Trust

Registration is free and includes lunch, teas, and coffees. Delegates are also invited to join speakers for dinner at Don Giovannis at their own expense.

To register, please email [email protected]. Include your full name, email address, institutional affiliation (if any), dietary requirements, and other requirements you think the organisers need to know about. Please also say whether or not you intend to come to dinner.

Trust enables prima facie goods such as co-operation, knowledge sharing, and fulfilling personal relationships. Distrust, however, causes social conflict, isolation and anxiety. Of course, we should only trust and distrust those who are worthy of such (dis)trust; but what does trusting or distrusting another amount to, and what does such an attitude represent about the one (dis)trusted? Asking this leads to further questions; does your being trusted to x thereby obligate you to x, even when that trust was misplaced? Why can believing testimony based on trust be justified, when having evidence of speaker veracity seems to negate any role for trust? What is the relation between trusting as an act (A can decide to trust B with her PIN number) and as a feeling (A is reassured that B won’t steal from her)? Is that feeling a doxastic or an affective/emotional attitude, and what is its representational content? Furthermore, can the trust we hold toward institutions such as the government or toward a broad social group, and the normative demands associated with such trust, be analysed in the same terms as the trust we have toward e.g. a friend or family member? This workshop brings together some of the world's foremost philosophers of trust to present and invite discussion on their current research, and will be of interest to those working in moral and political philosophy, philosophy of action, epistemology, emotion and psychology, and the social sciences.

09.00 - 09.30  Welcome

09.30 - 11.00  Bennett Helm 'Trust: An Emotion of Respect' 

11.00 - 11.30 Tea/coffee

11.30 - 13.00 Katherine Hawley 'Trustworthy Groups and Institutions'

13.00 - 14.00 Lunch

14.00 - 15.30 Paul Faulkner 'The Problem of Trust'

15.30 - 16.00 Tea/coffee

16.00 - 17.30 Richard Holton and Jacopo Domenicucci 'Trust as a Two-Place Relation'

18.00 - Close

Part of Co-operation and Equality, funded by the University of Manchester Faculty of Humanities Strategic Investment Research Fund (SIRF) for the years 2013-15.

Academic contact: [email protected]

Administrative contact: [email protected]