ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the conditions of rational trust into our informants and their relations to the reputational cues that are spread throughout our cognitive environment. The cognitive vulnerability that epistemic trusts involves makes of it a special epistemic attitude, in a sense, richer than reliance on testimony. Trust is an essential aspect of human cognitive, communicative interactions. Humans only end up trusting one another much of the time but are also trustful and willing to believe one another to start with, withdraw this basic trust only in circumstances where they have special reasons to be mistrustful. Trusting is a fundamental cognitive and emotional activity that is deeply embedded in people social institutions and reflects layers of practices, traditions and prejudices. The definition tries to capture the idea that reputation is a social property that is mutually constructed by the perceiver, the perceived and the social context. The essentially communicative nature of reputation is often disregarded in studies of the phenomenon.
