Symbolic systems The way in which we trust is strongly infl uenced by the way we perceive and understand the world around us. In that way trust is closely linked to cognition, and its forms are strongly infl uenced by the forms of our cognition. In my view the most satisfactory framework for approaching the link between cognition and trust is to be found in Ernst Cassirer’s Philosophy of Symbolic Forms – even though Cassirer himself has little to say about trust. Cassirer’s main achievement was to build on and extend the ‘Copernican revolution’ of Kant. According to Kant, we perceive and understand the world not passively and directly, in the manner of (as one might say nowadays) a camera, but actively and in a mediated form, through the categories supplied by the human mind, such as time, space, number and causality. Cassirer regarded Kant’s critique of reason and his ‘transcendental method’ as a great advance, but one nevertheless limited by the scientifi c methods of the era in which it was conceived. He felt it was possible in the twentieth century to reformulate it as a more comprehensive critique of culture, since culture generates the shared structures through which we interpret reality and impart our interpretation to others.