Reflexive trust considers the function of trust rather than verifying its object

Evidence

This seeing-through is of a different sort to the attempt to affirm trustworthiness directly. It does not seek to find out more and more precisely, by means of direct reference to the object, whether trust is justified, and so replace trust in the true sense with knowledge, making it superfluous. Rather, it distances itself and considers the function of trust and the conditions under which that function is performed, i.e. it takes as its starting point the necessity of going beyond the information available, and then places trust reflexively in the mechanisms for the formation of trust. It reveals the world of social contact, established by operating on symbols, as a manufactured illusion – but an illusion which provides a durable basis for the continuation of contacts so long as everyone observes the rules of the game and works together, in trust, to maintain the performance. — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 253

Categorization

• DEFINE: Precisely defines what reflexive trust IS — second-order awareness of trust’s function, not verification of the trusted object.
• XREF: The ‘manufactured illusion’ operating on symbols parallels Giddens’s ‘faceless commitments’ — confidence placed in abstract systems rather than facework.