Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-j824f Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-14T17:29:40.282Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Trouble with Being Sincere

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Timothy Chan  and
Guy Kahane
Timothy Chan
Affiliation:
Centre for the Study of Mind in Nature, University of Oslo, Norway
Guy Kahane
Affiliation:
Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, OxfordOX1 1PT, U.K.
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Questions about sincerity play a central role in our lives. But what makes an assertion insincere? In this paper we argue that the answer to this question is not as straightforward as it has sometimes been taken to be. Until recently the dominant answer has been that a speaker makes an insincere assertion if and only if he does not believe the proposition asserted. There are, however, persuasive counterexamples to this simple account. It has been proposed instead that an insincere assertion that p is one made by a speaker who (a) does not express his belief that p; or (b) does not believe that he believes that p; (c) does not assent to p; or (d) does not express any of these cognitive states. We show that these alternative accounts also face counterexamples.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 41 , Issue 2 , June 2011 , pp. 215 - 234
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 2011

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

1

The authors are listed in alphabetical order; both contributed equally to the paper. We are very grateful to two anonymous referees for extremely useful comments. We have also benefited from comments by audiences in Oxford, Oslo, and Geneva, where we presented earlier versions of this paper. Part of the work on this paper was supported by the Research Council of Norway and the Wellcome Trust (WT087208MF).

References

Anscombe, E. 1957. Intention. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.Google Scholar
Armstrong, D. M. 1973. Belief, Truth and Knowledge. New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Arpaly, N. 2003. Unprincipled Virtue: An Inquiry into Moral Agency. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Arpaly, N. and Schroeder, T.. 1999. ‘Praise, Blame and the Whole Self.’ Philosophical Studies 93: 161–88.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Audi, R. 1982. ‘Self-Deception, Action and Will.’ Erkenntnis 18: 133–58.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Austin, J. L. 1975. How to Do Things with Words. New York: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bennett, J. 1974. ‘The Conscience of Huckleberry Finn.’ Philosophy 49: 123–34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cohen, L. J. 1992. An Essay on Belief and Acceptance. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Evans, G. 1982. Varieties of Reference. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Frankfurt, H. 2005. On Bullshit. Princeton: Princeton University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gendler, T. S. 2008. ‘Alief in Action (and Reaction).’ Mind & Language 23:552–85.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Grice, P. 1968. ‘Utterer's Meaning, Sentence-Meaning, and Word-meaning.’ Reprinted in his 1989 Studies in the Ways of Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Mellor, D. H. 1978. ‘Conscious Belief.’ Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 78: 87–101.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Moran, R. 2005. ‘Problems of Sincerity.’ Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 105: 325–45.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Owens, D. 2006. ‘Testimony and Assertion.’ Philosophical Studies 130: 105–29.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Peacocke, C. 1998. ‘Conscious Attitudes, Attention and Self-Knowledge.’ Knowing Our Own Minds. In Wright, C. Smith, B. C. and MacDonald, C. eds. New York: Oxford University Press: 63–98.Google Scholar
Price, H. H. 1969. Belief. London: George Allen & Unwin.Google Scholar
Ridge, M. 2006. ‘Sincerity and Expressivism.’ Philosophical Studies 131: 487–510.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schwitzgebel, E. 2001. ‘In-Between Believing.’ Philosophical Quarterly 51: 76–82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Searle, J. 1969. Speech Acts. New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shoemaker, S. 1996. The First-Person Perspective and Other Essays. New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Twain, M. 1884. Advantures of Huckleberry Finn. London: Chatto & Windus.Google Scholar
Williams, B. 2002. Truth and Truthfulness. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar