Search Results

Blatant attacks on constitutional stature such as those in Bowers and Carhart are relatively few and far between. But although justices more often than not manage to explain their decisions without directly challenging the losers' constitutional stature, they nonetheless find ways to call constitutional stature into question more subtly and indirectly. This chapter explores how judicial untruthfulness about what is at stake for constitutional losers puts constitutional stature at risk.

The Introduction identifies what is required for a detailed theoretical framework for analyzing the language and ethics of untruthfulness in situated text. First, the scope of untruthfulness needs to be broad enough to cover perceived actual cases of discursive untruthfulness in the current social and political world without being so broad that it ceases to have analytical purpose. Second, a means of judging the ethical value of the act of untruthfulness and the speaker’s degree of culpability is needed. Finally, one needs to be able to judge acts of untruthfulness in the full complexity of their situated context. Untruthfulness necessarily involves complex relations between word, mind, and world that are not easily accessible to the analytical observer and that necessitate an interdisciplinary approach. The chapter concludes by setting out the central theoretical propositions of the TRUST framework that derive from these needs and that are explored in subsequent chapters.

This chapter teases out some key theoretical issues relating to the extension of the concept of untruthfulness from sincerity to epistemic irresponsibility, or a lack of care with which speakers act in forming, retaining, and conveying their beliefs. It argues that subjective responsibility is already embedded within the nature of assertion, but that epistemic responsibility is also both an intellectual virtue and a moral commitment. The growing work on bullshitting and bullshit enrichens our understanding of epistemically irresponsible discourse, but the focus on relating bullshitting to lying and insincerity prevents us from seeing bullshit as deriving from a distinct aspect of untruthfulness. Instead, taking dogma rather than bullshit as a point of departure opens up this aspect of untruthfulness to broader epistemic concerns. The chapter closes by comparing the recent notion of “negligent false assertion” to the account of epistemic irresponsibility in the TRUST framework.

This chapter summarizes the main analytical moves in the TRUST heuristic for analyzing untruthfulness. It then applies the heuristic to three short texts that have been widely called out as lies: Trump’s tweet about large-scale voter fraud just before the 2016 presidential elections; the “Brexit Battle Bus” claim that the United Kingdom sent £350 million per week to the European Union; and Tony Blair’s 2002 statement to Parliament about Iraq possessing weapons of mass destruction. The cases share a common theme: the capacity of untruthful public discourse to undermine democratic legitimacy by, respectively, questioning the integrity of electoral procedures, harming the capacity of voters to make a rational choice, and undermining faith in the rational and responsible deliberation of one’s leaders. The chapter troubles the simple attribution of lying in these cases and shows how a TRUST analysis can lead to a deeper understanding of the types and ethical value of untruthfulness.

This chapter demonstrates an alternative “holistic” method of TRUST analysis in which the focus is not on individual claims or short sections of text with a few related claims, but on the general manifestation of untruthfulness with respect to a particular case. The chapter provides an extensive analysis of multiple claims regarding the poisoning of the Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury, England, in March 2018. It opens with the prime minister’s short statement to Parliament just after the attack, which superficially but confusingly reminds us of Blair’s Preface, but this is used as a springboard for exploring various types of untruthful discourse that have emerged in relation to this international crisis. The framework thus becomes a way of structuring a much broader analysis of untruthfulness in international discourse. The study also demonstrates very clearly the role of social media in promoting epistemic partisanship.

The TRUST framework represents a radical challenge both to existing notions of untruthfulness and to the relevance of this topic to language research. This conclusion to the book All Bullshit and Lies? returns to the three central propositions of the TRUST framework concerning the scope, ethical import, and discursive analysis of untruthfulness, and teases out some of their implications, limitations, and possible future directions. It then takes up the challenge of the relevance of this topic to language research and considers the possibility of an interdisciplinary Ethical Discourse Analysis. Finally, the potential impact of the framework is discussed in terms of the fight-back against epistemic partisanship, the judgment of knowledge on purely partisan grounds. It focuses particularly on applications to education, fostering a greater awareness of the economy of truthfulness, the training of journalists, fact-checkers, and advocates, and the regulation of political advertising and social media.

This chapter investigates the conflict between thought and speech that is inherent in lying: the conflict of saying what you think is false. Traditionally, this is analyzed in terms of saying something and believing that it is false. But cases of unconscious or divided belief challenge these analyses. Amendments involving assent instead of belief fare no better. Attempts to save these analyses by appeal to guises or modes of presentation will also run into trouble. Alternative approaches to untruthfulness are considered. Two new kinds of case are introduced, “truth serum” and “liar serum” cases. Consideration of these cases reveals structural problems with intention- and expectation-based approaches also. The cases suggest that saying what you think is false, or being untruthful, is no less difficult and interesting a subject for analysis than lying itself. The discussion illuminates how the study of lying intertwines with issues in the nature of intentional action.