Trust is a three-part relation of A trusting B to do X

Evidence

Trust is a three-part relation: A trusts B to do X, and even this is restricted to certain contexts and ranges over degrees of trust. The fourth and fifth slippages involve the reduction of trust to a two-part relation. In our daily invocations of trust we commonly do not include the third part. This might merely be an ellipsis of what we mean, but it might also begin to inform what we think, so that I begin to assert that I trust you, purely and simply, as though with respect to anything and everything. Although this might sometimes be true or very nearly so, it is clearly not so in many cases in which I trust someone. Many writers also suppose we trust more or less anyone with respect to some things, so only the two parts, A and X, are present. Such trust is commonly called generalized or social trust. — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 292

Categorization

• DEFINE: Precisely defines trust as a three-part relation (A trusts B to do X), which is central to Hardin’s conceptual framework and useful for the Luhmann/Hardin synthesis.
• XREF: Directly connects to Luhmann’s familiarity concept and the blindness scenario — what happens to the three-part relation when monitoring collapses.