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other: more precisely, trust as decision/action presupposes trust as evaluation/expectation, as
we shall argue in Chapter 2.
Yet another issue that remains often underestimated or confused is the behavioral aspect of
trust , i.e. all the different types of actions that distinct actors (roles) have to perform, in order
for trust to be a felicitous choice.
As for the act of the trustee , what is frequently missed is that:
(a) The act can be non-intentional . First, the trustee might not be aware of my reliance on
him/it, 5 or he/it may not know or intend the specific result of its action that I intend to
exploit (see for instance the famous anecdote of Kant and his neighbor, where the latter
was relying on the former and trusting him for his punctuality and precision, without Kant
being aware of such a reliance). Second, the act that I exploit can be a non-intentional act
by definition: e.g. a reactive behavior, or a routine. Third, if we endorse a very general
notion where one can also trust natural processes or artifacts (see (c)), then of course the
exploited process and the expected result that we delegate to a natural event or to an artifact
are not intentional.
(b) Also omissions may be relevant in this context: e.g. 'doing nothing', 'not doing
α
',
'abstaining from
'. Obviously, omissions can be acts, even intentional ones - in which
case, they are the result of a decision. In addition, omissions can also be the outcome
of some more procedural choice mechanism, or of a merely reactive process, as well as
just the static and passive maintenance of a previous state (i.e. they are not even proper
'acts' in the latter sense). Regardless the specific nature of the omission, the trustor might
precisely expect, desire, and rely on the fact that Y will not do the specific action
α
α
,or
more generally that Y will not do anything at all (See note 3).
(c) The trustee is not necessarily a cognitive system , or an animated or autonomous agent.
Trust can be about a lot of things we rely upon in our daily activity: rules, procedures,
conventions, infrastructures, technology and artifacts in general, tools, authorities and
institutions, environmental regularities, and so on. Reducing trust to 'trust in somebody'
is not only an arbitrary self-limitation, but may also bias the proper interpretation of the
phenomenon, insofar as it hides the fact that, even when we trust somebody's action, we
are necessarily trusting also some external and/or environmental conditions and processes
(on this point, see Chapter 2). However, it remains obviously very important to precisely
characterize social trust , i.e. trust in another agent as an agent, and the so called 'genuine'
or typical trust in another human (see Chapter 2).
As for the act of the trustor , the more frequent shortcomings and confusions in the literature
are the following:
(a) It is often missing a clear (and basic) distinction between the act of the trustor and the act
of the trustee: for instance, Castaldo does not clearly disentangle the occurrences of the
two different acts within the definitions covered by his survey. Obviously, the act of the
trustor consists in the very act of 'trusting', of counting upon and deciding to rely on Y .
(b) Much more importantly, it is not always emphasized enough that the 'act' of trusting is a
necessary ingredient of one notion of trust (i.e. as a decision and a subsequent action), but
5 “It” since it can even be a tool, an inanimate active entity (agent).
 
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