Trust and inquiry.

This paper analyzes the relationship between trust and inquiry to argue for the view that <italic>A</italic> trusts <italic>B</italic> to act in some way only if <italic>A</italic> believes, <italic>in a way that she cannot distinguish from knowledge</italic>, for reasons of trust, that <italic>B</italic> will (or has) act(ed) in this way. Call such beliefs ‘outright trusting beliefs’. To support this view, I shall argue, by way of various examples, that the conditions under which inquiry erodes trust are the same as the conditions under which inquiry erodes outright trusting belief. This congruence is easily explained abductively if we take trust to involve such a belief constitutively. While philosophers have sometimes thought that the relationship between trust and inquiry threatens or complicates the doxastic account of trust, the argument presented here suggests, surprisingly, that this relationship supports and even strengthens this account. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]