Bullshit, trust, and evidence

It has become almost a cliché to say that we live in a post-truth world; that people of all trades speak with an indifference to truth. Speaking with an indifference to how things really are is famously regarded by Harry Frankfurt as the essence of bullshit. This paper aims to contribute to the philosophical and theoretical pragmatics discussion of bullshit. The aim of the paper is to offer a new theoretical analysis of what bullshit is, one that is more encompassing than Frankfurt’s original characterization. I part ways with Frankfurt in two points. Firstly, I propose that we should not analyze bullshit in intentional terms (i.e. as indifference). Secondly, I propose that we should not analyze it in relation to truth. Roughly put, I propose that bullshit is best characterized as speaking with carelessness toward the evidence for one’s conversational contribution. I bring forward, in the third section, a battery of examples that motivate this characterization. Furthermore, I argue that we can analyze speaking with carelessness toward the evidence in Gricean terms as a violation of the second Quality maxim. I argue that the Quality supermaxim, together with its subordinate maxims, demand that the speaker is truthful (contributes only what she believes to be true) and reliable (has adequate evidence for her contribution). The bullshitter’s main fault lies in being an unreliable interlocutor. I further argue that we should interpret what counts as adequate evidence, as stipulated by the second Quality Maxim, in contextualist terms: the subject matter and implicit epistemic standards determine how much evidence one needs in order to have adequate evidence. I contrast this proposed reading with a subjectivist interpretation of what counts as having adequate evidence and show that they give different predictions. Finally, working with a classic distinction, I argue that we should not understand bullshit as a form of deception but rather as a form of misleading speech.

The strategic and epistemic properties of `know'

In communicating about certainty, speakers make choices among available formulations and hearers will aim to recover speaker intentions. In two studies, we assess speakers' production choices and hearers' interpretations to test (a) how maximal certainty is formulated, (b) whether those formulations adjust depending on context, and (c) whether speakers' context-driven adjustments are apparent to hearers. We compare the lower-certainty formulation `I believe that the deadline is tomorrow' [`believe'] with two high-certainty formulations, `I know that the deadline is tomorrow' [`know'] and `The deadline is tomorrow' [bare assertion]. Following Williamson (2000) and De Rose (2002), it is unclear which one of the latter two conveys higher epistemic standards. Given the unclear picture, we investigate when (if ever) `know' should be felicitous to utter over the bare assertion. One reason could be that `know' may be uttered felicitously for a wider range of contexts than the bare assertion (De Rose, 1992).Furthermore, `know' might be a useful linguistic tool for speakers to structure the subsequent dialogue to their liking. By presupposing content speakers assume or act as if the conveyed information was already shared knowledge and not up for debate. Thus, hearers might be more inclined to accept and accommodate e.g. Lewis (1979) presupposed content than asserted content.We investigated whether interlocutors align in the way they convey and recover meaning from statements about degrees of belief, comparing their behaviour across cooperative and uncooperative scenarios. Our results suggest (a) that speakers use know>bare assertion>believe for content with successively lower evidentiality scores and that hearers likewise infer know>bare assertion>believe in the same relative ordering. Regarding (b), speakers used `know' strategically in the uncooperative scenario to overstate their knowledge indicating that the usage of `know' is context-dependent. Regarding (c), hearers seemingly fail to recover these production strategies. This may be due to our experimental design where we investigated comprehension from a bystander point of view, or might similarly suggest that speakers succeed with their strategic approach.

Insight and Understanding

In this chapter we explore a particular sort of understanding, understanding why, and a related sort of knowledge why—firsthand knowledge why—and the place of this in the humanities, including philosophy. We focus on one dimension of the humanities, not the whole, and on the humanistic side of philosophy, though there’s a lot more to philosophy than that. I’ll be arguing for the importance of firsthand intuitive insight. And that in turn will bear interestingly on two questions in the epistemology of the humanities, including philosophy. First question: Given that firsthand intuitive insight has special value and standing in the humanities, how is the epistemic standing of our own beliefs affected when we encounter the disagreement of others? Second, if firsthand intuitive insight is shown to have such special standing and value, how if at all does this affect what epistemological standards are properly operative in humanistic domains? Eventually, we will come to these two questions about the humanities, one about the place of disagreement, and the other about the proper epistemic standards. But first we take up the place and value of intuitive insight.

Practical reasoning and degrees of outright belief

According to a suggestion by Williamson (Knowledge and its limits, Oxford University Press, 2000, p. 99), outright belief comes in degrees: one has a high/low degree of belief iff one is willing to rely on the content of one’s belief in high/low-stakes practical reasoning. This paper develops an epistemic norm for degrees of outright belief so construed. Starting from the assumption that outright belief aims at knowledge, it is argued that degrees of belief aim at various levels of strong knowledge, that is, knowledge which satisfies particularly high epistemic standards. This account is contrasted with and shown to be superior to an alternative proposal according to which higher degrees of outright belief aim at higher-order knowledge. In an “Appendix”, it is indicated that the logic of degrees of outright belief is closely linked to ranking theory.

Conclusion

Many philosophers think that practical stakes affect epistemic standards for proper thought and speech. From the get-go, my gut feeling was that this must be incorrect: it can’t possibly be that whether you or I care more or less about a subject matter affects how much epistemic support we need in order to think or speak about it. After many years of research, I remain convinced that my initial gut reaction was correct. Indeed, the epistemic modifies the practical, not the other way around. This book has outlined the argumentative roadmap that got me from the initial reaction to my evidenced confidence in the independence of epistemically proper thought and speech from practical stakes....

The symmetry problem for testimonial conservatism

A prima facie plausible and widely held view in epistemology is that the epistemic standards governing the acquisition of testimonial knowledge are stronger than the epistemic standards governing the acquisition of perceptual knowledge. Conservatives about testimony hold that we need prior justification to take speakers to be reliable but recognise that the corresponding claim about perception is practically a non-starter. The problem for conservatives is how to establish theoretically significant differences between testimony and perception that would support asymmetrical epistemic standards. In this paper I defend theoretical symmetry of testimony and perception on the grounds that there are no good reasons for taking these two belief forming methods to have significant theoretical differences. I identify the four central arguments in defence of asymmetry and show that in each case either they fail to establish the difference that they purport to establish or they establish a difference that is not theoretically significant.

Epistemic evaluation and the need for ‘impure’ epistemic standards

That knowledge ascriptions exhibit some form of sensitivity to context is uncontroversial. How best to account for the context-sensitivity at issue, however, is the topic of heated debates. A certain version of nonindexical contextualism seems to be a promising option. Even so, it is incumbent upon any contextualist account to explain in what way and to what extent the epistemic standard operative in a particular context of epistemic evaluation is affected by non-epistemic factors (such as practical interests). In this paper, I investigate how non-epistemic factors come into play when knowledge is ascribed. I argue that knowledge ascriptions often serve the purpose of providing actionable information. This, in turn, requires that epistemic interests be balanced against non-epistemic interests. Moreover, it raises the question of whose interests matter, those of the ascriber, the addressee (of the knowledge ascription), or the subject of ascription. Eventually, an answer to the question is suggested.

Kierkegaard and forgiveness

This chapter introduces Kierkegaard’s contribution to the debate about forgiveness. The first part gives an overview of his explicit accounts of forgiveness, focusing upon the divine forgiveness of sins and its implications for interpersonal (human) forgiveness and self-forgiveness. This incorporates discussion of some key New Testament passages on forgiveness. The second part explores what difference is made by understanding interpersonal forgiveness as a ‘work of love’. Against the objection that ‘love’s vision’ involves wilful blindness, it is argued (drawing on both Kierkegaard and Troy Jollimore) that love has its own epistemic standards and that Jollimore’s claims about romantic love and friendship can in the relevant respects be extended to the case of agapic neighbour-love. In developing this view—which is seen as echoing important themes in Kierkegaard’s Works of Love—the importance of understanding ‘love’s forgiveness’ in the light of other virtues, especially hope and humility, begins to be shown.

Iffy Predictions and Proper Expectations

What individuates the speech act of prediction? The standard view is that prediction is individuated by the fact that it is the unique speech act that requires future-directed content. We argue against this view and two successor views. We then lay out several other potential strategies for individuating prediction, including the sort of view we favor. We suggest that prediction is individuated normatively and has a special connection to the epistemic standards of expectation. In the process, we advocate some constraints that we think a good theory of prediction should respect