The Emergence of Trust as a Technical and Legal Concept
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.36561/ING.30.17Keywords:
Trust, Historical Epistemology, Philosophy of Computer Science, Philosophy of Technology, Digital RightsAbstract
This paper traces the historical transformation of trust from a social and moral virtue into a technical and legal construct. Drawing on historical epistemology, it reconstructs how computer science in the late twentieth century redefined trust as a property of systems, protocols, and credentials —and how this technical meaning later migrated into law through the concept of trust services. While no canonical definition of trust exists —neither across the social sciences nor within any of them— it is possible to identify recurring traits of what may be called the traditional concept of trust. Adapting from Luhmann, the paper defines trust as a subjective belief in the good future performance of someone or something upon which valuable resources or enterprises depend. It then shows how technical and legal redefinitions of the term displaced this relational and experiential meaning with notions of formal verification and institutional compliance. The argument proceeds in three movements: (1) Trust as a traditional concept, understood as a relational and emotive category; (2) Trust as a technical concept, understood as designed reliability and automated verification; and (3) Technological trust as a legal concept, in which states reimport the term to confer legitimacy upon infrastructures and accredited intermediaries. The discussion interprets this evolution as a case of semantic inversion: law now commands citizens to trust entities that were, in technical origin, conceived precisely to eliminate the need for trust. Following Stevenson, the emotive charge of the word endures across this migration, generating a political illusion where moral confidence fuses with mathematical certainty. Naming, as Hacking reminds us, is never neutral: when categories travel, they create new realities of belief and obligation.
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