Michael Pope

Trust is crucial for much of what we know and do. As Annette Baier (Moral Prejudices, 1994) remarks, trust is like air—something both essential and taken for granted in social living. Yet, consensus about how best to understand trust remains elusive. Amidst competing predictive, affective, and normative accounts of trust, some trust scholars accept pluralism, viz., the thesis that trust comes in different forms. Pluralism remains underdeveloped, however. In this paper, after motivating pluralism, I examine plausible candidates for developing the view according to the attitudes, aims, and justification conditions in trust relationships. I argue that pluralism, especially through justification conditions, addresses counterexample problems for accounts of trust. However, I show that pluralism fails to address a second problem, namely how trust can explain social cooperation. After suggesting two routes for supplementing pluralism to address this explanatory problem, I conclude with reflections about pluralism’s impact on evaluations of well-placed trust.

The concept of truth is at the core of science, journalism, law, and many other pillars of modern society. Yet, given the imprecision of natural language, deciding what information should count as true is no easy task, even with access to the ground truth. How do people decide whether a given claim of fact qualifies as true or false? Across two studies (N = 1181; 16,248 observations), participants saw claims of fact alongside the ground truth about those claims. Participants classified each claim as true or false. Although participants knew precisely how accurate the claims were, participants classified claims as false more often when they judged the information source to be intending to deceive (versus inform) their audience, and classified claims as true more often when they judged the information source to be intending to provide an approximate (versus precise) account. These results suggest that, even if people have access to the same set of facts, they might disagree about the truth of claims if they attribute discrepant intentions to information sources. Such findings may shed light on the robust and persistent disagreements over claims of fact that have arisen in the “post-truth era”.

Classical pragmatists, especially William James, have long been known as defenders of the rationality of religious commitment. Recently, however, scholars have begun to appreciate Charles Sanders Peirce's unique contributions to that defense. For instance, Richard Atkins defends Peirce's Sentimental Conservatism as advising us to trust in our instinctual sentiments rather than our reasonings and theories, elucidating an account of the rationality of religious belief in Peirce's "A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God." Likewise, Michael Raposa examines Peirce's religious writings and underscores their significance for his philosophical writings in general.1 The aim of this essay is to supplement...