Trust requires a street-level epistemology of individual costs, not philosophical criteria of truth.

Evidence

The philosophy of knowledge and belief is a highly developed inquiry. Much of it focuses on particular beliefs or types of belief and the criteria for truth or what philosophers call “justified true belief.” For the understanding of trust and knowledge more generally, we require not a philosophically general epistemology of knowledge but an economic or street-level epistemology. The economic theory of belief and knowledge focuses on the individual believer, on the costs and benefits to the individual in coming to have various beliefs, not on the matter of belief (for example, the height of Mont Blanc). In such a theory we cannot speak of the justification of belief X tout court; rather, we must speak of the justification of belief X by person A. — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 534

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines ‘economic or street-level epistemology’ as distinct from philosophical epistemology — justification is person-relative, not belief-relative.
• XREF: Connects to Luhmann’s ‘familiarity’ as the individually-grounded substrate of trust that the reader keeps circling back to; both are cost-benefit views of trust formation.