Trust is an important aspect of human life. It provides instrumental value in allowing us to collaborate on and defer actions to others, and intrinsic value in our intimate relationships with romantic partners, family, and friends. In this paper I examine the nature of trust from a philosophical perspective. Specifically I propose to view trust as a context-sensitive state in a manner that will be made precise. The contribution of this paper is threefold. First, I make the simple observation that an individual's trust is typically both action- and context-sensitive. Action-sensitivity means that trust may obtain between a given truster and trustee for only certain actions. Context-sensitivity means that trust may obtain between a given truster and trustee, regarding the same action, in some conditions and not others. I also opine about what kinds of things may play the role of the truster, trustee, and action. Second, I advance a theory for the nature of contextual trust. I propose that the answer to "What does it mean for $A$ to trust $B$ to do $X$ in context $C$?" has two conditions. First, $A$ must take $B$'s doing $X$ as a means towards one of $A$'s ends. Second, $A$ must adopt an unquestioning attitude concerning $B$'s doing $X$ in context $C$. This unquestioning attitude is similar to the attitude introduced in Nguyen 2021. Finally, we explore how contextual trust can help us make sense of trust in general non-interpersonal settings, notably that of artificial intelligence (AI) systems. The field of Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) assigns paramount importance to the problem of user trust in opaque computational models, yet does little to give trust diagnostic or even conceptual criteria. I propose that contextual trust is a natural fit for the task by illustrating that model transparency and explainability map nicely into our construction of the contexts $C$.

翻译：[翻译摘要] 信任是人类生活的重要维度。它在工具价值层面使我们能够与他人协作或委托行动，在内在价值层面维系着与伴侣、家人、朋友的亲密关系。本文从哲学视角审视信任的本质，具体提出将信任视作一种精确意义上具有语境敏感性的状态。本文的贡献分为三部分：首先，提出一个基本观察——个体的信任通常既具行动敏感性又具语境敏感性。行动敏感性指信任关系仅在特定行动中存在于信任者与被信任者之间；语境敏感性指针对同一行动，信任关系可能在某些条件下成立而在其他条件下不成立。本文还对可能充当信任者、被信任者及行动角色的实体类型进行了探讨。其次，提出关于语境信任本质的理论框架。针对“在语境C中，A信任B执行行动X意味着什么”这一问题，本文给出两个必要条件：第一，A须将B执行行动X视为实现自身目的的手段；第二，A须对B在语境C中执行行动X采取不质疑态度。该不质疑态度与Nguyen（2021）提出的态度概念具有相似性。最后，本文探讨语境信任如何帮助我们理解非人际场景（尤其是人工智能系统）中的信任。可解释人工智能（XAI）领域虽将用户对不透明计算模型的信任问题置于核心地位，却未提供信任的诊断标准甚至概念界定。本文通过阐明模型透明度与可解释性可自然映射至我们对语境C的建构，论证语境信任概念完美适配该任务需求。