Trust always rests on a wager with incomplete information, never certainty

Evidence

Trust clearly depends, as several of the essays in this book stress, on the availability of information about the object.of one’s trust. I will trust my friends, or even my trading partners, because I believe that I can predict how they will behave. But although it may be perfectly rational for me to hold such a belief, I cannot in fact ever be in possession of sufficient information to know that they will not act in entirely unforeseen ways. I trust them not to do so. What I have will always be a belief. Like Pascal’s view of faith, trust relies in the end upon a wager; and in Italian as in Latin (and most Romance languages), the term most commonly used for trust, fede, is the term English translates as ‘faith’. — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 1723

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines trust as irreducible belief-against-insufficient-information, etymologically tied to faith (fede).
• XREF: Directly parallels Luhmann’s ‘familiarity’ as baseline trust and Hardin’s framing of trust as relying on imperfect knowledge of counterpart incentives. — connects to: Testing must be endlessly repeated because it never actually secures certainty. — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 416
• QUESTION: Doria and Genovesi see a nonrational wager in trust; how does this compare to Hardin’s claim that trust is encapsulated interest based on incentives?
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 1723