Trust replaces external information with internal premises, making it an act of will

Evidence

The reduction can also be guaranteed through certain internal processes, which will be dealt with in greater detail in Chapter 11, ‘Readiness to Trust’. In this case the system replaces external information with internal information or with premises which it has learned for its own processing of experiences, and which impart structures. One may, with Karl Deutsch, call this replacement of external by internal bases of experience ‘will’ (in the sense of conation or making autonomous decisions). In this sense trust is an operation of the will. — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 168

Categorization

• DEFINE: Links will, trust, and internal premise-processing into one causal mechanism.
• XREF: Illuminates the Ishiguro thesis: Stevens’s ‘will’ is precisely a substitution of internal role-premises for external moral information.