Jonathan Tallant

A multi-disciplinary body of research has long recognised trust as a pivotal feature of social and economic exchange. Empirical studies of trust by psychologists, sociologists, political scientists, and economists have examined different features of trust. Within this literature, the structure, components, preconditions, and implications of trust have received much attention. However, a question that has received comparatively little attention in the empirical literature is whether and to what extent trust is morally significant. Moral dimensions of trust have been discussed extensively by philosophers, who focus predominantly on interpersonal relationships involving trust. The purpose of this paper is to offer an experimental study of a dominant philosophical distinction between trust and mere reliance. Our findings suggest that the position taken in the philosophical literature is correct; there is a recognisable difference between trust and mere reliance, and, crucially, trust, but not reliance, has a moral dimension. These findings have significant implications for the existing body of empirical work on trust outside philosophy. They also help set the philosophy of trust subfield onto firm(er) foundations.

This paper distinguishes between trustability and trustworthiness as two conceptually and normatively distinct conditions for legitimate trust, a distinction that has been largely absent from the philosophical literature. Trustworthiness concerns whether an agent merits trust, while trustability names a prior condition: whether the entity in question is even the kind of thing to which trust can coherently apply. Focusing on Faulkner’s grammar of trust and recent work by Massaguer Gómez on human–robot interaction, we argue that many artificial intelligence systems today elicit trust without being trustable—a category error with ethical consequences for the design, deployment, and governance of emerging technologies. We propose that trustability functions as a normative threshold for evaluating whether trust in AI is not only misplaced but also structurally incoherent, and we show how this concept allows us to differentiate between merely instrumental reliance and genuinely normatively structured trust. This clarifies when evaluations should shift from “trust” to reliance with accountability. We also examine relevant philosophical discussions that have anticipated parts of our argument, situating our approach within debates about trust in governments, institutions, and nonhuman agents, and clarifying how our framework builds upon and departs from existing positions. Finally, we explore the conceptual and institutional conditions under which future AI systems might become both trustable and trustworthy—outlining technical, moral, and political prerequisites for such a development. This distinction provides a framework for diagnosing inappropriate trust, clarifying when it is possible, when it is normatively justified, and when it is conceptually impossible.

This paper investigates the impact of boundary spanning activities on building trust as a means of tackling health inequalities in hardly reached communities. Lack of trust has been identified as a barrier to engagement with healthcare services, resulting in poorer health outcomes. Engaging with hardly reached communities is challenging due to the social and symbolic boundaries prevalent in community healthcare settings. Drawing on empirical data from a recent year-long collaborative research project with communities from seven economically deprived areas in the City of Nottingham, we identify two boundary spanning activities that facilitate the development of trust: communication across boundaries and intergroup relationship building. By cross fertilising sociological accounts on trust with insights derived from philosophy, the study finds that for hardly reached communities, trusting relevant individuals is more potent and widespread than the trust they have in healthcare institutions. By developing individual trust, hardly reached communities are more likely to consequently perceive the existence of institutional goodwill and competence. This counter-intuitive finding invites us to regard trust as context specific and relational rather than as a binary choice between trusting individuals or institutions and to situate cross boundary activities focused on trust development within the power asymmetries in which they unfold.

Presentism is the view that only present things exist. So understood, presentism is primarily an ontological doctrine; it’s a view about what exists, absolutely and unrestrictedly. The view is the subject of extensive discussion in the literature on time and change, with much of it focused on the problems that presentism allegedly faces. Thus, most of the literature that frames the development of presentism has grown up either in formulating objections to the view (e.g., Sider 2001: 11–52), or in response to such objections (e.g., Bigelow 1996; Markosian 2004; Effingham 2023), with exceptions to this largely coming via the ways in which presentism is motivated (e.g., Markosian 2022; Builes & Impagnatiello 2025). This entry mirrors the structure of that literature, for the most part. Here’s the plan for what follows. We begin with a more detailed sketch of presentism, unpacking its commitments and motivations. Then, we move to consider several concerns raised for presentists. We use these to illustrate the breadth and severity of the challenges that presentism faces, as well as the range of different versions of presentism developed to help meet these challenges.

Contextualism in epistemology, as developed by Keith DeRose, holds that the truth of knowledge attributions depends on the epistemic context of the attributor. This paper presents three objections to DeRose’s formulation of contextualism, each aimed at undermining its standard motivations. First, I argue that the natural-language methodology typically used to support contextualism is insufficient to establish its semantic conclusions. By constructing parallel HIGH/LOW cases involving the predicate ‘is real’, I suggest that if such arguments were sound, they would commit us to implausible forms of metaphysical indexicality, thereby weakening the natural-language motivation for contextualism about knowledge. Second, I challenge the claim that contextualism offers a distinctive explanation of sceptical scenarios. I introduce symmetric SHIGH/SLOW cases in which raising epistemic standards appears to license, rather than undermine, certain knowledge attributions, casting doubt on the asymmetry required for the contextualist response to scepticism. Finally, I argue that there are contexts in which ‘knows’ is correctly applied despite the absence of belief, suggesting that variation in knowledge attributions sometimes reflects shifts in meaning rather than shifts in epistemic standards. Taken together, these considerations do not show contextualism to be false, but they significantly weaken the case for its standard motivations.

The main contention of this paper is that theoretical virtues in metaphysics can be justified in the face of a broadly Carnapian challenge. In particular, we look to extend insights from recent work that seeks to justify our preference for more parsimonious theories into our evaluation and justification of theories that possess other theoretical virtues. Our journey begins with Carnap. From that basecamp, we move through a variety of recent discussions of parsimony, using case studies as our guide.

Kit Fine has articulated a position according to which reality is fragmented. In this paper I will refer to this view as ‘Heterodox Presentism’. I want to try and do two things. First, I want to try and undermine the arguments presented by Fine in favour of Heterodox Presentism and show that the view is unmotivated – in part by the fact that it fails to meet some of the standards that Fine sets for it. The second target aim is to offer some very informal and sketchy remarks as to how we might better construe the ‘standard’ view of realism, or ‘presentism’ to which Fine objects – the view that I will define here as ‘only present objects exist’. As we shall see, my own view of presentism differs quite substantially from this pithy slogan

Philosophers have had much to say about the moral obligations arising from trust. These obligations involve, predominantly, interpersonal relationships. But what can we say about the moral relevance of trust in institutional settings? In this paper, we consider the particularised approach to trust and its focus on interpersonal relationships and argue that it is far from clear whether this is the kind of relationship that persons can have with respect to firms. For a particularised view of trust to be applicable to firms, firms must be seen as institutions that are to some extent distinct from their individual members. They would also have to be fitting targets and sources of reactive attitudes in morally relevant trust relationships. Such an account of trust in firms is not as yet forthcoming. To inspire future work on trust and firms, we take note of an argumentative strategy in the literature on corporate agency that lets us conceive of firms as appropriate targets and/or sources of reactive attitudes. In so far as this strategy turns out to have empirical efficacy, we suggest it may also prove fruitful for thinking about trust in relation to firms.

Discussions of trustworthiness are not ubiquitous in the philosophical literature (compare remarks by Jones 2012, 61). Nonetheless, there are some attempted analyses and there is excellent work ongoing. The goal of this paper is to focus on trustworthiness's even less discussed opposite: untrustworthiness. So far as I can tell, the concept has gone largely undiscussed in the philosophical literature. This is unfortunate. For, just as Hawley (2014) points out that a theory of trust must be rendered compatible with a theory of distrust, so (I claim) a theory of trustworthiness must be rendered compatible with a theory of untrustworthiness. A further wrinkle to be introduced along the way is the need for a further distinction: cases where we must talk, not of trustworthiness or untrustworthiness, but of neither.

In this paper, we explore locative grounding harmony, according to which the location of the grounds mirrors the location of the grounded. We proceed in three stages. First, we clarify the notion of locative harmony and describe different locative harmony principles. Second, we offer two arguments for the claim that grounding between physically located entities obeys principles of locative harmony. Third, we consider and respond to a range of cases that seem to show that grounding relations between physically located entities do not obey such principles. We conclude that grounding between such entities obeys locative harmony.

In this paper we explore the connection between the act of teaching and the imparting of knowledge. Our overarching aim is to demonstrate that the connection between them is less tight than one might suppose. Our stepping off point is a recent paper by David Bakhurst who (on one reading, at least) takes a strong view, opposed to our own. On our reading, Bakhurst argues that there is a tight conceptual connection between teaching and the imparting of knowledge. We argue that this is not the case; the connection does not hold. We then consider several ways we might weaken the alleged conceptual connection between teaching and knowledge, finally considering two ways of severing the conceptual connection altogether, whilst at the same time allowing that much teaching does indeed lead to the imparting of knowledge. We argue that such views are to be preferred.

Some theories in the philosophy of time combine a commitment to the existence of non-present regions of spacetime with the view that there is a perspective-independent present time. We call such theories 4D A-theories. There is a well-known objection to 4D A-theories, as follows: 4D A-theories entail that the vast majority of subjects across time believe falsely that they are present. But if the vast majority of subjects across time believe falsely that they are present, we do not know that we are present. We call this the Epistemic Objection to 4D A-theories. In this paper we do two things: first, we describe and assess a number of different versions of the Epistemic Objection. We argue that there is only one version of the objection—the version due to Russell that we call the Safety Argument—that does not rely on implausible epistemic principles which entail radical scepticism. Second, we raise objections to the main strategies adopted by 4D A-theorists in response to the Safety Argument. We conclude that the Epistemic Objection—in the form of the Safety Argument—remains a threat to 4D A-theories.

A dominant claim in the philosophical literature on trust is that we should stop thinking in terms of group trustworthiness or appropriate trust in groups. In this paper we push back against this claim by arguing that philosophical work on trust would benefit from being brought into closer contact with empirical work on the nature of trust. We consider data on reactive attitudes and moral responsibility to adjudicate on different positions in the philosophical literature on trust. An implication of our argument is that the distinction between different kinds of groups – mere groups versus institutional groups – deserves more attention than is currently recognized in the philosophical literature on trust.

We aim to introduce presentism and to consider the question that presentism is supposed to answer. That is, if “only present objects exist” (or some appropriate precisification of the slogan) is the answer to a philosophical question, then (i) what is the question? And (ii) is it the right question to ask? We suggest that the question presentists are answering is not a good one to ask. We aim to articulate a question that presentists, or the heirs of presentism, should try to answer. In pursuing these aims, we provide the reader with a sense of how we have reached the current position in the literature, as well as how we might move it along.

This is a paper about trust, with a specific focus on the ways in which trust is investigated in the business literature and the commercial sector. The lens through which the topic is approached is distinctively philosophical. We use philosophical tools to demonstrate the paucity of some of the accounts of trust that are given in the business and management literature, as well as the empirically informed literature that has flowed from them. We close with a discussion of some work on trust drawn from the commercial sector that would, as we shall demonstrate, benefit from a clearer understanding of the nature of trust. We take this to be important. Trust is a key moral and ethical component of transactional relationships. Without a clear understanding of the notion, we will be missing a central concept in our attempts to understand the commercial world that we inhabit. The paper proceeds in four parts. In the first part of the paper we introduce some reasonably standard philosophical distinctions between different kinds of trust, as well as saying a little more about our methods. In the second, we demonstrate that a reasonably widely held account of trust in the business and management literature fails to capture the nuance reflected by the philosophical literature. On the basis of this, in the third section, we suggest that various pieces of empirical work require reassessment. In the final part of the paper we explore some non-academic discussions of trust drawn from the commercial sector arguing that, there too, we require a more precise understanding of trust. In short, though, our overarching argument is simply this: if we can give a more precise analysis of trust, it follows that both our empirical research and current commercial activity can be improved.

The Triviality Argument against presentism maintains that we should reject presentism because there is no way to define the view that is not either trivially true or obviously false. We suggest that this style of argument over-emphasises purely linguistic means of representing a philosophical thesis. We argue that there is no reason to suppose that all philosophical theses must be linguistically representable, and thus that the failure to linguistically represent presentism is no big deal. It certainly shouldn’t lead us to reject the view. We offer a more general moral for philosophy, and that is to look beyond purely linguistic methods of representing philosophical views and embrace a wider range of representational media.

Mereological harmony is the idea that the mereological structure of objects mirrors the mereological structure of locations. Grounding harmony is the idea that there is a similar mirroring between the grounding structure of objects and locations. Our goal in this paper is exploratory: we introduce and then explore two notions of grounding harmony: locative and structural. We outline potential locative and structural harmony principles for grounding, and show which of these principles may entail, or be entailed by, principles of mereological harmony. We then present a case study in grounding harmony, by applying it to Schaffer’s :31, 2010a) specific version of priority monism. We show that, given a strong form of grounding harmony, Schaffer-style monism is inconsistent, but that this inconsistency can be resolved by offering bespoke notions of grounding harmony. We use Schaffer’s priority monism to demonstrate a broader tension within certain packages of metaphysical views, including versions of priority pluralism. We close by briefly considering the case against structural grounding harmony.

The idea that time does not exist is, for many, unthinkable: time must exist. Almost every experience we have tells us so. There has been plenty of debate around what time is like, but not whether it exists. The goal of this book is to make the absence of time thinkable. Time might not exist. Beginning with an empirically flavoured examination of the 'folk' concept of time, the book explores the implications this has for our understanding of agency, and the extent to which our best physics and best metaphysics are compatible with a timeless conception of reality.

Presentists face a familiar problem. If only present objects exist, then what 'makes true' our true claims about the past? According to Ross Cameron, the 'truth-makers' for past and future tensed propositions are presently instantiated Temporal Distributional Properties. We present an argument against Cameron's view. There are two ways that we might understand the term 'distribute' as it appears. On one reading, the resulting properties are not up to the task of playing the truth-maker role; on the other, the properties are incompatible with presentism.

Truths depend upon what there is. So say many. A significant subset of that group say more; they say that the best way—perhaps the only way—to make sense of the claim that truth depends upon what there is, is to adopt a form of truth-maker theory. Truth-maker theorists claim that truths require ground; what’s true must depend upon what there is. Typically, truth-maker theory isn’t seen as a theory about the nature of truth. Rather, it’s seen as a theory about what truths must do. Truths must depend. Relatedly, the claim that truths require ‘truth-makers’, that is, some putative ontological grounds, is used as a methodological tool in metaphysics. Put somewhat crudely, fix on what truths there are and locate the truth-makers—if necessary, add to your ontology until you satisfy this demand for truth-makers. Truth-making is thus at once both narrow and broad. It’s narrow insofar as it’s not a theory (it’s not a claim) about the nature of truth, and yet it’s broad insofar as it enables us to determine our ontological commitments. We take this to be a two-part orthodoxy about truth-making. We reject the orthodoxy on both counts.