ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the idea of primitive trust and to ask whether primitive trust is at work in our cooperation with one another; that is, instead of looking at the idea of trust as vestigial. It examines a concept of trust in which trust is a primitive reaction in relation to human life itself. The chapter focuses on the cooperation necessary for language is not itself moral in nature; yet there are many other ways in which we cooperate with each other, ways that allow us not only to speak a language, but to learn language in the first place. Lars Hertzberg suggests that there is a type of trust that is necessary prior to learning and which is primitive in that it is not only prior to judgment, but also is what enables one to learn the criteria for judgment. Hertzberg here is attempting to get at a notion of trust that falls under both moral and epistemological categories.
