axioms & logic of trust

and part of where that came from was imagining publishing the 100% confidence + 100% humility piece and feeling into which bricks I've already laid

I've now laid down the unforeclosing piece, but that doesn't explain the power of the word "trust", which would benefit from the axioms/logic

> Sort of relatedly, one could sort of have a “three-valued logic” of belief:
(1) belief, (2) disbelief, and (3) absence of belief
The first two are sort of “presences,” there’s “something there,” and the last one is of course an “absence,” a “lack.” But, even in that latter case, there might be “another belief, or collection of beliefs” that’s doing the “same or similar work,” were that absence “filled.” For example, a person might not have beliefs (in some sense) about “societies,” but they have beliefs about “civilizations” that do “overlapping work.” Or, someone, loosely speaking, doesn’t believe in water but they do believe in H2O. It’s not quite this, because, again, we’re sort of especially talking about the “sensuous, real-time action-level,” but it is kind of like this. (Those more “abstract” distinctions, used in these examples, do matter, too, actually, and not even just for the situated writing or speaking to other people, that we do, as part of our “seamless actioning in the world.”)
And so, regarding the “nebulosity of belief,” these sort of “overlapping non-absences” are one dimension of that nebulosity, but not the only one, cf. phenomenologically, musculoskeletally, neurophysiologically, and so on…

To spell it out a little further: trust has “AND” nature.  I take this to be true by definition at this point, but I want to be clear that my definition was created to match most peoples’ intuitions: if I trust Bob and you don’t trust Bob, would we say “we trust Bob”? Of course not.  A little less obviously, it’s actually even stronger than AND, but instead requires common knowledge: if I trust Bob and you trust Bob, but I don’t trust that you trust Bob…  or we each trust Bob but you don’t trust that I trust that you trust Bob, then we still don’t say “we trust Bob”.  And it doesn’t have to be a perfect infinite regress, but it has to be sufficiently accounted for.

It’s a bit complex though, like, is it about the presence of trust or the absence of distrust?  Because there can also simply be a kind of neutrality, a lack of perceived relevance. The subsystems in me that track whether my automatic debits are set up properly simply do not have any involvement in the question of whether a stranger on the street is safe to ask for help or not.

[COMMENT 2025: my recent reading of Stafford Beer and thinking about fractal coalitions has me wanting to note that at the point when a seriously new entity (not just a plurality of entities) has emerged, then it can trust things the parts distrust, at least again as far as our intuitions are concerned. eg insofar as corporations trust, they can kind of trust things that many of their employees distrust.  But then, for any corporations of which this is true, I would hazard that the employees do not entirely trust the corporation!]

In a sense, "I can't trust that X" is saying “according to my organism’s personal skin-in-the-game, it’s not safe to treat X as true” (where again “safe” isn’t necessarily about physical safety from violence, but about one’s ability to make sense of things, manage slack, etc.).  This is thus a MUCH stronger type of statement than “I don’t think X” or “I don’t believe X”.