Rational assessments of trustworthiness cannot be grounded in purely infantile behavioral learning

Evidence

Given the way in which trust seemingly develops from infancy, one might suppose that trust “is not based on grounds” (Hertzberg 1988, 318). On Baier’s account, trust is an extension of the infant’s relation to its parent, especially its mother. Yet, she notes, a “constraint on an account of trust which postulates infant trust as its essential seed is that it not make essential to trusting the use of concepts or abilities which a child cannot be reasonably believed to possess” (Baier 1986, 244). If this is so, then the encapsulated-interest view of trust is inherently wrong because assessments of trustworthiness could only be based on an infant’s instinctive, behavioral learning. They could not require straightforward rational accounting such as we indulge regularly when, for example, we revise a prior supposition and realize that someone is, after all, not trustworthy. — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 352

Categorization

• XREF: Baier’s constraint that trust not require concepts a child lacks supports the reader’s Hardin integration: encapsulated-interest trust presumes exactly the rational, belief-revising capacity that blindness extinguishes. — connects to: Class confidence is an injury-trait acquired at birth, not current power — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1872; Human toddlers’ sole cognitive advantage over great apes is social learning — Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture…, 80