The Street-Level Epistemology Of Trust

Abstract A widely held view is that trust and distrust are essentially rational. For example, James Coleman bases his account of trust on complex rational expectations. There are two central elements in applying a rational choice account of trust: incentives of the trusted to fulfill the trust and knowledge to allow the truster to trust (or to recommend distrust). The knowledge at issue, of course, is that of the potential truster, not that of the theorist or social scientist who observes or analyzes trust. Hence we require an account of the epistemology of individual knowledge or belief, of street-level epistemology, to complete the rational theory of trust.