on which we build functioning social relations. Good question seeing as a certain amount of distrust is not just desirable but necessary for social progress. Yet mass breakdowns of trust could destroy it.

I could see a taxonomy of trusts identifying negative and positive aspects to trust in each embedded context to which a form of trust applies, but I suppose the simple answer to the conundrum is that we should selectively, critically, and appropriately apply trust/mistrust. Selectively, in that we eschew a naive mistrust of everything and accept that trust is sometimes both good and necessary. Critically, in that when we do apply mistrust, we do so in accordance with reason. Our mistrust should be warranted. And appropriately, in that we apply mistrust of the right degree, of the right scope, and at the right level.

Degree e.g. We distrust a mainstream media outlet and are warranted in doing so, does that mean we should dismiss everything they say tout court as "Fake news"? Not necessarily.

Scope e.g. We distrust a mainstream media outlet and are warranted in doing so, does that mean we should dismiss all msm outlets? Again, not necessarily, we first need a separate warrant and even if we get one, it's back to the degree question.

Level e.g. We distrust the political world, so should we withdraw from the social and cultural too. Not necessarily. The degree and scope of warranted mistrust may be very different at each level.

And so on.

Tl;dr As good as it is to be skeptical of our social and interpersonal environment, getting too skeptical can fuck things up an' shit.

Oh yeah, Google, when you're talking about business-level trust, trust of entities in a market, you can divorce trust from notions of integrity and as @Christoffer suggested, look to the factors that are most necessary for the entity in question to maximize its market viability. If trust happens to be one of those factors then that in itself is a bootstrappy justification for a degree of trust.

I could see a taxonomy of trusts identifying negative and positive aspects to trust in each embedded context to which a form of trust applies, but I suppose the simple answer to the conundrum is that we should selectively, critically, and appropriately apply trust/mistrust. Selectively, in that we eschew a naive mistrust of everything and accept that trust is sometimes both good and necessary. Critically, in that when we do apply mistrust, we do so in accordance with reason. Our mistrust should be warranted. — Baden

Thanks, that's a very helpful clarification. Certainly as one grows up, one is likely to uncover the frailties of even the most benign parent, so that one no longer trusts their infinite wisdom on all things, while continuing, hopefully, to trust their benevolent orientation towards their offspring.

To relate all this to the philosophical tradition, Hume's scepticism declares that there is no reason to expect the world to continue in the orderly causal way that it has in the past; but we trust that it will. Such is the base level of trust that as it percolates upwards to other people and expects decent people to carry on being decent, and rogues to carry on being rogues, becomes what one might think of as a natural conservatism. "every day as sure as the clock, somebody hears the postman's knock."

Agriculture, the necessary foundation of civilisation, is only possible if the peasant trusts both that the seasons will follow their usual succession and that one's neighbours will allow ones cabbages to come to fruition. "Good faces make good neighbours.", not because neighbours cannot climb fences, but because they clarify which are my cabbages, and which are my neighbour's.

And if I cannot trust all my neighbours, or at least the raiding parties from far away, of Vikings or American oil-men, then I need to trust policemen and armies and the local warlords to protect my cabbages, because i have to eat, and I have to sleep.

So if I am a peasant in North Korea, or an abused child in Essex, life is shit, no one can be trusted, and the outlook is pretty damn poor. This does not demonstrate that trust is unnecessary.

I could see a taxonomy of trusts identifying negative and positive aspects to trust in each embedded context to which a form of trust applies, but I suppose the simple answer to the conundrum is that we should selectively, critically, and appropriately apply trust/mistrust. Selectively, in that we eschew a naive mistrust of everything and accept that trust is sometimes both good and necessary. Critically, in that when we do apply mistrust, we do so in accordance with reason. Our mistrust should be warranted. And appropriately, in that we apply mistrust of the right degree, of the right scope, and at the right level. — Baden

Why must we dichotomize things in such a way that we look for the degree of trust or mistrust in every relation we have with the world? I would place both trust and mistrust as reasoned approaches, like you do here, but the majority of interactions which we have are habitual of nature, and therefore fall outside the classification of a reasoned approach, and cannot be described as either trusting or mistrusting.

So I see a problem with this approach, because if we look with hindsight, at our actions, (and it must be hindsight, because looking ahead would be reasoning about possible actions), and try to determine what was the reason for doing this or that, was it trust or mistrust, it turns out to be very difficult to determine such reasons. That I believe is due to the force of habit. Habit makes us go ahead and do things without reason. And when we assign a reason for these habitual acts, in hindsight, it's just a matter of rationalizing, which does not give us the true reason, being the force of habit. Therefore there is a large variety of actions and interactions which cannot be classed in the two opposing categories of trusting and mistrusting, because they are better described as habitual actions rather than reasoned actions.

To relate all this to the philosophical tradition, Hume's scepticism declares that there is no reason to expect the world to continue in the orderly causal way that it has in the past; but we trust that it will. — unenlightened

Why call this "trust" though? Does it make sense to you to say that you trust the inanimate world? Yes it does, but shouldn't we distinguish two fundamentally different forms of "trust" then? Surely, if I say I trust that the sun will come up tomorrow morning, it doesn't mean the same thing as when I say that I trust you to deliver what we agreed upon. To begin with, we could look at statistics and probability, and see that there's a significant difference between the two. Then if I look deeper I can see that the way I relate to the reliability of the sun coming up, and the way that I relate to the reliability of you carrying out your side of the deal, is not even similar.

I don't even consider it a real possibility that the inanimate world could behave in a way contrary to my understanding of it, yet in my understanding of human beings, it appears like they need to be cultured in a particular way in order that I can even begin to understand their behaviour. I see very little reliability in the behaviour of other animals for example. It's just cultured human beings and some domesticated creatures, who display even a minimal degree of reliability. What I find is that the inanimate realm appears to be fundamentally reliable, while the animate realm appears as fundamentally unreliable. Human beings demonstrate some degree of reliability so we assign "trust" to them. But this is in comparison to the fundamentally unreliable behaviour of other living creatures. If I compare this to the reliability of the inanimate world, it doesn't even come close to the qualifications of "trust" in that sense.

:clap:

Why call this "trust" though? — Metaphysician Undercover

Hume calls it 'habit'.

Surely, if I say I trust that the sun will come up tomorrow morning, it doesn't mean the same thing as when I say that I trust you to deliver what we agreed upon. — Metaphysician Undercover

I suppose you are saying that the sun has proved more reliable than me in the past. :sad: Or is there another difference? Every day the sun rises, and the postman delivers. I can imagine a theory or two of physics and psychology/biology that would lead me to have more confidence in the sun than the postman. But as to it not meaning the same thing to say I trust them both, I don't see it.

Why must we dichotomize things in such a way that we look for the degree of trust or mistrust in every relation we have with the world? — Metaphysician Undercover

Because the premise here is that trust is basic to the human condition.

would place both trust and mistrust as reasoned approaches, like you do here, but the majority of interactions which we have are habitual of nature, and therefore fall outside the classification of a reasoned approach, and cannot be described as either trusting or mistrusting. — Metaphysician Undercover

Your leveraging of a distinction here related to habit only highlights the usefulness of a deeper analysis of the concept of trust. You even seem to acknowledge this in the rest of your post. Is it that I was speaking normatively not descriptively the stumbling block? Yes, we do things out of habit. Sometimes that is justified and sometimes not. We should apply reason to know the difference. i.e. that habit is not always borne of conscious reasoning is not a justification for not applying conscious reasoning to it, and when we do, we see habit is largely a matter of trust and largely within our control.

but shouldn't we distinguish two fundamentally different forms of "trust" then? — Metaphysician Undercover

There's no fundamental dichotomy there. Trust occurs both across a spectrum of relationship levels and relates to a spectrum of expectations. What we require for our trust is what determines its character. And looking at these requirements, we can hypothesize and debate the exact nature of many "trusts" and come to no definitive answer. But the point is more to recognize distinctions that help clarify both why we grant trust at different levels or in different contexts and what the justifications for this are.

For example (at a minimum):

Trust of family presumes love.
Trust of friends presumes loyalty.
Trust of acquaintances presumes integrity.
Trust of workmates presumes competence.
Trust of companies presumes production of value.
Trust of the media presumes accuracy.
Trust of the justice system presumes impartiality.
Trust of the military presumes strength.
Trust of a political system presumes equality of opportunity.
Trust of the physical world presumes a fixed nature.

In the final case above, the instantiation of habit (fixed behaviour) occurs as a reflection of and in response to the physical world's fixed nature and that's not something that normally needs to be questioned. But habit can and does appear at every level in different ways. Also, further to the above, we can get our wires crossed and either grant trust on an irrational presumption or withhold it on an irrational expectation. And so we move from the descriptive to the normative. Why should we trust X? And the (easier): Why should we not trust X?

I've posited above, for example, that we require at least loyalty from our friends to avoid mistrust. To me, that seems fairly uncontroversial. So, someone who put their trust in a friend who was disloyal would be setting themselves up for a fall. But we're talking necessary not sufficient conditions here, so for justified trust, we may need more depending on the context, e.g. reliability if we're to lend them money etc.

It would be easy to get bogged down in this, but I want to bring up the issue of political leaders, which are not on the list but are where I think we make some of the biggest mistakes in terms of trust. The question would be: What is a minimum requirement for trust in a political leader to be rational?

For a lot of people, the answer seems to be "strength" and I think that's the wrong answer, not only because strength is often confused with stubbornness, arrogance, fecklessness, aggressiveness etc. but because we need our political leaders to work for us and "strength" is the domain of warriors not servants. We need something more inclusive. Any ideas?

I ought to have mentioned that your previous post was very close to what I was trying to express there. :up:

You thought it through much better than I did.

I suppose you are saying that the sun has proved more reliable than me in the past. :sad: Or is there another difference? Every day the sun rises, and the postman delivers. I can imagine a theory or two of physics and psychology/biology that would lead me to have more confidence in the sun than the postman. But as to it not meaning the same thing to say I trust them both, I don't see it. — unenlightened

That's because trust/mistrust comes in degrees. If you don't fully trust, then logically, there is a degree of mistrust. Who, or what, do you fully trust?

“....While Hobbes, Locke, and Hume disagreed on many important matters, but they each constructed their political theory in a political world that felt a trust crisis. While the atmospheres of Hobbes’s Civil War, Locke’s Glorious Revolution, or Hume’s Wilkes riots are not directly comparable to the difficulties of our own times, the early moderns’ search for solutions to the problem of trust might still be edifying for us. Quite clearly, neither Hobbes, Locke, nor Hume, believed that a political order could be maintained without efforts to promote trustworthiness. All understood that reason makes clear that an order that sustains and encourages mutual trust is best for all involved, but the maintenance of this order is always precarious because of the inability of humanity to regularly understand their interests. For all three, promoting trustworthiness involved promulgating passions, ideas, and habits that compensate for this basic human failing....”
(Anderson, 2011, in http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.197.6937&rep=rep1&type=pdf)

Reason....use it or lose it.

Trust of family presumes love.
Trust of friends presumes loyalty.
Trust of acquaintances presumes integrity.
Trust of workmates presumes competence.
Trust of companies presumes production of value.
Trust of the media presumes accuracy.
Trust of the justice system presumes impartiality.
Trust of the military presumes strength.
Trust of a political system presumes equality of opportunity.
Trust of the physical world presumes a fixed nature. — Baden

You use "trust" here to mean you accept its veracity, except with your last example where you use it to mean you expect certain results. You have therefore equivocated.

To say "I trust the physical world to offer me stabilty" is different from saying "I trust my friend." The former usage allows for such comments as "I trust China will lie, that Ted Bundy will slaughter, and that covid will hospitalize." The latter is a generalized statement of veracity, where "I trust China" would be a questionable statement, but "I trust China to lie" would be accurate.

Nitpicked your examples maybe, but I do think the distiction is one to point out because there is a pragmatic argument that could be made that distrust of a person's veracity is not a bad thing as long as that dishonesty is predictable enough to allow others to successfully navigate it. That is, as long as I know there's dogshit on the sidewalk, I can avoid stepping in it.

Or is there another difference? Every day the sun rises, and the postman delivers. I can imagine a theory or two of physics and psychology/biology that would lead me to have more confidence in the sun than the postman. But as to it not meaning the same thing to say I trust them both, I don't see it. — unenlightened

I see a big difference. I see inanimate things as fundamentally reliable, and living things as fundamentally unreliable. If the temperature goes down the water will freeze. But just when you get to know the postman he might quit the job and be replaced by someone else. The reliability of human beings is attributable to the social structures, and these have very little temporal extension. The water has been freezing, and the sun has been rising for billions of years. The postman has only been coming for a few hundred, and that phase will likely be done soon.

We should apply reason to know the difference. i.e. that habit is not always borne of conscious reasoning is not a justification for not applying conscious reasoning to it, and when we do, we see habit is largely a matter of trust and largely within our control. — Baden

I don't see that in my habits, I see the exact opposite. The habits seem to be largely outside my control. I can control the habit if I put conscious effort into it, but as soon as I'm not putting that conscious effort into it, i.e. forget to, the habit takes over for that moment. That it is within my control is an illusion, because it seems to be within my control, while I am actively controlling it, but the habit will find a way to take control back when I let down my guard for some reason. The ability to control a habit cannot be taken for granted. Depending on the type of habit some are easier to control than others.

There's no fundamental dichotomy there. — Baden

I wouldn't call it a dichotomy, just fundamentally different forms of trust, as I explained to unenlightened. The trust I have of the physical world, is based in the assumption that it's behaviour is, as you say "fixed". The trust I have for a living being is based in the assumption that it's behaviour is not fixed. So for example, if something about the physical world appeared a little bit unfixed, or unpredictable, like the weather, I'd say that I don't trust the weather. But the weather is actually a whole lot more predictable and fixed, than the actions of the most trustworthy human being. So it is through a completely different set of criteria that we judge the trustworthiness of aspects of the physical world, from the ones that we use to judge the trustworthiness of living beings. That is why I say that "trust" has a different meaning in each of these cases.

In the final case above, the instantiation of habit (fixed behaviour) occurs as a reflection of and in response to the physical world's fixed nature and that's not something that normally needs to be questioned. But habit can and does appear at every level in different ways. Also, further to the above, we can get our wires crossed and either grant trust on an irrational presumption or withhold it on an irrational expectation. And so we move from the descriptive to the normative. Why should we trust X? And the (easier): Why should we not trust X? — Baden

I think you misuse "habit" here. A habit is what a living being has, and it is not appropriate to speak of the physical world as having habits. Doing this will likely confused the two distinct types of "trust" referred to above. We cannot say that our trust in the reliability of the physical world is due to the "habits" of that world, because this would imply that the physical world might use conscious effort to change its habits, just like human beings, and that doesn't really make any sense. So we need to distinguish trusting a living creature because we know its habits (recognizing that this is fundamentally unreliable), from trusting the physical world due to it's fixedness (recognizing this as fundamentally reliable). We ought not use the same word "habit" here.

However, the supposed "fixed nature" of the physical world is still something which needs to be questioned. This is because there are many aspects of the physical world which do not appear to be completely fixed, like the example of the weather for instance. Furthermore there is the question of how living things come into existence, which seem to have a fundamental unreliability about them, and only seem to become reliable through the existence of habits. So it looks like there may not be a clear boundary between which aspects of the world need to be judged as trustworthy by the one set of criteria, and which aspects ought to be judged by the other criteria for trust.

For a lot of people, the answer seems to be "strength" and I think that's the wrong answer, not only because strength is often confused with stubbornness, arrogance, fecklessness, aggressiveness etc. but because we need our political leaders to work for us and "strength" is the domain of warriors not servants. We need something more inclusive. Any ideas? — Baden

Here, I think we can draw an analogy between trusting the physical world, and trusting human beings. There are many different aspects of the physical world, and some are much more trustworthy than others. The sun coming up tomorrow is very trustworthy, but the weather isn't so trustworthy. We could say the same of human beings, a human being is trustworthy in some aspects, but not in others. The problem with human beings though, is that the aspect which is trustworthy in one is not in another, and there's a whole lot of different characteristics which we might judge for trustworthiness. So I might trust one person for one thing, another for another thing, and so on, depending on each person's character, but finding no one who is completely, and overall trustworthy in an absolute way. Therefore it doesn't make sense to talk about trust for a person in an absolute sense, we need to qualify it, saying I trust the person in this or that particular way.

"Strength" doesn't seem to be a very good qualification. I trust the person's strength? What would that give me in terms of reliability? Maybe it'd good for protection, but for some reason strong doesn't seem to be a good indicator of reliable behaviour.

I see a big difference. I see inanimate things as fundamentally reliable, and living things as fundamentally unreliable. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yes. The way I would put it is that things are indifferent, whereas people at least, maybe animals, can be benevolent or malevolent. But if you are saying you trust things more than people, then you yourself are using the same term and making a comparison in the same terms. As you say the weather is also unreliable, but we don't tend to personify it as folks used to, though we still talk about angry skies or cruel sea.

@Hanover @Metaphysician Undercover

We're in danger of getting lost in semantics here. But to clear up a few misunderstandings:

1) My analysis involved a mini-taxonomy of trusts. I recognize the differences in type you both pointed out. There's no equivocation seeing as I was pointing to differences not trying to obscure them.
2) My point about fixed-nature is that it's predictably fixed in terms of physical laws not outcomes. And our expectations tend to be fixed in terms of the former not the latter, which matters when it comes to complexity. We expect stuff to fall when we drop it, but we can't be sure about the weather.
3) I never claimed the physical world had "habits". I used the term "fixed-nature" as above to refer to physical laws. But we do have habits in our behaviours and attitudes towards both physical and non-physical things that are analagous.

:point:

But if you are saying you trust things more than people, then you yourself are using the same term and making a comparison in the same terms. — unenlightened

But if you are saying you trust things more than people, then you yourself are using the same term and making a comparison in the same terms. — unenlightened

It's the same word, but used in a different way, therefore having different meaning. I'm not saying that I trust things more than I trust people, I'm saying that these two instances give "trust" a completely different meaning. If you pretend that the meaning is the same, it's equivocation, as Hanover mentioned. This creates a problem in the sense that the reader needs to be able to determine which way the word is used every time it is used, in order to understand what the author is saying, but if the author blurs the distinction (creating ambiguity) by crossing back and forth, it's likely the reader will never be able to understand what has been written.

It is not a mistake to make a comparison between the distinct uses of the word, looking for the reasons why there are distinct uses, and trying to establish boundaries so that equivocation can be avoided.in future use. It is an exercise in clarification which is necessary for understanding. That's what Plato demonstrated with his dialectics.

This requires determining what is actually meant in particular instances of use, to identify the exact nature of the difference. So for example, when I say that I do not trust the weather, I'm really saying that my ability to understand what might happen is insufficient to make a judgement. But when I say that I do not trust my neighbour, I'm really saying that my ability to understand is sufficient to make a judgement. Do you see how these two are opposed? One is produced from having insufficient knowledge, the other is produced from having sufficient knowledge. Whether or not to trust a physical thing is directly related to one's degree of knowledge of that thing, the better the knowledge and understanding of the thing, the more the trust of the thing. But in judging whether to trust a human being, there is no such direct relationship, knowing and understanding the person may just as well lead to a judgement of untrustworthy, as it may lead to a judgement of trustworthy. And increasing one's knowledge of the person will not take away that untrustworthiness. Therefore a judgement of "trust" directed at a physical object is substantiated by, as a direct representation of one's own knowledge. But a judgement of "trust" directed at a human being is substantiated by, and meant to be a representation of the actions of that person.

If you pretend that the meaning is the same, it's equivocation, — Metaphysician Undercover

My whole point of doing what I did was to identify different types of trust. So, I'm making distinctions not obscuring them. There is a sense in which the meaning is the same and in which it's different, which I've made clear (and which we can debate further). But it is not like there are two fundamentally different meanings here, like ball (football) and ball (dance). I'll read the rest of your post when I've stopped being irritated at your inability to understand my previous explanation, which should have been enough on this point.

when I say that I do not trust the weather, I'm really saying that my ability to understand what might happen is insufficient to make a judgement. — Metaphysician Undercover

Ok. I don't know if it will rain or be fine so I take a coat.

But when I say that I do not trust my neighbour, I'm really saying that my ability to understand is sufficient to make a judgement. — Metaphysician Undercover

Ok. I know he's thieving bastard, so I lock the door when I go out. (You can trust Mr Thing to take advantage as soon as your back is turned)

But I would want to say, because I am banging on about necessity here:

I don't trust the weather, so I have to trust my coat.
I don't trust my neighbour, so I have to trust my door lock.

Of course in each case I could maybe just not go out, but then I would have to trust my roof to keep me dry, or my presence to keep me from being burgled.

Each thing I employ to deal with the unreliability might require a further back up, so I think that going down the road of distrust points us toward the skeptic's infinite regress. So, let's turn this thing around, and put an end to the infinite regress by inserting something trustworthy.

In the case of the rain, there are many things I can trust, my coat, my roof, etc., which will assure me that the infinite regress of not knowing is ended, allowing me to sleep in peace, knowing that I can beat the uncertainty of the weather. In the case of the untrustworthy person though, I am dealing with an intelligent being. The intelligent being can change its ways, so I have to be very wary that the person may always try to outsmart me (the door's locked, the window's open), coming up with new forms of behaviour which I am not prepared for, and which are also dishonest. So unlike the weather, dealing with the untrustworthy person is not a case of coming up with something reliable, which would put an end to the infinite regress of unreliability, because it's always possible that the person (being dishonest in the first place) may find a way around it. Therefore it appears like the only way to properly deal with the untrustworthy person is to actually change the person, conversion. Would you agree? And do you think that this is even possible?.

Therefore it appears like the only way to properly deal with the untrustworthy person is to actually change the person, conversion. Would you agree? And do you think that this is even possible?. — Metaphysician Undercover

That is a heck of a big question. But I'm happy to move on to it, as we seem to have reached the point where the disagreement is more about terminology than substance.

Let's lay out some simple assumptions.

1. People vary. Some are more trustworthy than others.

2. Thou and I and the other contributors are more trustworthy than untrustworthy. (Especially as we can't get near each other's throats or stashes.)

So you are asking how we might best deal with Mr Thing, the hypothetical untrustworthy person.

It seems to me, that because we are trustworthy, we can only deal with Mr thing in a trustworthy manner. If we are not trustworthy from Mr Thing's POV, then we are not trustworthy. I think that means that we cannot even try to change the person against their will. Cannot, that is, without changing ourselves in the other direction, and becoming untrustworthy.

But people can change, at least.

I think that is sufficiently convoluted to stop there and see how it goes down with some of you trustworthy folks. Can you swallow it?

And here's a big fat dissertation in case the unenlightened diet is a bit rich for you. I've only just started it myself, but it looks relevant.

1) My analysis involved a mini-taxonomy of trusts. I recognize the differences in type you both pointed out. There's no equivocation seeing as I was pointing to differences not trying to obscure them. — Baden

This all feels like pragmatics. Sure, it's better to be able to trust, just so I can know what to expect. I trust the Klansman to be a racist, and in a perverse way prefer him over the person pretending not to be racist, but who is. I trust my parking brake to fail because the cable is broken, so I park my car against the curb.

What I want though really are people who aren't racist and a car that won't roll down a hill. I want to be able to say I trust people to be good, for cars to be good, for everything to be good. The breakdown in society comes not from the symptom that dishonesty has led to unreliability and unpredictability, but from the fact that people are immoral.

Maybe we're saying the same thing here because I do note that in every one of your examples you reference something that had a positive result flowing from the trust, so you seem to see trust as a good thing when honorable, which is just another way of saying we need more morality in the world. I can drink to that, and I'd add that in addition to there being a need for more of thou shalt not lie, we need more of thou shalt not steal and thou shalt not murder as well. And I'd say we need all of those things even if the world were a worse and less reliable place because of it.

I'm also not convinced that the dishonesty we experience today is a sign of our times. I think it's a sign of our species.

:up:

Great subject matter. Wish I had time...

I trust the Klansman to be a racist, and in a perverse way prefer him over the person pretending not to be racist, but who is. I trust my parking brake to fail because the cable is broken, so I park my car against the curb.

What I want though really are people who aren't racist and a car that won't roll down a hill. — Hanover

Indeed so. Annoying, but i completely agree with this. So could we say that the Klansman is reliably untrustworthy, whereas the shamefaced racist is unreliably untrustworthy? Well we can argue about the terminology, but the substance is clear enough I think.

I think trust comes in many forms, and is difficult to define. It also depends on expectation.

For example, one of my friends has a tendency to exaggerate, and sometimes even to fabricate. I can't trust that he is always telling me the truth, but then as long as I keep that in mind, it causes me no hardship. But in a crisis, I would trust him with my life. I trust that he wouldn't harm me, and would come through for me if I needed it.

Trust can also be very specific. Perhaps I need to leave a message for someone with their receptionist. I don't know the receptionist, so I have no idea whether I could trust them as such, but I can get some sense by their phone manner as to their professionalism, and if that impression is a good one then I will feel that I can trust them to pass on the message correctly.

So for me, it's important to qualify trust. I don't tend to ask myself 'Do I trust this person?'. But I might ask myself 'Do I trust this person to tell me the truth?'. Or 'Do I trust this person not to steal my wallet if they find it lying around?'.

@Metaphysician Undercover @Hanover @unenlightened

Some insightful analysis there. Putting it together, does something like the following schema cover the examples provided?:

Trust

1) Awareness – Habitual/nonhabitual (Part of background assumptions vs. requires more of a conscious decision).
2) Scope – General/Specific (trust in general vs. trust to be/trust to do something specific).
3) Agency – Agent/Non-agent
4) Polarity – Positive/Negative

E.g.

"I trust friends."

Habitual – General – Agent – Positive

(Friends are the type of people I trust)

"I trust my friend."

Nonhabitual – General – Agent – Positive

(My friend has shown himself to be trustworthy)

"I don't trust my friend to be on time."

Nonhabitual – Specific – Agent - Negative

(I may trust my friend, in general, but that doesn't mean I trust him/her to do specific things the way I want.)

I trust the Klansman to be a racist — Hanover

[Also analyzable as: "I don't trust the Klansman not to be a racist"]

Habitual – Specific – Agent – Negative.

(It's part of the nature of Klansmen to be racist).

I trust people to be good — Hanover

Habitual – Specific – Agent – Positive

I don't trust the weather today — unenlightened

Non-habitual – General – Non-agent – Negative

"I don't trust the weather (in general)."

Habitual – General – Non-agent – Negative

We expect stuff to fall when we drop it — Baden

Habitual – General – Non-agent – Positive

Etc.

Anything not fit?

Edit: Cross-posted with @fishnchips. Maybe addresses some of that.

Economists call it 'confidence' and measure it. It is real, it is social, it is the glue of society, and the media that betray it are more destructive than war and terrorism.

Do you trust Google? — unenlightened

Economic confidence is a belief in how the economy will grow in the future and many things can influence that prediction. I imagine it's possible, for instance, for Google to tweak its algorithm to favor search results that contain negative words or phrases in association with economic growth, possibly influencing user's economic forecasts on an unconscious level and ultimately lead to a downturn, potentially causing more destruction, in terms of human suffering, than war or terrorism.

I have trust issues.

I trust people to be good
— Hanover

Habitual – General – Agent – Positive — Baden

This might be specific and not general. All other examples of specific cases had prepositional phrases except this one. Unless you assert "to be good" is a redundancy subsumed by the word "trust," it's a specific case. That is if "I trust people" is the same as saying "I trust people to be good, " only then is this the general case.

I say not because "I trust people to be bad" proves goodness is not inherent in trust, meaning the prepositional phrase is not superfluous.

In fact, I'd go as far to say that there is an equivocation error throughout because the word "trust" changes meaning when the prepositional phrase is added. I trust you to be here at 9 am means I expect you'll be here at 9 am. It has nothing to do with an assessment of your veracity, but just my expectation. But, if I say "I trust you," that's an assertion of my belief in your honesty..

Consider substituting "expect" for "trust" in those examples with the prepositional phrase. That cannot be done in those without because it has a different meaning. E.g. "I expect you to be nice" versus the meaningless "I expect you."

It seems to me, that because we are trustworthy, we can only deal with Mr thing in a trustworthy manner. If we are not trustworthy from Mr Thing's POV, then we are not trustworthy. I think that means that we cannot even try to change the person against their will. Cannot, that is, without changing ourselves in the other direction, and becoming untrustworthy.

But people can change, at least. — unenlightened

OK, I'd agree that we really can't try to change someone against their will. Usually we'll determine how they've broken the law, and lock them up or some other punishment, hoping that they might learn a lesson and change their ways. So people can change, and we actually might get a person to change one's own will. Then the changing of the person from being untrustworthy to being trustworthy would not be against their will, they would want to be trustworthy. I don't think punishment is the right way to go about this, because it's not a matter of breaking the person's will, it's a matter of changing the person's will. I think we need to ask what makes people into nice, trustworthy people.

But that's going off track of the point I was getting at. What I was saying is that when we're dealing with untrustworthy inanimate things like the weather, we can always provide safe guards to protect us from the parts we don't trust. But when we're dealing with untrustworthy human beings, they're always going to find ways around the safeguards, so our only recourse is to make sure that we're not dealing with those dishonest people, to begin with. These are two distinct approaches for dealing with things which we cannot trust. Which category does a company like Google fall into? Is it like an inanimate thing, and if we establish the proper protection we'd be protected from any untrustworthiness within it, or is it like a human person, such that the only way to really protect ourselves is to excluded all untrustworthiness from within it?