| dc.description.abstract | My dissertation offers a developmental account of trust which emphasizes trust’s contextual, embodied, and relational aspects. On my account, trust is a response to one’s situation that embraces risk and vulnerability. I argue that my developmental account is better suited for understanding how trust functions in applied contexts because it attends to trust as a necessary component of intimacy and as prerequisite for developing a practical identity.
I begin with a chapter that engages with Annette Baier’s work on trust. In this chapter I argue that what is typically cited from Baier’s work misrepresents her view and I draw attention to underappreciated features of her account. My reinterpretation of Baier forms the basis of my developmental account of trust, which is further developed in chapters four and five. In chapter two, I argue that an adequate account of trust must be able to: 1) account for distrust, 2) make a meaningful distinction between trust and reliance, and 3) attend to the way trust functions in relationships with asymmetries of power. Chapter three evaluates extant affective, doxastic, and ordinary language accounts of trust with respect to these requirements. I show that the existing accounts struggle to meet the third requirement and that the doxastic and affective accounts tend to fall prey to two pitfalls—the call to “demoralize” trust and the turn toward trustworthiness.
In chapter four, I argue that the developmental account of trust not only satisfies all three requirements better than the alternatives, but also that it does so in a way that avoids the pitfalls encountered by affective and doxastic accounts. This is because it possesses two key features: attention to social and historical context and an emphasis on relationships. I then show that how these two features pull the ethical value of trust into focus. In chapter five, I explore additional advantages of the developmental account. I demonstrate that one advantage is that it yields a more complete picture of how trust is impacted by the experience of trauma. I also show that attending to the lived, embodied experience of trust forges new paths for exploring the relationship between trust and the formation of identity. I conclude by arguing that the developmental account provides us with the conceptual resources that are necessary for understanding how trust can be fostered, maintained, and repaired in the real world. | |
