Eliot Michaelson

Lying: Language, Knowledge, Ethics, and Politics is the first dedicated collection of philosophical essays on the emerging topic of lying. While philosophers have been thinking about lying for several thousand years, only recently has this topic emerged as a sustained locus of inquiry, one which has proved equally of interest to philosophers of language, epistemologists, ethicists, and political philosophers. The essays in this volume embrace the inter-subdisciplinary nature of this topic, breaking new methodological ground in exploring the ways that a better understanding of language can inform the study of knowledge, ethics, or politics—and vice versa. Some of the more specific questions explored in this volume include: How can we lie when it is unclear what exactly we believe, or when we have contradictory beliefs? Can corporations lie, and if so how? Is lying always wrong, or always at least prima facie wrong? What can one learn from a liar? And can we lie to mindless machines?

A great deal of attention has been directed at the question of what exactly is required for an utterance to count as a lie. At the center of recent discussion stand bald-faced lies, which have proven to be remarkably resistant to philosophical analysis. This chapter focuses on a related, yet curiously under-explored, set of cases: lies that we construct together, as friends, families, colleagues, and communities. This sort of lie exhibits a degree of moral and linguistic complexity not found in more standard examples of lying. That moral complexity will ultimately put pressure on the enduring thesis that the distinctive wrong of lying is that it threatens to undermine the potential for communication. The linguistic complexity, in contrast, will stand as a challenge to standard theories of conversational dynamics.

A difficulty in combating fake news is that it is not entirely clear what fake news is. This chapter provides an overview of recent definitions, questioning the essential role they assign to the beliefs of fake news consumers. We offer an alternative definition, which raises questions about how fake news is to be distinguished from fictional news (e.g., news satire or parody). We propose that the categories of fake news and fictional news in fact overlap, although works of fictional news are members of artistic genres while works that are merely fake news are not.

Online speech is structured rather differently than offline speech. One important aspect of this, we argue, is that online speech environments are amplificatory. That is, these speech environments are designed to make the speech act of amplification easy, make amplification of others’ speech a predictable side-effect of one’s own, or both. In this essay, we first clarify what the speech act of amplification amounts to. Then we investigate the design choices of our present online speech environments which serve to promote amplification, and how these lay what we call the ‘amplification trap’ when it comes to responding to bad speech. Finally, we consider some ways that online environments could be re-designed in order to mitigate the amplification trap.

Reference is a relation that obtains between a variety of representational tokens and objects or properties. For instance, when I assert that “Barack Obama is a Democrat,” I use a particular sort of representational token—i.e. the name ‘Barack Obama’—which refers to a particular individual—i.e. Barack Obama. While names and other referential terms are hardly the only type of representational token capable of referring (consider, for instance, concepts, mental maps, and pictures), linguistic tokens like these have long stood at the center of philosophical inquiries into the nature of reference. Accordingly, and to keep things to a reasonable length, this entry will focus primarily on linguistic reference. Assuming that at least some token linguistic expressions really do refer, a number of interesting questions arise. How, for example, does linguistic reference relate to the act of referring—something that we as speakers do with referential terms? How exactly do referential terms come to refer? That is, in virtue of what do they refer to what they do? Is there a single answer to this question, a single mechanism of reference, or different answers depending on the sort of term in question—or even the circumstances in which a single term is used? And what exactly is the relationship between reference and meaning? Answers to these various questions will turn out to be closely related, and the task of this entry will be to trace out some of the main clusters of answers.

For billions of people, the internet has become a second home. It is where we meet friends and strangers, where we organise and learn, debate, deceive, and do business. In some respects, it is like the town square it was once claimed to be, while in others, it provides a strange new mode of interaction whose influence on us we are yet to understand. This collection of papers aims to give a short indication of some of the exciting philosophical work being carried out at the moment that addresses the novel aspects of online communication. The topics range from the expressive functions of emoji to the oppressive powers of search engines.

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.

We consider a range of cases—both hypothetical and actual—in which agents apparently know how to \ but fail to believe that the way in which they in fact \ is a way for them to \. These “no-belief” cases present a prima facie problem for Intellectualism about knowledge-how. The problem is this: if knowledge-that entails belief, and if knowing how to \ just is knowing that some w is a way for one to \, then an agent cannot both know how to \ and fail to believe that w, the way that she \s, is a way for her to \. We discuss a variety of ways in which Intellectualists might respond to this challenge and argue that, ultimately, this debate converges with another, seemingly distinct debate in contemporary epistemology: how to attribute belief in cases of conflict between an agent’s avowals and her behavior. No-belief cases, we argue, reveal how Intellectualism depends on the plausibility of positing something like “implicit beliefs”—which conflict with an agent’s avowed beliefs—in many cases of apparent knowledge-how. While there may be good reason to posit implicit beliefs elsewhere, we suggest that there are at least some grounds for thinking that these reasons fail to carry over to no-belief cases, thus applying new pressure to Intellectualism.

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.

There are some names which cannot be spoken and others which cannot be written, at least on certain very natural ways of conceiving of them. Interestingly, this observation proves to be in tension with a wide range of views about what names are. Prima facie, this looks like a problem for predicativists. Ultima facie, it turns out to be equally problematic for Millians. For either sort of theorist, resolving this tension requires embracing a revisionary account of the metaphysics of names. Revisionary Millianism, I argue, offers some important advantages over its predicativist competitor.

In recent work, Bengson, Cuneo, and Shafer‐Landau (2020) develop a new social version of moral intuitionism that promises to explain why our moral intuitions are trustworthy. In this paper, we raise several worries for their account and present some general challenges for the broader class of views we call Social Moral Intuitionism. We close by reflecting on Bengson, Cuneo, and Shafer‐Landau's comparison between what they call the “perceptual practice” and the “moral intuition practice”, which we take to raise some difficult normative and meta‐normative questions for theorists of all stripes.

According to what is perhaps the dominant picture of reference, what a referential term refers to in a context is determined by what the speaker intends for her audience to identify as the referent. I argue that this sort of broadly Gricean view entails, counterintuitively, that it is impossible to knowingly use referential terms in ways that one expects or intends to be misunderstood. Then I sketch an alternative which can better account for such opaque uses of language, or what I call “sneaky reference.” I close by reflecting on the ramifications of these arguments for the theory of meaning more broadly.

What determines the meaning of a context-sensitive expression in a context? It is standardly assumed that, for a given expression type, there will be a unitary answer to this question; most of the literature on the subject involves arguments designed to show that one particular metasemantic proposal is superior to a specific set of alternatives. The task of the present essay will be to explore whether this is a warranted assumption, or whether the quest for the one true metasemantics might be a Quixotic one. We argue that there are good reasons—much better than are commonly appreciated—for thinking the latter, but that there nevertheless remains significant scope for metasemantic theorizing. We conclude by outlining our preferred option, metasemantic pluralism.

Due in no small part to Kant's own seemingly dim views on the value of animals, Kantian ethics has traditionally been understood to be rather unfriendly ground for arguments in favor of vegetarianism. This has started to change recently, which raises the question: do Kantian approaches offer a way of defending vegetarianism that doesn't run afoul of the sorts of futility worries that afflict consequentialist arguments for vegetarianism? I argue that Kantian approaches in fact face an analogous worry, due to their need to explain why eating meat ought to be understood as a disrespectful act simpliciter, rather than only in certain circumstances.

A variety of eating and purchasing practices, in particular vegetarianism, are often motivated via an appeal to their expected good consequences. Lurking in the background, however, is the question: can I really hope to make a difference via my purchases in a social world as complex and wasteful as our own? I review the evidence as it stands and conclude that there are good reasons to suspect that one probably does not make a difference directly via one's purchases. That said, there may be some related, though less direct, reasons to be vegetarian.

It is increasingly common for philosophers to rely on the notion of an idealised listener when explaining how the semantic values of context-sensitive expressions are determined. Some have identified the semantic values of such expressions, as used on particular occasions, with whatever an appropriately idealised listener would take them to be. Others have argued that, for something to count as the semantic value, an appropriately idealised listener should be able to recover it. Our aim here is to explore the range of ways that such idealisation might be worked out, and then to argue that none of these results in a very plausible theory. We conclude by reflecting on what this negative result reveals about the nature of meaning and responsibility.