Consider the following case, inspired by Katherine Hawley’s “Trust and Distrust”: You think of me as a good friend and invite me to your birthday party. If we are indeed good friends, I’m not truly free to turn down your invitation without a very good reason. You can reasonably trust me to come and feel let down if I don't. However, much like trust itself, many of our relationships are vague, and while you may consider me a good friend, I might take you more as an acquaintance, feeling no obligation to attend your party.

This mismatch in how we perceive our relationship illustrates a fundamental challenge in the literature of trust and is the source of many daily interpersonal conflicts we have: What can we be trusted to do, and to what extent someone else’s trust is binding to us? I address these conflicts in my recent paper “Navigating Vagueness: Rule-Following and the Scope of Trust” (forthcoming in The Philosophical Quarterly), exploring how vagueness about our relationships (and the norms that constitute them) may cause disagreements about trust terms.

Trust is not merely an attitude of reliance on someone to act in a certain way but rather a reliance on others to follow through the norms constitutive of the relationship we share. Accordingly, the scope of trust—whatever paths of action that would count for the fulfillment of trust in a given trusting relationship—is delineated by the nature of our relationships, which is often vague and blurry. The source of this inherent vagueness lies in the gap between how one may perceive the relationship and what it actually is. In the birthday case, there is some vagueness about what we are to one another, or on whether we are indeed friends. This is a quite extreme (although quite common) case, but such conflicts may arise even when we agree about the ground relationship. That is, we may indeed be friends and share that understanding, but fail to see eye to eye on its terms.

The understanding of relationships that I have in mind here follows Raz, who defines relationships as "constituted by norms which determine what conduct is appropriate between people in the relationships." These relationship norms aren't merely imposed externally by the social scripts that tell us what it is to be a friend, but the participants of relationships negotiate and personalize the character of their relationships. This flexibility is an important feature of relationships, making them both socially structured and “individually explored and established”, creating a form that is “vital to social life” (Raz, 2009 : 317).

When conflicts of trust arise people are much quicker in identifying problems in others' conduct rather than attributing them to their own epistemic uncertainties. When conflicts of trust occur, there’s not only a mismatch on how we regard one another, but there’s something we are both referring to and trying to interpret, the actual relationship, and at least one of us may be wrong about their particular understanding of the norms we’ve established in our interpersonal history. When you feel let down by my absence at your birthday party, you might interpret it as a breach of trust—a failure to fulfill what our friendship demands. From my perspective, however, I might see no breach of trust since I don't recognize the same obligations within our relationship. This disagreement isn't merely unfortunate; it may deeply strain our relationship moving forward, and it should be resolved.

In my paper I address how we may navigate such situations and minimize disagreement. A first step, as to be expected, is communication—having "the talk" about how we understand our relationship. This, however, is not conclusive, as explicit communication will always fall into creating additional layers of interpretation and continue to be subject to gaps in understanding. A more conclusive method I propose, inspired by Wittgenstein’s discussion on how we truly grasp rules: by practice.

One is not born trustworthy but becomes trustworthy through practice. When we engage in trusting relationships of all kinds, we develop a better grasp of what those relationships are, what particular norms they entail, and how they should be applied. Through practice, we also engage in a mechanism of recurrent feedback, correction, and reinforcement. If I miss your birthday and see how hurt you are, I may learn something about the nature of our relationship that mere discussion might not have conveyed as effectively. Similarly, if you understand my reasoning for missing the event, you might recalibrate your expectations of me. Together we may work establishing more clearly what we are to one another. This mutual feedback shapes the relationship itself, with both parties providing correction and reinforcement of each other's conduct. Trust, then, is not only a particular attitude placed on particular expectations we have of others, but a global project we engage in building and clarifying our relationships.

Conflicts of trust