You can trust the ladder, but you shouldn’t

Tallant, Jonathan

Abstract

My claim in this paper is that, contra what I take to be the orthodoxy in the wider literature, we do trust inanimate objects—per the example in the title, there are cases where people really do trust a ladder (to hold their weight, for instance), and, perhaps most importantly, that this poses a challenge to that orthodoxy. My argument consists of 4 parts. In section 2 I introduce an alleged distinction between trust as mere reliance and trust as a rich, morally loaded notion. In the course of doing so, I briefly sketch some models of trust. This will help us to get a handle on how some of the mainstream models of trust preclude or ignore the trusting of inanimate objects. In section 3 I introduce cases designed to show that we have reason to think that we do trust inanimate objects. In section 4 I consider an objection, and, in section 5 I discuss some consequences of this finding, before concluding in section 6.

Citation

Tallant, J. (2019). You can trust the ladder, but you shouldn’t. Theoria, 85(2), 102-118. https://doi.org/10.1111/theo.12177

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Dec 18, 2018
• Online Publication Date: Jan 28, 2019
• Publication Date: Apr 30, 2019
• Deposit Date: Dec 19, 2018
• Publicly Available Date: Jan 29, 2021
• Journal: Theoria (Sweden)
• Print ISSN: 0040-5817
• Electronic ISSN: 1558-5816
• Publisher: Berghahn Journals
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 85
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 102-118
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/theo.12177
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1424080
• Publisher URL: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/theo.12177
• Contract Date: Dec 19, 2018