Trust in the Guise of Belief

Abstract

What kind of mental state is trust? It seems to have features that can lead one to think that it is a doxastic state but also features that can lead one to think that it is a non-doxastic state. This has even lead some philosophers to think that trust is a unique mental state that has both mind-to-world and world-to-mind direction of fit, or to give up on the idea that there is a univocal analysis of trust to be had. Here, I propose that ‘trust’ is the name we give to mental states that we would think of as beliefs if belief was to be thought of in ‘pragmatist’ terms (that is, as a state posited primarily to explain agents’ actions) and belief resists ‘pragmatist’ treatment. Only such an account, I argue, can univocally account for all the diverse features of trust. As such, I also propose that the explanation of trust provides us with a case for understanding the limitations of a comprehensively ‘pragmatist’, or ‘Neo-Wittgensteinian’ conception of the mental.     

父母的经济人信念对自身信任及儿童信任的影响

经济人信念认为人是自私的与理性的,研究者发现,经济人信念会破坏人际信任。然而,以上研究均是以大学生为被试的启动研究,限制了结论的可推广性。本研究编制了经济人信念量表,测量了351名成年被试的经济人信念及他们在投资博弈中的信任水平,以及其子女的信任水平,以考察父母的经济人信念对自身信任和其子女信任的影响。结果发现:(1)研究所编制的经济人信念量表信效度良好;(2)父母和儿童在投资博弈中均表现出了一定水平的信任;(3)父母的经济人信念能够预测其在投资博弈中的信任水平;(4)父母的经济人信念能够预测男孩在投资博弈中的投资额,主要表现为父亲的经济人信念能够负向预测男孩的投资额。     

Reliance,Trust, and Belief

Abstract

An adequate theory of the nature of belief should help us explain the most obvious features of belief as we find it. Among these features are: guiding action and reasoning non-inferentially; varying in strength in ways that are spontaneously experience-sensitive; ‘aiming at truth’ in some sense and being evaluable in terms of correctness and warrant; possessing inertia across time and constancy across contexts; sustaining expectations in a manner mediated by propositional content; shaping the formation and execution of plans; generalizing spontaneously projectively; and being independent of the will and resisting instrumentalization. Using the method of ‘creature construction’, I attempt to show how we can build an attitude with these features step-by-step from simpler components, thereby avoiding the problems of regress or circularity affecting a number of influential accounts of belief.     

Moral Motivation,Moral Phenomenology,And The Alief/Belief Distinction

In a series of publications, Tamar Gendler has argued for a distinction between belief and what she calls ‘alief’. Gendler's argument for the distinction is a serviceability argument: the distinction is indispensable for explaining a whole slew of phenomena, typically involving ‘belief-behaviour mismatch’. After embedding Gendler's distinction in a dual-process model of moral cognition, I argue here that the distinction also suggests a possible (dis)solution of what is perhaps the organizing problem of contemporary moral psychology: the apparent tension between the inherently motivational role of moral judgments and their manifestly objectivistic phenomenology. I argue that moral judgments come in two varieties, moral aliefs and moral beliefs, and it is only the former that are inherently motivating and only the latter that have an objectivistic phenomenology. This serves to both bolster the case for the alief/belief distinction and shed new light on otherwise well-trodden territory in metaethics. I start with an exposition of the moral-psychological problem (§1) and a discussion of Gendler's alief/belief distinction (§2). I then apply the latter to moral judgments in an attempt to dissolve the former (§3). I close with discussion of the upshot for our understanding of moral thought, moral motivation, and moral phenomenology (§4).     

Trust, Dependency, and Control in the Contemporary Organization

Trust is an essential element in productive and effective intraorganizational communication and interaction. The present study examined several consequences of trust in terms of influence strategies used and the frequency with which people interact with each other. The study also examined the extent to which the technology of work affects management's dependency on their employees. It was found that distrust of subordinates by managers (n = 275) was associated with the use of strong tactics of influence, little dependency on employees, and the use of personal-related characteristics to explain distrust. It was also found that distrust of managers by subordinates (n = 267) was associated with the use of strong methods of influence, less interaction, less attempts to influence, and the use of personal-related characteristics to explain lack of trust. These findings have clear implications for understanding the relation among worker trust, dependency, and social influence. The data suggest that both employees and employers could benefit from considering the importance of a trusting relationship in the workplace.     

Knowledge with and Without Belief

This article argues for the thesis that the distinction between propositional and doxastic justification should be extended to knowledge. A consequence of this thesis is that there is a type of knowledge that requires belief and a type that does not. A familiar example strikingly similar to the sort of example used to introduce the propositional/doxastic justification makes a prima facie case. Additional theoretical advantages are revealed when the distinction is applied within the context of some recent epistemological debates. These include debates over the knowledge account of assertion, testimonial knowledge, self‐deception, and the question of whether knowledge can be essentially based on falsehood. It is contended that the sort of distinction offered here provides a way to settle these debates and, at the same time, acknowledge what is correct in the opposing positions.     

Trust,Reliance, and Democracy

Abstract

From the perspective of philosophy and political science it is often pointed out that trust is of central value for democracy. The paper critically examines this claim and argues that we should not overestimate the role of trust in democracy. In order to do that, I argue for a specific understanding of the notion of trust that appropriately accounts for the distinction between trust and mere reliance. In a second step, I argue that we have no reason to put this kind of trust in our elected officials and representatives, but should instead focus on legislative and institutional ways to make sure that they are reliable in particular respects. After contrasting my suggestion with the position of Hardin, I point to two advantages of my account: (1) The avoidance of political analysis through the lens of trust allows us to react more flexibly to unforeseen circumstances and resist populist attempts to emotionalize public debates; (2) at the same time, diffusing the tension between trust and civic vigilance solves a systematic problem in political philosophy. In a concluding section, I briefly discuss the question whether there is an alternative role for trust to play in the field of politics.     

Belief,Credence, and the Preface Paradox

Many discussions of the ‘preface paradox’ assume that it is more troubling for deductive closure constraints on rational belief if outright belief is reducible to credence. I show that this is an error: we can generate the problem without assuming such reducibility. All that we need are some very weak normative assumptions about rational relationships between belief and credence. The only view that escapes my way of formulating the problem for the deductive closure constraint is in fact itself a reductive view: namely, the view that outright belief is credence 1. However, I argue that this view is unsustainable. Moreover, my version of the problem turns on no particular theory of evidence or evidential probability, and so cannot be avoided by adopting some revisionary such theory. In sum, deductive closure is in more serious, and more general, trouble than some have thought.     

Community Psychology, Political Efficacy, and Trust

Much attention has been paid to the effects of political efficacy and trust on political participation. Most studies tend to use efficacy or trust as an independent variable to explain political actions such as voting, campaign involvement, and the like. Despite their importance in explanations of political behavior, relatively little is known regarding mechanisms through which social involvement may influence trust and efficacy. If efficacy and trust are of value, then it is important that we determine how their development can be fostered, and especially whether their development can be promoted through social interaction—such as a sense of community. Borrowing from the field of community psychology, I employ the Sense of Community Index to provide a more nuanced measure of community based on individual perceptions of their community that previous studies were unable to capture. Analyzing original survey data, this paper examines to what extent, if any, a sense of community matters for trust and efficacy. The results demonstrate that social forces, such as community, exert positive and significant effects on internal and external efficacy and personal and political trust, independently of individual traits such as income, age, gender, and education.     

道德信仰危机的成因及其克服

道德信仰是对道德的终极关怀,是理性的非理性存在方式,是人的精神支柱。道德理想主义,制度安排不尽合理,市场经济负面效应以及社会主义低谷是道德信仰危机的重要根源。发展经济,加强制度伦理建设,强化规则意识等克服道德信仰危机的主要措施。     

Trust,risk, and the social contract

The problem of trust is discussed in terms of David Hume’s meadow-draining example. This is analyzed in terms of rational choice, evolutionary game theory and a dynamic model of social network formation. The kind of explanation that postulates an innate predisposition to trust is seen to be unnecessary when social network dynamics is taken into account.     

初中生学业错误的实然观与应然观关系研究

运用《初中生学业错误实然观问卷》和《初中生学业错误应然观问卷》调查了453名初中生的学业错误观,结果表明：（1）初中生学业错误的实然观与应然观均表现出显著的年级特征和性别差异;（2）初中生学业错误的应然观对实然观具有显著正向预测效用。     

大学生精神信仰的现状研究

本研究首次关注大学生的精神信仰,通过问卷对1100名大学生调查,发现大学生精神信仰存在如下特点：社会信仰占优势,其次依次为实用信仰和超自然信仰;民族主义、生命崇拜和国家主义位居前三位,宗教信仰、金钱崇拜和神灵崇拜位居后三位。     

学校不同群体的阅读信念对记叙文意义建构的影响

采用问卷调查的方法,考察学校三类群体(初中生、大学生、教师)的阅读信念(reading belief)对记叙文意义建构的影响。结果发现:(1)学校三类群体对记叙文的意义建构不同:在表层信息上,教师和大学生显著优于初中生,教师和大学生之间水平相当;而在整体理解上,教师显著优于大学生和初中生,而且大学生也显著优于初中生;(2)在初中阶段,传递信念对记叙文意义建构起主导作用;(3)在大学阶段,互动信念对记叙文意义建构起主导作用。     

Iterated Belief Change and the Recovery Axiom

The axiom of recovery, while capturing a central intuition regarding belief change, has been the source of much controversy. We argue briefly against putative counterexamples to the axiom—while agreeing that some of their insight deserves to be preserved—and present additional recovery-like axioms in a framework that uses epistemic states, which encode preferences, as the object of revisions. This makes iterated revision possible and renders explicit the connection between iterated belief change and the axiom of recovery. We provide a representation theorem that connects the semantic conditions we impose on iterated revision and our additional syntactical properties. We show interesting similarities between our framework and that of Darwiche–Pearl (Artificial Intelligence 89:1–29 1997). In particular, we show that intuitions underlying the controversial (C2) postulate are captured by the recovery axiom and our recovery-like postulates (the latter can be seen as weakenings of (C2)). We present postulates for contraction, in the same spirit as the Darwiche–Pearl postulates for revision, and provide a theorem that connects our syntactic postulates with a set of semantic conditions. Lastly, we show a connection between the contraction postulates and a generalisation of the recovery axiom. Portions of this paper were originally presented at ECAI 2002.     

哲学性向、生活事件与精神信仰关系的研究

该文从实证的角度,探讨哲学性向、生活事件与精神信仰的关系。研究表明:1)哲学性向对宗教、神灵、金钱、家族崇拜起负向作用;对政治、国家和民族主义起正向作用。2)生活事件对神灵、生命和家庭起负向预测作用;生活事件通过与哲学性向的交互作用对民族信仰起预测作用。     

Belief, faith, and acceptance

Belief is a central focus of inquiry in the philosophy of religion and indeed in the field of religion itself. No one conception of belief is central in all these cases, and sometimes the term ‘belief’ is used where ‘faith’ or ‘acceptance’ would better express what is intended. This paper sketches the major concepts in the philosophy of religion that are expressed by these three terms. In doing so, it distinguishes propositional belief (belief that) from both objectual belief (believing something to have a property) and, more importantly, belief in (a trusting attitude that is illustrated by at least many paradigm cases of belief in God). Faith is shown to have a similar complexity, and even propositional faith divides into importantly different categories. Acceptance differs from both belief and faith in that at least one kind of acceptance is behavioral in a way neither of the other two elements is. Acceptance of a proposition, it is argued, does not entail believing it, nor does believing entail acceptance in any distinctive sense of the latter term. In characterizing these three notions (and related ones), the paper provides some basic materials important both for understanding a person’s religious position and for appraising its rationality. The nature of religious faith and some of the conditions for its rationality, including some deriving from elements of an ethics of belief, are explored in some detail.     

Belief Revision,Rational Choice and the Unity of Reason

Hans Rott has argued, most recently in his book Change, Choice and Inference, that certain formal correspondences between belief revision and rational choice have important philosophical implications, claiming that the former strongly indicate the unity of practical and theoretical reason as well as the primacy of practical reason. In this paper, I confront Rott's argument with three serious challenges. My conclusion is that, while Rott's work is indisputable as a formal achievement, the philosophical consequences he wants to draw are not forthcoming. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Trust,Connectivity, and Thriving: Implications for Innovative Behaviors at Work

This study examines how trust, connectivity and thriving drive employees' innovative behaviors in the workplace. Using a sample of one hundred and seventy two employees across a variety of jobs and industries, we investigated the relationship between trust, connectivity (both measured at Time 1), thriving and innovative work behaviors (both measured at Time 2). Trust and connectivity were hypothesized to create a nurturing environment that enables people to thrive and be innovative in their work. The results of structural equation modeling (SEM) indicate a sequential mediation model in which connectivity mediates the relationship between trust and thriving, and thriving mediates the relationship between connectivity and innovative behaviors. The theoretical and practical implications for employee thriving and innovative behaviors at work are discussed.