Vernunft oder Wahnsinn? Über Vertrauen als eine Bedingung der Möglichkeit, sich seines eigenen Verstandes zu bedienen

Abstract

This paper discusses trust as a condition of the possibility of enlightenment. It claims that trust matters for the capacity to accept rather than to justify beliefs. This view is defended against the background of a functional approach to trust according to which it is by virtue of trust that people may enter into and sustain stable, potentially reflexive, and affirmative relations to all kinds of relata, not exclusively other people. All in all, a distinction between two theoretical layers is proposed: a transcendental-philosophical layer which examines whether trust is a condition of epistemic action, and a normative layer which discusses the problems of the justification of trust. This distinction, it is argued, is crucial to defending the ideal of enlightenment, or epistemic autonomy: before one can discuss problems of the justification of trust, trust is to be understood as a condition of the possibility of acting or, in epistemic contexts, of accepting beliefs