Abstract
For the past few years, the notions of post-truth, fake news and disinformation have been commonplace in popular parlance across traditional and new media. These are the buzzwords depicting the contemporary socio-political reality, which is (claimed to be) rife with dishonesty, insincerity and mischief deployed to affect public opinion. These folk terms have also been adopted in academic research within communication and political studies, eclipsing the notions of deception, insincerity and untruthfulness addressed in philosophy and linguistics. The latter strand of research seeks primarily adequate theoretical conceptualisations of various forms of deception, typically based on fabricated examples that guarantee scholars’ full insight into social actors’ epistemic states. By contrast, the former research field takes on board political data, assuming that chosen examples represent selected notions in line with vox pop and/or the researcher’s judgement.
In his book, Chris Heffer makes an ambitious attempt to merge these two research traditions by examining the notion of untruthfulness in what he calls the ‘postfactual’ world. Heffer wittily coins the acronym TRUST (Trust-Related Untruthfulness in Situated Text), its underlying premise being that untruthfulness is unethical when the speaker breaches the trust that the hearer has invested in them. This is the author’s point of departure for the study of ‘insincere discourse strategies’, which consist in failing to disclose to the hearer what the speaker believes should be disclosed to them, as well as ‘epistemically irresponsible discourse pathologies’, which involve the speaker’s failure to communicate their beliefs with care. ‘Discursive insincerity’ encompasses lying, misleading and withholding (all three amply discussed in previous philosophical studies), while bullshit, distortion (of evidence) and dogma (closing off inquiry) qualify as ‘epistemic irresponsibility’, with each of the strategies encompassing a mix of realisations. Following this theoretical contribution, Heffer offers a heuristic to analyse untruthfulness in situated discourse. This proposal is illustrated and validated on the basis of examples selected from public political rhetoric.
Heffer’s monograph is a brave intellectual endeavour that merges the findings of various disciplines and approaches, taking into account ethical, legal and philosophical considerations. The author draws amply on relevant literature, presenting his interpretations of the alternative proposals through a convenient lens and offering his postulates and multiple terms coined or borrowed from previous works. This terminological profusion (coupled with the terms’ polysemy and non-technical uses of words that coincide with technical terms) and conceptual abundance can easily cause confusion. This is manifest especially when new senses are attributed to terms used in previous literature or the parlance is not pursued consistently in the course of the monograph. For example, ‘misleading’ is proposed as a superordinate notion that encompasses ‘lying’ in Chapter 1, whereas in the introduction and empirical chapters, the two are presented as independent categories (e.g. p. 6 or p. 239), which seems to be consonant with the view prevailing in philosophy. The reader must then stay alert in order to keep track of the various arguments and distinctions. Because of this, as well as because of the author’s manner of referring to previous research (with references not being used rigorously across chapters wherever a given concept is discussed or just brought up), the book needs to be read as a whole so that the author’s holistic, eclectic proposal can be appreciated.
Overall, the theoretical chapters of Heffer’s book depict a perspective on untruthfulness alternative to the book-length discussions in Vincent Marrelli (2004) or Dynel (2018), in terms of both the general framework and specific postulates. It is for the readers to decide which of the proposals is most appealing. However, a cautionary note is in order. Heffer incorporates and/or bounces off of various postulates in his account. In order to motivate and salvage this new framework, the discussion inevitably involves some over-simplifications and potential (unwitting) misinterpretations of the previous scholarship. Such is the case with the statement that ‘Grice’s implicature is fundamental to understanding insincerity within a framework of communicative cooperation, but his sincerity maxim unnecessarily narrows the scope of insincerity’ (p. 56), whilst – in actual fact – insincerity can manifest itself as what is said (lies) and what is implicated (untruthful implicatures), in either case running counter to Grice’s original view of communication governed by the Cooperative Principle (see Dynel, 2018). Also, Heffer seems to place too much emphasis on the novelty of the distinction between what he calls ‘utterance insincerity’ and ‘discursive insincerity’, the latter of which is billed as a new contribution that can capture withholding information. However, studies done so far (whether or not neo-Gricean) cannot have focused merely on the utterance level; philosophers of language have amply examined not only deception through withholding information but also other forms of insincerity/untruthfulness that cannot be reduced to what is actually uttered, such as deceptive implicature, in line with the neo-Gricean tradition. These (and other) quibbles aside, the TRUST framework is definitely worth considering as a theoretical construct. So is the heuristic for analysing untruthfulness in situated discourse, as exemplified with a few case studies.
The practically implemented heuristic involves several analytic steps, with multiple options within each: claim (checking for the falsifiability of assertoric, as well as suggested or presupposed, content); evidence (for falsity and unreliability); suspensions (of epistemic commitment, such as jokes); sincerity (searching for insincere discourse strategies and their wilfulness); responsibility (analysis of epistemically irresponsible discourse pathologies and their epistemic negligence); culpability (evaluation of the breach of trust along ethical dimensions given mitigating/aggravating circumstances); and a final judgement of the claim. Neat as the components (albeit terminologically complex) of the analytic procedure may look, Heffer’s analyses of a few examples appear to indicate that there is still much arbitrary decision-making to be done by the analyst so that they can claim that they have determined something ‘for a fact’ (e.g. which evidence is to be trusted vs which is only skilfully fabricated). The ‘truth’ behind any specimen of public discourse can only be conjectured but never known based on any seemingly cut-and-dried heuristic.
Overall, Chris Heffer’s monograph is an interesting contribution to the research on untruthfulness in discourse that gives some new ideas for examining deception empirically. However, it certainly does not put an end to the ongoing discussions.