No. A compliment, for example, is not praise, even though it's talking positively. And you can easily talk negative about something without being blame, e.g., gossip.
We appear not to be speaking the same language. To me, a compliment is praise and gossip is blame. Honestly.
This is sophistry. Your claim was that all displays are advertisements and a form of praise. Now you're moving the goalpost by saying, "well, you see, it's not the display IN the advertisement that's what's called praise, but what it's potentially saying about YOU, the audience. Buy into what they're selling (charity) and you, too, can be praiseworthy!"
That is what the virtue signalling ad does and I am not the one being devious here. The people doing such ads are.
It's a logo, label, and a description of the contents. Where is the praise?
The word "chef", which connotes "cuisine", is a form of praise. The halo that seems to be issuing from the pasta, like from a saint's head, is also a traditional iconographic equivalent of praise in Western culture. We are so used to seeing these things that we no longer realize they are praise (even though we are influenced by them unconsciously).
We've been over this. Trusting that your car will turn on when you insert the key into the ignition is not the same as trusting that your degenerate gambler best friend is going to pay you back your money, which is not the same as trusting that gravity will continue to work like it always has.
There is a difference in intensity. Apart from that, I do not see the difference in the mental attitude. In all cases, you expect something to happen even though it may not. Of course the probabilities are different: P(gravity) > P(car starts) >> P(pay back). However, the mental goings on are the same.
The kind of trust Kuhn is talking about is about the tools and methods available to solve the so-called anomalous problems. He's not talking about the efficacy and effective of the tools to solve all problems in science.
I think you are fundamentally misunderstanding what Kuhn is saying. What do you mean by "the tools"? To me, Kuhn's theory is quite simple. He says that when doing "normal science", scientists trust the one reigning theory (let us say Newtonian Mechanics). Then when "anomalies" pop up a little too often, people start to have doubts; they trust the theory less and less. Then when a new theory emerges, people do not trust it at first, but as evidence supporting it piles up, their trust increases. Eventually, the old theory is wholly discredited (it has become completely distrusted) and the new one is trusted by all. This is what happened with relativistic mechanics in the early years of the XXth theory. In so doing, Kuhn is describing a transfer of trust from the old to the new theory, and therefore describing trust as the basic engine of scientific progress.
More sophistry. In the past you've criticized what science is - a methodology to obtain knowledge and truth about the world around us and reality at large.
Yes. I do not believe that Science gives us knowledge or truth. What it does is give us trust in predictive methods that we can use to anticipate what the world around us will do. For example, we can predict the trajectory of a probe within the solar system and we trust that our predictions will be accurate enough to be practically useful. That is trust in a predictive model, not knowledge or truth. Relativistic mechanics gives us better predictions than the old newtonian one (especially near relativistic speeds and massive objects) but we can have no guarantee that the world actually works the way the theory says. The ability to predict does not equate with "knowledge of what things are"
For example, we could have used Newtonian mechanics to go to the Moon, while not having developed relativity yet. Let us suppose that, fresh from our success, we now build a big nuclear rocket like the one from Project Orion and try to use it to go to the nearest star, while still being unaware of relativistic mechanics. When the spaceship would have reached speeds of around 100 000 km/s (1/3 of C), we would have started to see significant discrepancies with our predicted trajectory and we would have been puzzled as to why. What guarantee do we have that we are not in such a situation now? What guarantee do we have that relativity will not fail when we try it in some yet untested range of speeds and mass?
None. We trust relativity for the moment but we fully expect that we will need to replace it by something else one day.
If you make the step from "trusted predictive models" to "knowledge of truth", you are making a jump from science to superstition; from the empirically verifiable to the metaphysical.
and have tried introducing "trust" as some kind of thesis to the anti-thesis of "truth" to combat a perceived analogue to religion that science has supposedly become (in the minds of masses perhaps, but not in the practice of it), since you see everything through the lens of religion and everything we do is some expression of it.
What I just meant is that both science and religion are based on trust. There is no fundamental difference. Science reaches very high levels of trust on very narrow fields of predictive practice, while religion deals with general life principles although at lower levels of trust.
That is not an attack on science neither on religion.
A small number of people have admitted to doing it, therefore everyone does it?
People are generally loath to admit that they are doing a nasty but tempting thing. Therefore, if only a small number admit to it, it is reasonable to assume that they are just the tip of a pretty big iceberg. This is how you deal with human nature.