Imagining life without trust yields instructive but ultimately spurious thought experiments

Evidence

A third possibility is to think about and use one’s imagination to portray the anxieties of an existence without trust. By this means one can transcend the everyday world, and provide a distanced interpretation of it through the philosophical tradition. The prospect of this borderline situation has held great fascination for psychologists and doctors, not to mention eminent thinkers of the present day. In fact, although spurious conceptions have their uses and can be instructive, they nonetheless remain spurious. — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 95

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth chasing later: does Luhmann’s dismissal of the ‘spurious’ no-trust thought experiment have implications for Ishiguro’s literary method, which dramatizes exactly such a borderline case?