Trust is a policy adopted precisely where knowledge of future action is unavailable

Evidence

No one can know how another human being will act in the future. Trust is a policy apt for conditions where knowledge is unavailable, as in the case of the free acts of another person (in Locke’s view) it will always remain. Trust does not have to be any more credulous or sentimental than the judgement of those who decide how to allocate it, though it will in practice, naturally, not be any less so either. — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 1197

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines trust as decision-making under knowledge-absence about free others’ acts — precisely the theoretical bridge to Luhmann’s familiarity-under-observation collapse in the blindness novel.
• XREF: Feeds the reader’s core claim that trust requires observable constraints; Locke’s trust-as-policy-under-ignorance pairs with Hardin’s trust-as-encapsulated-interest and with the doctor’s wife’s lone sightedness restoring observability.
• DEEPTHINKING: The last sentence — trust no more credulous than the judgement deciding its allocation, yet no less — captures a reflexive circularity worth sitting with: the rationality of trust depends on the trustworthiness of the allocator’s judgement.