The Philosophy of Trust by Faulkner Paul; Simpson Thomas; & Thomas Simpson

Author:Faulkner, Paul; Simpson, Thomas; & Thomas Simpson [Faulkner, Paul & Simpson, Thomas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press USA - OSO
Published: 2017-02-06T00:00:00+00:00

That is a perfectly normal thing to say. In contrast, if Jules had said:

(2) Ok, I rely on you. You can borrow it,

we would conclude that he probably wasn’t a native speaker of English. Why the difference? It’s not that we couldn’t put in three-place constructions here. Both of the following are acceptable:

(3) Ok, I trust you to take good care of it. You can borrow it.

(4) Ok, I rely on you to take good care of it. You can borrow it.

Since we can’t start with (4) and convert it to (2) by simply eliding the third place and implicitly generalizing over it, why think that that is what is happening in the move from (3) to (1)? Instead (1) seems to work in a radically different way. Talk of trust is used to explain or justify lending the car. It’s as though Jules had said ‘I trust you, therefore you can borrow it’.

One further observation lends force to this interpretation. The three-place uses with ‘rely’, and equally those with ‘count on’, are more natural if their aspect is changed to the present continuous:

(5) Ok, I’m relying on you to take good care of it. You can borrow it.

(6) Ok, I’m counting on you to take good care of it. You can borrow it.

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