TRUST LAB
COGITO EPISTEMOLOGY RESEARCH CENTRE

Trust Lab

Can we model our way out of the crisis of expertise?

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Dates: October 2026 – July 2027

Project leads: J. Adam Carter, Nicolas Côté and Emma C. Gordon

Funding: Glasgow Changing Futures Collaborative Seed Fund 2026 (GBP 14,750)

Builds on: A Virtue Epistemology of Trust (Leverhulme Trust, 2020–2024)

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Societies are facing a dramatic collapse of public trust in expertise, over vaccines and children's health, climate, and education. The epistemology of trust asks when trust in experts is warranted and how broken trust can be rebuilt, but its standard method, testing theories against the theorist's own intuitions about hypothetical cases, gives conflicting answers, partly because those intuitions vary widely across culture, gender and background. Trust Lab tries a different approach. It adapts modelling techniques from the mathematical social sciences to study trust the way scientists model complex systems they cannot observe directly, starting from the team's own prototype model of how trust travels, and collapses, across domains: how a rational agent should adjust trust in an expert in one field after gaining or losing trust in others.

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Over 2026–27 the lab runs three thematic workshops (modelling methods in epistemology; trust, trustworthiness and the ethics of expert advice; trust transport and the generalisation of distrust), a public speaker series, and a flagship conference in Glasgow, building a Glasgow-led research community across philosophy, economics and the science of trust and preparing larger external bids. The lab continues the momentum of COGITO's Leverhulme project A Virtue Epistemology of Trust (2020–2024), whose main output was Carter's A Telic Theory of Trust (Oxford University Press, 2024). Earlier project.

 

Outputs

The lab's first two papers come from the trust-transport model the project is built around.

 

Trust Transport

Nicolas Côté, J. Adam Carter and Emma C. Gordon

Status: revised version under review at Ergo (revise-and-resubmit, resubmitted September 2026).

Experts often opine outside their home domain. Philosophers writing on epistemic trespassing agree that expertise in one field does not simply carry over to another, but nobody has said how much carries over, or why. Using David Lewis's account of subject matters, the paper makes relatedness between fields a measurable quantity and derives a rule for adjusting trust as an expert moves between fields, with consequences for epistemic trespassing and for how broken trust can be rebuilt.

 

Trust as the Willingness to Gamble on the Faithfulness of Others

Nicolas Côté, J. Adam Carter and Emma C. Gordon

Status: working paper, to be presented by J. Adam Carter and Nicolas Côté at the Responsible Trusting Without Prejudice workshop, University of Stirling, 7–8 November 2026.

To trust someone is to be willing to stake costly consequences on their acting as they have committed to act: trust is the willing intent to gamble on the faithfulness of others, and how much you trust someone is how much their commitment moves the odds you will accept. The account separates trust from mere reliance, explains why trust carries a necessary vulnerability to betrayal, and accounts for both the action-like and the belief-like character of trust.

 

Planned for 2026–27: three thematic workshops, a public speaker series and a closing conference in Glasgow; dates will be posted on the Events page.