Grace Paterson

We frequently trust others—even strangers—based on little more than the good word of a third party. The purpose of this paper is to explain how such trust is possible by way of certain speech acts. I argue that the speech act of vouching is the primary mechanism at work in many of these cases and provide an account of vouching in comparison to the speech act of guaranteeing. On this account, guaranteeing and vouching both commit the speaker to certain actions conditional on undesirable events. However, while guaranteeing may generate reliance in someone or something by providing insurance against bad outcomes, vouching may generate trust in another agent by way of the vouching party manifesting their own trust in the party vouched for and enjoining the addressee to trust likewise.

This paper concerns sock puppetry, a practice which involves an individual communicating under multiple pseudonymous identities in a manner that makes it seem as though these personas are distinct conversational participants. I provide a definition of sock puppetry that is more narrow than other definitions, allowing it to be distinguished from related phenomena. I then analyse some of the ways in which sock puppetry can interfere with social tools we use for establishing trust within an online community, evaluating a speaker's credibility, and generally deciding who and what to believe.

Both individuals and groups sometimes make use of proxy agents who perform actions on their behalf. Although these kinds of actions are vital to our social and political lives, they raise deep questions about agency and responsibility. One concern is whether and in what ways a principal can be responsible for actions performed by way of their proxy. I argue here that two conditions are necessary if a principal is to be considered responsible for such actions in a deep sense. First the proxy must be properly authorised, and second the action performed must cohere with the principal’s deliberative perspective. A consequence of this is that successful proxies will often be those who learn to adopt and act from the perspective of the principal they represent. The capacity to reason from the perspective of another individual or group is therefore of great importance in the work of spokespersons and other proxies.

This paper discusses the speech act of disavowal, focusing in particular on disavowals of prior speech acts. It is argued that disavowals are often used when speakers wish to distance themselves in certain ways from some past speech act, but cannot (or should not) retract it. An account is offered according to which disavowals involve three components: an admission of having performed the target act, a denunciation of that act, and an accounting for the act. Disavowals are compared to the related speech acts of denial, retraction, apology, as well as the use of figleaves in political speech.

This paper provides an account of anonymous speech treated as anonymized speech. It is argued that anonymous speech acts are best defined by reference to intentional acts of blocking a speaker's identification as opposed to the various epistemic effects that imperfectly correlate with these actions. The account is used to examine two important subclasses of anonymized speech: speech using pseudonyms, and speech anonymized in a specifically communicative manner. Several pragmatic and ethical issues with anonymized speech are considered.

We frequently trust others—even strangers—based on little more than the good word of a third party. The purpose of this paper is to explain how such trust is possible by way of certain speech acts. I argue that the speech act of vouching is the primary mechanism at work in many of these cases and provide an account of vouching in comparison to the speech act of guaranteeing. On this account, guaranteeing and vouching both commit the speaker to certain actions conditional on undesirable events. However, while guaranteeing may generate reliance in someone or something by providing insurance against bad outcomes, vouching may generate trust in another agent by way of the vouching party manifesting their own trust in the party vouched for and enjoining the addressee to trust likewise.

This paper is concerned with situations in which a speaker issues many speech acts at the same time. A common example is the publication of a large text such as a book containing many distinct assertions. It is argued that these cases present a challenge for speech act theory related to how we are to understand sincerity. With reference to the well known paradox of the preface, it is argued that sincerity of such bulk speech cannot be understood as a simple conjunction of the sincerity of the encoded acts. A proposal is given according to which sincere bulk speech requires the speaker explicitly and as precisely as possible mark any subsets of her communication about which she has doubts.

We present an objection to Beall & Henderson’s recent paper defending a solution to the fundamental problem of conciliar Christology using qua or secundum clauses. We argue that certain claims the acceptance/rejection of which distinguish the Conciliar Christian from others fail to so distinguish on Beall & Henderson’s 0-Qua view. This is because on their 0-Qua account, these claims are either acceptable both to Conciliar Christians as well as those who are not Conciliar Christians or because they are acceptable to neither.