Michael Lynch

Bald-faced lies are on the uptick by political leaders in democracies worldwide. In the United States, for example, we are becoming numb not only to outrageous falsehoods, but to the bizarre self-assurance with which they are pronounced. We were told crowds were bigger than they were, that the sun shined when it didn’t, that Trump won in a landslide—and that was just in the first few days after his election. What has shocked so many is the fearlessness in the face of the facts, the willingness to simply deny reality outright, and the apparent toleration—even joy—with which Trump’s followers greet the practice. Bald-faced lying by political leaders is an important phenomenon, but it is easy to misunderstand in ways that undermine our ability to combat its strange effectiveness. In this paper, I aim to first analyze political bald-faced lies and then examine the threat they pose to the norms of democratic discourse. My goal is not to answer the empirical question of how frequently denials of obvious facts occur in politics; it is the normative question of understanding what harms they cause — particularly when they are made by those — in political power. Nonetheless, I think it is important to resist the temptation to think that what we are talking about here are a few isolated and extreme examples. As Hannah Arendt noted, there are times in political life when truth, “if it happens to oppose a given group’s profit or pleasure, is greeted with greater hostility.” Arguably we are living in one of those times.

Ontography is distinguished from ontology in the way it pursues historical or ethnographic case studies, rather than general philosophical reflections on the nature of being. Ontography takes classical metaphysical problems, such as how to distinguish between natural entities and human technologies, but instead of offering a general solution to those problems it describes how socially, historically, and institutionally situated agents address and provisionally resolve those problems. Examples of such investigations are practical efforts to resolve the difference between research artifacts and evidence of microscopical entities in laboratory research, and cases in intellectual property law which deploy a distinction between products of nature and compositions of matter.

Is truth itself natural? This is an important question for both those working on truth and those working on naturalism. For theorists of truth, answering the question of whether truth is natural will tell us more about the nature of truth (or lack of it), and the relations between truth and other properties of interest. For those working on naturalism who wish to have truth as part of the natural order, answering this question is of paramount importance. In this chapter, we focus primarily on the kinds of theory of truth that occupy the central positions in current debates about truth, namely correspondence theories, deflationary theories, epistemic theories, and pluralist theories, and aim to discern the extent to which truth is a natural property on each view.

This article critically examines the relations between epistemics in conversation analysis and linguistic and cognitivist conceptions of communicative interaction that emphasize information and information transfer. The epistemic program adheres to the focus on recorded instances of talk-in-interaction that is characteristic of CA, explicitly identifies its theoretical origins with ethnomethodology, and points to implications of its research for the social distribution of knowledge. However, despite such affiliations with CA and ethnomethodology, the EP is cognitivist in the way it emphasizes information exchange as an underlying, extrasituational ‘driver’ in social interaction. To document how the EP draws upon cognitivist conceptions of information and knowledge, we review examples from the corpus of transcripts analyzed in key publications on epistemics. Our re-analysis casts doubt upon the way EP analysis invokes an underlying order that supposedly drives the evident sequential organization of those transcripts.

This paper follows the history of an object. The purpose of doing so is to come to terms with a distinctive kind of research object – which we are calling a ‘test object’ – as well as to chronicle a significant line of research and technology development associated with the broader nanoscience/nanotechnology movement. A test object is one of a family of epistemic things that makes up the material culture of laboratory science. Depending upon the case, it can have variable shadings of practical, mathematical and epistemic significance. Clear cases of test objects have highly regular and reproducible visible properties that can be used for testing instruments and training novices. The test object featured in this paper is the silicon 7×7, a particular surface configuration of silicon atoms. Research on this object over a period of several decades has been closely bound up with the development of novel instruments for visualizing atomic structures. Despite having little direct commercial value, the Si 7×7 also has been a focal object for the formation of a research community bridging industry and academia. It exhibits a complex structure that became a sustained focus of observation and modelling. Our study follows shifts in the epistemic status of the Si 7×7, and uses it to re-examine familiar conceptions of representation and observation in the history, philosophy and social study of science

The expression ‘Oh’ in natural conversation is a signal topic in the development of the Epistemic Program. This article attempts to bring into view a sense of place for this simple expression in the early literature, beginning with ‘Oh’ as a ‘change-of-state token’ and through its subsequent treatments in the production of assessments. It reviews them with an interest in two allied developments. One is the rendering of ‘Oh’ as an expression that ‘indexes’ epistemic structure. The other, pursued in the detail of transcript in Part 2, is how, as of this rendering, the literature manages its tasks of ‘animating transcript’, or how we portray ordinary talk as social action. We think these two moves are closely connected within the EP. And we think they yield a very different ‘vocabulary of motives’, different from the natural language studies of conversation analysis. Our discussions address in turn the central phrases of our title.

This article presents a case study of a recent controversy over the use of computed tomography as a diagnostic technology in South Korean hospitals. The controversy occurred in the wake of a series of conflicts in the late twentieth century over the legitimate placement of healing practices, medicinal substances, and medical technologies within Korea’s separate “Western Medicine” and “Korean Medicine” systems of health care and pharmaceutical distribution. The controversy concerned an attempt to use hi-tech imaging technology—the epitome of modern medicine—in a clinic that maintains a strong ideological attachment to Korean healing traditions. A close study of this dispute, based on interviews, participant observation, and documentary analysis, showed that discursive positions taken about the translatability of medical technologies changed with the context of dispute, and did not reflect a stable epistemic boundary between rival medical paradigms.

Ethnomethodology and conversation analysis investigate many of the activities that are featured in the cognitive sciences. These include memory, learning, perception, and calculative activities. However, for ethno/ca such activities are not necessarily ‘cognitive’, and their investigation as activities does not necessarily require observation or speculation about what goes on within the mind or brain. This article briefly discusses three examples of nominal ‘cognitive’ activities: looking-for/seeing; failing to recall; and counting things and people. The discussion suggests how these examples can be understood and elucidated in a way that has little to do with any existing program in cognitive science. The modest aim of the article is not to persuade readers that ethno/ca can contribute to cognitive studies. Instead, I argue that ethno/ca offers a path not taken in cognitive science: a viable research program for investigating nominally ‘cognitive’ themes without trading in mentalistic notions of cognition.

In this essay, I discuss the relationship between Garfinkel’s Studies in Ethnomethodology and subsequent developments in ethnomethodology and conversation analysis. I argue that a point of continuity in ethnomethodology and CA, which marks both as radically different from long-standing traditions in Western philosophy and social science, is the claim that social order is evidently produced in ongoing activities, and that no specialized theory or methodology is necessary for making such order observable and accountable. In the half-century following the publication of Studies, Garfinkel explicitly aimed to radicalize ethnomethodology’s stance toward what he called “formal” or “classical” treatments of social order, while much of CA pursued the path of an empirical social science that became increasingly integrated with other branches of social science. Nevertheless, I argue, Garfinkel’s radical initiatives are not completely out of play in ethnomethodological conversational analysis, and the potential remains for further elucidating, exemplifying, and developing them.

This paper is an analysis of a video clip of an interview between a reporter and ice hockey player following a game in which the player was involved in a hard collision with a member of the opposing team. The paper explores blame attribution and how participants claim and disclaim expertise in a way that supports or undermines assertions to have correctly seen and assessed the actions shown on tape. Our analysis focuses on the video of the interview, and it also examines relevant video clips of the collision and various commentaries about the identities of the characters and their actions shown on the videos. In brief, the study is a third-order investigation of recorded-actions-under-analysis. It uses the videos and commentaries as “perspicuous phenomena” that illuminate and complicate how the members’ own action category analysis is bound up with issues of expertise, evidence, and blame.

Physicist Alan Sokal achieved a moment of fame by announcing that he had succeeded in publishing an article in the cultural studies journal Social Text, which was 'sprinkled with nonsense' about developments in quantum gravity physics that supposedly converge with post- modernist themes. Sokal announced his hoax in an article in the liter ary magazine Lingua Franca. This touched off an intense flurry of commentary. Many commentators praised Sokal for exposing shoddy editorial standards in the cultural studies field, while others denounced him for committing scientific fraud. With few exceptions, both Sokal's celebrants and detractors accepted his claim that he did not believe what he said in the Social Text article. Under the circumstances, it is puzzling that they took seriously what he said in Lingua Franca, and did not con sider that he was once again 'successfully pretending to be himself'. In this paper, I suggest that the Lingua Franca article also achieved a parody, and that those who took Sokal seriously were once again taken in by the voice of scientific authority.

The article begins with Derrida’s etymology of the word ‘archive’: a privileged site to which records are officially consigned and in which they are guarded by legal authority. It explores contemporary variations on the theme of archive. The cases presented include efforts to construct scholarly archives that stand as personal monuments, struggles over the collection and consignment of records during official investigations of government scandals, and the ‘popular archive’ produced by the media spectacle surrounding the O. J. Simpson trial. The discussion orients to these archives not only as sources of documentary information but also as sites of historical struggle over the writing, collection, consignment, destruction and interpretation of writings