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The term "fake news" ascended rapidly to prominence in 2016 and has become a fixture in academic and public discussions, as well as in political mud-slinging. In the flurry of discussion, the term has been applied so broadly as to threaten to render it meaningless. In an effort to rescue our ability to discuss—and combat—the underlying phenomenon that triggered the present use of the term, some philosophers have tried to characterize it more precisely. A common theme in this nascent philosophical (...) discussion is that contemporary fake news is not a new kind of phenomenon, but just the latest iteration of a broader kind of phenomenon that has played out in different ways across the history of human information-dissemination technologies. While we agree with this, we argue that newer sorts of fake news reveal substantial flaws in earlier understandings of this notion. In particular, we argue that no deceptive intentions are necessary for fake news to arise; rather, fake news arises when stories which were not produced via standard journalistic practice are treated as though they had been. Importantly, this revisionary understanding of fake news allows us to accommodate and understand the way that fake news is plausibly generated and spread in a contemporary setting, as much by non-human actors as by ordinary human beings. (shrink)

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Emanuel Viebahn accounts for the distinction between lying and misleading in terms of what the speaker commits to, rather than in terms of what the speaker says, as on traditional accounts. Although this alternative type of account is well motivated, I argue that Viebahn does not adequately explain the commitment involved in lying. He explains the commitment in lying in terms of a responsibility to justify one's knowledge of a proposition one has communicated, which is in turn elaborated in terms (...) of being able to consistently dismiss a challenge to justify that knowledge. But whether one can consistently dismiss such a challenge, as Viebahn defines this, depends on whether one is responsible for justifying one's knowledge. Without further specification of the nature of this justificatory responsibility, it is difficult to assess whether it is one that liars have but misleaders lack. (shrink)

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In response to Habgood-Coote (2019) and a growing number of scholars who argue that academics and journalists should stop talking about fake news and abandon the term, we argue that the reasons which have been offered for eschewing the term 'fake news' are not sufficient to justify such abandonment. Prima facie, then, we take ourselves and others to be justified in continuing to talk about fake news.

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When I see a tree through my window, that particular worldly tree is said to be ‘in’, ‘on’, or ‘before’ my mind. My ordinary visual link to it is ‘intentional’. How similar to this link are the links between me and particular worldly trees when I see them in photographs, or in paintings? Are they, in some important sense, links of the same kind? Or are they links of importantly different kinds? Or, as a third possibility, are they at once (...) links of the same important kind and also links of importantly different sub-kinds within that kind? This paper takes up these taxonomical questions. After fleshing out (a bit) the characterisation of these different subject-object links, I explain and expand upon an approach to answering the taxonomical questions originally set out by Kendall Walton. I then follow this approach a certain distance, connecting it with the question of how to mark the boundary between perception and cognition. My investigations support the conclusion that the three types of links just described are not importantly different in kind. (shrink)

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It is fairly widely accepted that Saul Kripke, Keith Donnellan, and others showed in the 1960s–1980s that proper names, in particular uses by speakers, can refer to things free of anything like the epistemic requirements posited by Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell. This paper separates two aspects of the Frege–Russell view of name reference: the metaphysical thesis that names in particular uses refer to things in virtue of speakers thinking of those things and the epistemic thesis that thinking of things (...) requires a means of determining which thing one is thinking of. My question is whether the Kripke–Donnellan challenge should lead us to reject,, or both. Contrary to a popular line of thinking that sees practices or conventions, rather than singular thinking, as determinative of linguistic reference, my answer is that we should reject only the epistemic thesis, not the metaphysical one. (shrink)

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This chapter investigates the conflict between thought and speech that is inherent in lying. This is the conflict of saying what you think is false. The chapter shows how stubbornly saying what you think is false resists analysis. In traditional analyses of lying, saying what you think is false is analyzed in terms of saying something and believing that it is false. But standard cases of unconscious or divided belief challenge these analyses. Classic puzzles about belief from Gottlob Frege and (...) Saul Kripke show that suggested amendments involving assent instead of belief do not fare better. I argue that attempts to save these analyses by appeal to guises or Fregean modes of presentation will also run into trouble. I then consider alternative approaches to untruthfulness that focus on (a) expectations for one’s act of saying/asserting and (b) the intentions involved in one’s act of saying/asserting. Here I introduce two new kinds of case, which I call “truth serum” and “liar serum” cases. Consideration of these cases reveals structural problems with intention- and expectation-based approaches as well. Taken together, the string of cases presented suggests that saying what you think is false, or being untruthful, is no less difficult and interesting a subject for analysis than lying itself. Tackling the question of what it is to say what you think is false illuminates ways in which the study of lying is intertwined with fundamental issues in the nature of intentional action. (shrink)

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This chapter explores the prospects for justifying the somewhat widespread, somewhat firmly held sense that there is some moral advantage to untruthfully implicating over lying. I call this the "Difference Intuition." I define lying in terms of asserting, but remain open about what precise definition best captures our ordinary notion. I define implicating as one way of meaning something without asserting it. I narrow down the kind of untruthful implicating that should be compared with lying for purposes of evaluating whether (...) there is a moral difference between them. Just as lying requires a robust form of assertion, so the kind of untruthful implicating to be compared with lying requires a robust form of implicating. Next, I set out various ways of sharpening the Difference Intuition and survey a range of approaches to justifying one class of sharpenings. I finish by sketching an approach to justifying an alternative sharpening of the Difference Intuition, which is inspired by John Stuart Mill's discussion of lying. (shrink)

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The thesis that in order to genuinely think about a particular object one must be (in some sense) acquainted with that object has been thoroughly explored since it was put forward by Bertrand Russell. Recently, the thesis has come in for mounting criticism. The aim of this paper is to point out that neither the exploration nor the criticism have been sensitive to the fact that the thesis can be interpreted in two different ways, yielding two different principles of acquaintance. (...) One principle uses the notion of content in distinguishing genuine thinking-about things from a merely derivative kind of thinking-about things. The other principle is quiet about content, focusing instead on a distinction between satisfactional and non-satisfactional means of bringing things into thought. Most work has focused on the first, content-based principle of acquaintance. But criticisms of this principle do not apply straightforwardly to the non-content-based principle. I shall argue that the latter principle merits independent assessment as part of the broader effort to account for genuine thinking about particular objects. In the final section of the paper, I will sketch a roadmap for this assessment. (shrink)

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The aim of this chapter is to explore various ways of thinking about the concept of manipulation in order to capture both current and potentially future instances of machine manipulation, manipulation on the part of everything from the Facebook advertising algorithm to super-intelligent AGI. Three views are considered: a conservative one, which slightly tweaks extant influence-based theories of manipulation; a dismissive view according to which it doesn't matter much if machines are literally manipulative, provided we can classify them as so (...) doing to make sense of our interactions with them; and an ameliorative analysis, according to which we should change our concept of manipulation better to make sense of machine manipulation. We tentatively favor the latter. (shrink)

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Lies come in different sizes. There are little white lies, slight stretches, exaggerations, fibs, and whoppers. Such terms can reflect different aspects of lies, but one of these is how far a lie is from what the liar really thinks. This paper proposes that this dimension of lie-size reflects a scalar aspect of sincerity. Drawing inspiration from the study of truthlikeness, the paper elucidates this aspect of sincerity, which I call “truthful-likeness”. Truthful-likeness reflects how sincere a reply to a question (...) is, based on how close the speaker takes the reply to be to their best available one. A related measure, expected subjective truth factor, reflects how sincere a constative act that is not a reply to a question is, based on how close to being true the speaker thinks it is. (shrink)

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There is a clear intuitive difference between lying and attempting to mislead. Recent efforts to analyse this difference, and to define lying in ways that respect it, are motivated by the conviction that the difference is important or significant in some way. Traditionally, the importance of the lying-misleading distinction has been cashed out in moral terms, but this approach faces a number of challenges. The purpose of this paper is to suggest and develop a different way in which the lying-misleading (...) distinction might be important: it might matter aesthetically. I propose that the aesthetic significance of the distinction inheres in a more prominent experienced disharmony in lying as compared with attempting to mislead. (shrink)

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In addition to ordinary conversations among relatively small numbers of individuals, human societies have public conversations. These are diffuse, ongoing discussions about various topics, which are largely sustained by journalistic activities. They are conversations about news – what is happening now – that members of various groups (such as the residents of a certain country, a certain town, or practitioners of a certain profession) need to know about in their capacity as members of those groups, and about how to react (...) to the news. Our topic in this chapter is a type of resistance to evidence that can arise at the level of these public conversations, rather than at the level of individual agents. We call it “relevance-based resistance to evidence”. A public conversation exhibits this kind of evidence resistance when it becomes overly focused on topics that members of the group that the conversation concerns do not in fact need to know about qua members of the group – topics which are, in a word, irrelevant. We argue that the risks of such relevance-based knowledge resistance are significantly amplified by certain structural features of online discourse. (shrink)

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1. During the 1960s and 1970s, Keith Donnellan (1966, 1970, 1974) and Saul Kripke ([1972] 1980) developed influential critiques of then-prevailing ‘description theories’ of reference. In place of s...

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Imogen Dickie's book Fixing Reference promises to reframe the investigation of mental intentionality, or what makes thoughts be about particular things. Dickie focuses on beliefs, and argues that if we can show how our ordinary means of belief formation sustain a certain connection between what our beliefs are about and how they are justified, we will have explained the ability of these ordinary means of belief formation to generate beliefs that are about particular objects. A worry about Dickie's approach is (...) that the explanation it offers is circular and thus not a genuine explanation of mental aboutness. This article develops a version of that worry in detail and turns it aside. Nonetheless, I argue that the explanatory value of the account remains unclear. While it does promise a dialectical advance over traditional theorizing about aboutness, it does not reveal how our ordinary means of belief formation make beliefs be about what they are about. (shrink)

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The interpretation of pronouns and anaphora in ordinary English has been analyzed within a variety of frameworks in formal semantics as involving variables and variable-binding operators. This chapter challenges the widely held assumption that English nominals, including pronouns, can be understood within the syntactic-derivational and model-theoretical frameworks of predicate logic. The first section of the chapter outlines a program for a directly referential semantics of English nominals and contrasts it with the formalist program that has been dominant in the semantic (...) tradition since Frege and Russell. The second section describes two semantic models for pronouns consistent with the program outlined in the first section. Finally, the third section argues for an understanding of reference as a form of perception. The semantic reference of pronouns depends on the causal history of a particular use of the expression, rather than on language-internal semantic rules. (shrink)

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We explore the speech act of amplification and its newfound prominence in online speech environments. Then we point to some puzzles this raises for the strategy of ‘fighting speech with more speech’.

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This chapter explores the prospects for justifying the somewhat widespread, somewhat firmly held sense that there is some moral advantage to untruthfully implicating over lying. I call this the "Difference Intuition." I define lying in terms of asserting, but remain open about what precise definition best captures our ordinary notion. I define implicating as one way of meaning something without asserting it. I narrow down the kind of untruthful implicating that should be compared with lying for purposes of evaluating whether (...) there is a moral difference between them. Just as lying requires a robust form of assertion, so the kind of untruthful implicating to be compared with lying requires a robust form of implicating. Next, I set out various ways of sharpening the Difference Intuition and survey a range of approaches to justifying one class of sharpenings. I finish by sketching an approach to justifying an alternative sharpening of the Difference Intuition, which is inspired by John Stuart Mill's discussion of lying. (shrink)

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In virtue of what are particular individuals or objects thought about? I call this the grounding question. A consensus answer is bifurcationism: objects can be thought about in virtue of both satisfactional grounds—roughly, in virtue of their unique satisfaction of conditions that figure in a subject's thought—and non-satisfactional grounds. Bifurcationism is a consensus view, but it comes in different flavours that correspond to different approaches to answering the grounding question. This paper draws on Saul Kripke's approach to linguistic reference in (...) order to make recommendations about how to move toward a sensible bifurcationism concerning what grounds thought about particulars. (shrink)

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The topic of this paper is the question of in virtue of what first-person thoughts are about what they are about. I focus on a dilemma arising from this question. On the one hand, approaches to answering this question that promise to be satisfying seem doomed to be inconsistent with the seeming truism that first-person thought is always about the thinker of the thought. But on the other hand, ensuring consistency with that truism seems doomed to make any answer to (...) the question unsatisfying. Contrary to a careful and enticing recent effort to both sharpen and escape this dilemma by Daniel Morgan, I will argue that the dilemma remains pressing both for broadly epistemic and broadly causal-acquaintance-based accounts of the aboutness of first-person thought. (shrink)

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This paper provides a general framework for organising theorizing about reference.

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There is an intuitive and seemingly significant difference between lying and falsely implicating. This difference has received scrutiny both historically and recently, mostly in the context of the following two questions. First, how should lying be defined so as to distinguish it from falsely implicating? Second, is the difference between lying and falsely implicating really significant, and if so, how and why is it significant? Answers to the first question typically invoke assertion, claiming (roughly) that to lie is to assert (...) something you take to be false, as opposed to merely implicating something you take to be false. The task is then to spell out the account of assertion that is needed for a satisfactory definition of lying. Answers to the second question divide over whether the difference between lying and falsely implicating has moral significance. This chapter will review and critically evaluate the current state of the literature on these two questions. One conclusion will be that it is not clear that lying can be defined by breaking it down into the components of asserting something, on the one hand, and taking that something to be false (or not taking it to be true), on the other. Another conclusion will be that a puzzle has emerged about the significance of the difference between lying and falsely implicating. There is strong reason to think that the difference is not a moral one, yet alternative explanations of its felt significance are unsatisfying. Finally, an effort will be made to link the two questions by examining the role that norms for assertion might play both in defining lying and in explaining the significance of the difference between lying and falsely implicating. (shrink)

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There is an intuitive and seemingly significant difference between lying and falsely implicating. This difference has received scrutiny both historically and recently, mostly in the context of the following two questions. First, how should lying be defined so as to distinguish it from falsely implicating? Second, is the difference between lying and falsely implicating really significant, and if so, how and why is it significant? Answers to the first question typically invoke assertion, claiming (roughly) that to lie is to assert (...) something you take to be false, as opposed to merely implicating something you take to be false. The task is then to spell out the account of assertion that is needed for a satisfactory definition of lying. Answers to the second question divide over whether the difference between lying and falsely implicating has moral significance. This chapter will review and critically evaluate the current state of the literature on these two questions. One conclusion will be that it is not clear that lying can be defined by breaking it down into the components of asserting something, on the one hand, and taking that something to be false (or not taking it to be true), on the other. Another conclusion will be that a puzzle has emerged about the significance of the difference between lying and falsely implicating. There is strong reason to think that the difference is not a moral one, yet alternative explanations of its felt significance are unsatisfying. Finally, an effort will be made to link the two questions by examining the role that norms for assertion might play both in defining lying and in explaining the significance of the difference between lying and falsely implicating. (shrink)

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The aim of this paper is to approach a basic question in semantics: what is semantic reference? Or, what is reference, insofar as the notion has a role in the semantics of natural language? I highlight two ways of conceiving of semantic reference, which offer different starting points for answering the question. One of these conceptions – what I call the conventional conception of semantic reference – is the standard conception. I propose an alternative to this conception: what I call (...) the historical conception of semantic reference. The first section of the paper explains the two conceptions, highlighting their common ground and how they differ. The second section offers a preliminary argument that the two conceptions are really both ways of conceiving of semantic reference, and that the historical conception is more viable as a basis for the semantics of natural language than the conventional conception. Finally, in the third section, I comment on the status of the historical conception as a basic view about semantic reference that sets the stage for the development of a theory of semantic reference. (shrink)

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