Speculative trust requires imagining others’ positions without understanding them.

Evidence

Ultimately, it, too, requires a speculative imagination, in the sense of being able to imagine ourselves occupying the positions of others, but not necessarily to understand or to empathize. This is not a Rawlsian veil of ignorance, in the sense of a rational device that allows equal citizens to make fairer choices. Rather, it looks more like a trust fall game, in which participants share each other’s relinquishment of control. Forging horizontal forms of trust will thus never generate greater certainty, for as philosopher Martha Nussbaum (2001) has pointed out, the most radical forms of trust are inherently uncertain too; they require a leap of faith that doesn’t seek to align different forms of resistance into one unified whole. — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 527

Categorization

• XREF: The trust-fall image of horizontal trust parallels the reader’s finance work: market cooperation works through shared speculative bets without mutual comprehension.
• DEFINE: Clarifies what ‘speculative imagination’ means for trust: role-taking without empathy, contrasted with Rawls’s veil of ignorance.