According to telling based views of testimony (TBVs), B has reason to believe that p when A tells B that p because A thereby takes public responsibility for B's subsequent belief that p. Andrew Peet presents a new argument against TBVs. He argues that insofar as A uses context-sensitive expressions to express p, A doesn't take public responsibility for B's belief that p. Since context-sensitivity is widespread, the kind of reason TBVs say we have to believe what we're told, is (...) not widespread. Peet doesn't identify any problem with his own argument though he does attempt to limit its sceptical potential by identifying special contexts in which TBVs stand a chance of success. A more general defence of TBVs can be provided by showing Peet's argument to be unsound. I argue that Peet's argument is unsound because it requires us to wrongly suppose that speakers do far less labour than their audiences in context-sensitive linguistic communication. I aim to show why—in the context of the epistemology of testimony and the philosophy of language—it's important to recognize the labour that speakers can do, and so can can be held responsible for not doing, in episodes of context-sensitive linguistic communication. (shrink)

We discuss arguments against the thesis that the world itself can be vague. The first section of the paper distinguishes dialectically effective from ineffective arguments against metaphysical vagueness. The second section constructs an argument against metaphysical vagueness that promises to be of the dialectically effective sort: an argument against objects with vague parts. Firstly, cases of vague parthood commit one to cases of vague identity. But we argue that Evans' famous argument against will not on its own enable one to (...) complete the reductio in the present context. We provide a metaphysical premise that would complete the reductio, but note that it seems deniable. We conclude by drawing general morals from our case study. (shrink)

This paper develops an analysis of non-epistemic deniability. On my analysis, a speaker has non-epistemic deniability for G-ing when non-acknowledgment social norms make it impermissible for others to retaliate against the speaker for G-ing. I identify two kinds of non-acknowledgment norms that generate non-epistemic deniability: two-tracking norms, which function to contain conflict within a group, and open secrecy norms, which function to inhibit the group from acting on shared knowledge. Narrowly, this paper builds on Alexander Dinges and (...) Julia Zakkou’s recent landmark analysis of deniability. Dinges and Zakkou argue that non-epistemic deniability does not exist. I disagree. But I also use their account of epistemic deniability in order to motivate my own analysis of non-epistemic deniability. Broadly, my paper provides a case study in how speakers strategically leverage non-acknowledgment norms in order to protect their own interests at the expense of others’. (shrink)

In conversation, we often do not acknowledge what we jointly know to be true. This article identifies a distinctive kind of non-acknowledgment norm, open secrecy norms, and analyzes how such norms constrain our speech. First, the author argues that open secrecy norms are structurally different from other everyday non-acknowledgment norms. Open secrecy norms iterate: when p is an open secret, then there’s a norm not to acknowledge that p, and this norm is itself an open secret. Then, the author argues (...) that the non-acknowledgment at issue in open secrecy norms motivates a more complex understanding of discourse structure. When interlocutors are conforming to open secrecy norms, they rely on at least two disjoint common grounds, one of which has a privileged status. To understand why and how it is privileged, the author develops Erving Goffman’s notion of defining a social interaction. Finally, the author shows how strategic speakers can exploit the structure of open secrecy norms in order to both communicate about the open secret and shield themselves from retaliation for what they communicate. (shrink)

Because climate change can be seen as the blind spot of contemporary philosophy of technology, while the destructive side effects of technological progress are no longer deniable, this article reflects on the role of technologies in the constitution of the (post)Anthropocene world. Our first hypothesis is that humanity is not the primary agent involved in world-production, but concrete technologies. Our second hypothesis is that technological inventions at an ontic level have an ontological impact and constitutes world. As we object to (...) classical philosophers of technology like Ihde and Heidegger, we will sketch the progressive contribution of our conceptuality to understand the role of technology in the Anthropocene world. Our third hypothesis is that technology has emancipatory potential and in this respect, can inaugurate a post-Anthropocene World. We consider these three hypotheses to develop a philosophical account of the ontology of technology beyond an abstract and deterministic understanding. This concept enables us to philosophically reflect on the role of technology in the Anthropocene World in general, and its contribution to the transition to the post-Anthropocene World in particular. (shrink)

According to Steven Pinker and his associates the cooperative model of human communication fails, because evolutionary biology teaches us that most social relationships, including talk-exchange, involve combinations of cooperation and conflict. In particular, the phenomenon of the strategic speaker who uses indirect speech in order to be able to deny what he meant by a speech act (deniability of conversational implicatures) challenges the model. In reply I point out that interlocutors can aim at understanding each other (cooperation), while being (...) in conflict. Furthermore, Pinker’s strategic speaker relies on the Cooperative Principle when conveying a conversational implicature, and so non-cooperative behaviour (denial) only emerges as a response to a negative reaction from the audience. It is also doubtful in the cases Pinker presents whether a denial will successfully cancel the conversational implicature –change the audience’s interpretation of speaker’s meaning. I also argue that a strategic speaker might choose indirect speech due to the ignorability of conversational implicatures, in which case the strategic speaker can be highly cooperative. (shrink)

According to Steven Pinker and his associates the cooperative model of human communication fails, because evolutionary biology teaches us that most social relationships, including talk-exchange, involve combinations of cooperation and conflict. In particular, the phenomenon of the strategic speaker who uses indirect speech in order to be able to deny what he meant by a speech act (deniability of conversational implicatures) challenges the model. In reply I point out that interlocutors can aim at understanding each other (cooperation), while being (...) in conflict. Furthermore, Pinker’s strategic speaker relies on the Cooperative Principle when conveying a conversational implicature, and so non-cooperative behaviour (denial) only emerges as a response to a negative reaction from the audience. It is also doubtful in the cases Pinker presents whether a denial will successfully cancel the conversational implicature –change the audience’s interpretation of speaker’s meaning. I also argue that a strategic speaker might choose indirect speech due to the ignorability of conversational implicatures, in which case the strategic speaker can be highly cooperative. (shrink)

Most philosophical and linguistic theorizing about meaning focuses on cooperative forms of communication. However, much verbal communication involves parties whose interests are not fully aligned, or who do not know their degree of alignment. In such contexts, speakers sometimes turn to insinuation: implicatures that permit deniability about risky attitudes and contents. I argue that insinuation is a form of speaker's meaning in which speakers communicate potentially risky attitudes and contents without adding them to the conversational record, or sometimes even (...) to the common ground. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is twofold: First, we present and develop a system of logic for pragmatics including the act of denial. Second, we analyse in our framework the so-called paradox of assertability. We show that it is possible to yield sentences that are not assertable. Moreover, under certain conditions, a symmetric result can be obtained: There is a specular paradox of deniability. However, this paradox is based on the problematic principle of classical denial equivalence.

In conversation, speakers often felicitously underspecify the content of their speech acts, leaving audiences uncertain about what they mean. This article discusses how such underspecification and the resulting uncertainty can be used deliberately, and manipulatively, to achieve a range of noncommunicative conversational goals—including minimizing conversational conflict, manufacturing acceptance or perceived agreement, and gaining or bolstering status. The article argues that speakers who manipulatively underspecify their speech acts in this way engage in a mock speech act called pied piping. In pied (...) piping, a speaker leaves open a range of interpretations for a speech act while preserving both plausible deniability and plausible assertability; depending on how the audience responds, the speaker can retroactively commit to any of the interpretations left open, and so try to retroactively update the common ground. The article goes on to develop a model of how pied piping functions that incorporates game-theoretic elements into the more traditional common ground framework in order to capture the uncertainty of updating. (shrink)

This volume applies Resolution Theory to modern governance. Its central claim is structural: contemporary states increasingly generate outcomes without identifiable authors. As decision-making is routed through committees, procedures, incentives, and model-mediated “best practice,” causal explanation expands while authorship becomes illegible. The result is institutional anonymity: power remains real, but responsibility cannot reliably land. Resolution Theory blocks the collapse of accountability by separating verdict-types. Explanation describes how an outcome arose; authorship concerns where deliberation was closed into action—where resolution occurred—and who held (...) the authority to decide and the power to stop it. When resolution points are obscured, legitimacy degrades predictably: politics moralises, blame is displaced, scapegoating rises, and “strongman gravity” emerges as publics search for visible resolvers. The volume then diagnoses temporal distortion as a second driver of decline: where exposure can be exported into the future, institutions default to short-horizon optimisation and reputational management, liquidating long-horizon costs under plausible deniability. Policing is treated as the state’s visible edge: where force becomes effectively unowned—or concealment becomes survivable—legitimacy collapses fastest. The proposed remedy is not ideological alignment but restoration of legible resolution: explicit sponsorship points, preserved decision trails for high-exposure decisions, and governance designs that force future exposure into present deliberation without dissolving democratic sovereignty. (shrink)

Various thinkers are concerned that the Orthodox view of Ancestral Sin does not avoid the age-old Augustinian concern of Pelagianism. After all, the doctrine of Ancestral Sin maintains that fallen human beings do not necessarily or inevitably commit actual sins. In contemporary literature, this claim could be articulated as a denial of the ‘inevitability thesis.’ A denial of the inevitability thesis, so contemporary thinkers maintain, seems to imply both that human beings can place themselves in right relation to God as (...) well as the Pelagian denial that all require Christ's work to attain this right relation to God. This article demonstrates that the Ancestral Sin, along with a denial of the inevitability thesis, is neither Pelagian nor Semi-Pelagian. I show that the doctrine of Ancestral Sin denies (Semi-) Pelagianism in various ways. I show that, for Ancestral Sin to entail (Semi-) Pelagianism, one must commit to several assumptions, each of which is plausibly deniable and none of which Orthodox thinkers affirm. (shrink)

Therapy-speak is the imprecise and superficial integration of psychotherapy language into everyday communication, especially by privileged or wealthy people. Despite the advantages of normalizing psychotherapy language, such as resisting epistemic injustice and enhancing awareness of mental health issues, therapy-speak raises important concerns. On the epistemic front, therapy-speak is susceptible to the erosion of the meaning and relevance of psychotherapy terms, pathologizing, and the risk of self-diagnosis. Regarding its ethical concerns, therapy-speak might be used to discredit individuals, evade responsibilities, and even (...) signal social status, by taking an objective stance. Beyond these epistemic and ethical concerns, therapy-speak can also be weaponized to promote and perpetuate some forms of epistemic injustice, and to generate affective injustice. In particular, we argue that the weaponization of therapy-speak exploits the epistemic authority and the credibility excesses of medical evidence, the conflation between the descriptive and the normative, and the linguistic strategy of deniability to impose a specific way to manage emotions in challenging, and unjust, situations. (shrink)

This satirical yet critical essay explores how subtle, systemic corruption can thrive within the UK higher education sector under the guise of governance best practices. Independent researcher Peter Kahl provides a fictional blueprint demonstrating how charities and governance organisations might legally exploit universities through rankings, opaque consultations, bureaucratic complexity, and carefully managed conflicts of interest. By exposing the quiet ways in which corruption becomes normalised, the essay highlights the challenges of fighting institutional injustice, the inadequacies of post-facto accountability, and the (...) crucial role courageous researchers and vigilant journalism must play in protecting democratic integrity. (shrink)

This paper develops the concept of manufactured necessity to describe a linguistic–moral technology through which structurally produced ecological harm is reframed as neutral infrastructural inevitability (“it’s just how the system works,” “unfortunate but necessary,” “the cost of modernisation”). I argue that this moral compression plays a constitutive role in sustaining what Achille Mbembe terms death-worlds: socio-ecological environments in which injury, exposure, and shortened life expectancy are normalised background conditions of dwelling rather than recognised political violence. Drawing on feminist political economy (...) and ecofeminist theory, the paper shows how responsibility for sustaining life inside these degraded environments is systematically displaced onto households and communities, where survival labour is disproportionately feminised. Co-dwelling thus becomes a privatised moral burden, while extractive institutions are linguistically insulated from accountability. Ecological collapse is rendered governable not only through economic and legal mechanisms, but through everyday moral language that converts violence into inevitability. I argue that a more-than-human ethics of dwelling must therefore confront not only material patterns of extraction, but the moral technologies that render ecological death-worlds administratively manageable and politically deniable. Recognising long-term ecological harm as institutional violence — rather than neutral background static — is proposed as a core normative demand of environmental justice. (shrink)

dialectical frameworks have been introduced as a formalism for modeling argumentation allowing general logical satisfaction conditions and the relevant argument evaluation. Different criteria used to settle the acceptance of arguments are called semantics. Semantics of ADFs have so far mainly been defined based on the concept of admissibility. However, the notion of strongly admissible semantics studied for abstract argumentation frameworks has not yet been introduced for ADFs. In the current work we present the concept of strong admissibility of interpretations for (...) ADFs. Further, we show that strongly admissible interpretations of ADFs form a lattice with the grounded interpretation as the maximal element. We also present algorithms to answer the following decision problems: whether a given interpretation is a strongly admissible interpretation of a given ADF, and whether a given argument is strongly acceptable/deniable in a given interpretation of a given ADF. In addition, we show that the strongly admissible semantics of ADFs forms a proper generalization of the strongly admissible semantics of AFs. (shrink)

The studies of ethics had long been under-dealt although it is the kind of primary in sustaining a civility. It is hardly deniable that the concept of efficiency and productivity has hailed on the mindedness and interest of academic community. The narrative of ethics or social justice would be ridiculed as the kind of Greek juggle on philosophy or put to be on neglect for its lacking or default on the modern disciplinary frame in the academics. A cure, however, seems (...) not to be from a juggernaut of modern capitalistic civilization and its supportive paradigm of understanding so that alternative way for any more realistic solution can be made exploitative from the ethics or similar tools of motivation. Now we talk about noblesse oblige or benevolent capitalism as one important dose for the new paradigm of social promise or reformed capitalism. The ethics studies have increasingly made its way as focused in the discipline of business and public administration. Typically, it is profiled in combination of leadership studies, and the civility tends to accept this narrative, beyond the liberal competition and fairness school, as one of important element when we consider the concept of social justice. The modern professionals, for example, bar members, medical doctors, and many of licensees for their business operation, also clone to carry their responsibility under a specific ethical code. This would be the kind of safety code from the abusive or madly profit-driven capitalism. More importantly, I believe that a sheer understanding of ethics and social justice would be assets and equipment for the ruling class in the contemporary society. In this context, the paper would survey an ethical theory or decision making model, history of Korea as well as a recent episode involving the chief prosecutor of South Korea. Korean leadership, typically for the powerful cores or inner circle princelings, can be revisited in purview of ethics studies, such as Cooper‟s design and ethical decision making model. (shrink)

Rumfitt has given two arguments that in unilateralist verificationist theories of meaning, truth collapses into correct assertibility. In the present paper I give similar arguments that show that in unilateral falsificationist theories of meaning, falsehood collapses into correct deniability. According to bilateralism, meanings are determined by assertion and denial conditions, so the question arises whether it succumbs to similar arguments. I show that this is not the case. The final section considers the question whether a principle central to Rumfitt's (...) first argument, ‘It is assertible that if and only if it is assertible that it is assertible that ’, is one that bilateralists can reject, and concludes that they cannot. It follows that the logic of assertibility and deniability, according to a result by Williamson, is the little known modal logic K4 studied by Sobociński. The paper ends with a plaidoyer for bilateralists to adopt this logic. (shrink)

How can we capture the intuitive distinction between lying and misleading? According to a traditional view, the difference boils down to whether the speaker is saying (as opposed to implying) something that they believe to be false. This view is subject to known objections; to overcome them, an alternative view has emerged. For the alternative view, what matters is whether the speaker can consistently deny that they are committed to knowing the relevant proposition. We point out serious flaws for this (...) alternative view, and sketch a simpler alternative that incorporates key insights of the traditional view. (shrink)

At first glance, hate speech and microaggressions seem to have little overlap beyond being communicated verbally or in written form. Hate speech seems clearly macro-aggressive: an intentional, obviously harmful act lacking the ambiguity (and plausible deniability) of microaggressions. If we look back at historical discussions of hate speech, however, many of these assumed differences turn out to be points of similarity. The harmfulness of hate speech only became widely acknowledged after a concerted effort by critical race theorists, feminists, and (...) other activists. Before the 1990s, slurs were widely considered socially acceptable behavior: mere jokes that weren’t intended to be harmful. Authors like Richard Delgado, Mari Matsuda, and Charles Lawrence pushed back against this dismissal. In this chapter, I show that their arguments for the serious harmfulness of hate speech prefigure and provide support for current debates about the serious harmfulness of microaggressions. Exploring resonances with the 1980s hate speech debate will allow us to explain why microaggressions fall below the cutoff for legal liability but remain apt targets for moral blame. (shrink)

In paradigmatic cases of subtweeting, one Twitter user critically or mockingly tweets about another person without mentioning their username or their name. In this chapter, we give an account of the strategic aims of subtweeting and the mechanics through which it achieves them. We thereby hope to shed light on the distinctive communicative and moral texture of subtweeting while filling in a gap in the philosophical literature on strategic speech in social media. We first specify what subtweets are and identify (...) the central features that give rise to their strategic mechanics. Next, we draw attention to problematic aspects of subtweeting and consider conditions under which subtweeting can be justified on moral and prudential grounds. The chapter concludes by discussing practical upshots and noting avenues for future work. (shrink)

This paper develops a pragmatics of narcissistic communication. I argue that narcissistic speakers do not merely violate the Cooperative Principle; they occupy a distinctive non-cooperative niche within the Gricean and Stalnakerian frameworks of meaning. Narcissistic speakers weaponize implicature, presupposition, expressive meaning, and context manipulation to secure power while preserving plausible deniability. I show that gaslighting is the retroactive rewriting of speaker meaning combined with coercive pressure on the hearer to accommodate a newly asserted literal narrative, a move that exploits (...) the very mechanisms that normally stabilize interpretation. In contrast, autistic communicative styles reveal a semantically transparent, truth-oriented baseline that makes this exploitation especially effective. Over time, these local pragmatic strategies accumulate into a “synthetic history” and a state of epistemic capture, in which the narcissist becomes de facto curator of the shared world. Narcissistic discourse thus functions as a non-cooperative species of meaning, illuminating how ordinary pragmatic machinery—normally used for coordination—can, under certain psychological profiles, enable domination, interpersonal distortion, and epistemic harm. (shrink)

I outline what I call the ‘deniability problem’, explain why it is problematic, and identify the range of utterances to which it applies (using religious discourse as an example). The problem is as follows: To assign content to many utterances audiences must rely on their contextual knowledge. This generates a lot of scope for error. Thus, speakers are able to make assertions and deny responsibility for the proposition asserted, claiming that the audience made a mistake. I outline the problem (...) (a limited version of which Fricker 2012 discusses), before explaining why it is problematic. Firstly it blocks testimonial knowledge according to assurance views. Secondly it prevents epistemic buck passing (the importance of which is emphasized by Goldberg 2006 and McMyler 2013). Finally, it removes a key disincentive to dishonesty. The recent literature on context sensitivity (particularly Cappelen and Lepore 2004) seems to entail that the problem applies to a very wide range of utterances. I consider a series of responses which fail to provide a solution, but which help us narrow down the scope of the problem. (shrink)

How is it that a speaker _S_ can at once make it obvious to an audience _A_ that she intends to communicate some proposition _p_, and yet at the same time retain plausible deniability with respect to this intention? The answer is that _S_ can bring it about that _A_ has a high justified credence that ‘_S_ intended _p_’ without putting _A_ in a position to know that ‘_S_ intended _p_’. In order to achieve this _S_ has to exploit (...) a sense in which communication can be lottery-like. After defending this view of deniability I argue that it compares favorably to a rival account recently developed by Dinges and Zakkou (Mind, https://doi.org/10.1093/mind/fzac056, 2023 ). (shrink)

This paper presents and motivates a new philosophical and logical approach to truth and semantic paradox. It begins from an inferentialist, and particularly bilateralist, theory of meaning---one which takes meaning to be constituted by assertibility and deniability conditions---and shows how the usual multiple-conclusion sequent calculus for classical logic can be given an inferentialist motivation, leaving classical model theory as of only derivative importance. The paper then uses this theory of meaning to present and motivate a logical system---ST---that conservatively extends (...) classical logic with a fully transparent truth predicate. This system is shown to allow for classical reasoning over the full (truth-involving) vocabulary, but to be non-transitive. Some special cases where transitivity does hold are outlined. ST is also shown to give rise to a familiar sort of model for non-classical logics: Kripke fixed points on the Strong Kleene valuation scheme. Finally, to give a theory of paradoxical sentences, a distinction is drawn between two varieties of assertion and two varieties of denial. On one variety, paradoxical sentences cannot be either asserted or denied; on the other, they must be both asserted and denied. The target theory is compared favourably to more familiar related systems, and some objections are considered. (shrink)

In Frontiers and Ghettos: State Violence in Serbia and Israel (University of California Press, 2003), James Ron explores a critical question: Why do states unleash extreme violence in some places, but not in others? Drawing on fieldwork in Serbia, Bosnia, Israel, the West Bank, and Lebanon, Ron argues that the answer lies in the interaction between state institutions and geography. -/- The book introduces the concepts of the “ghetto”—zones under direct state control where violence is regulated and legalized—and the “frontier”—spaces (...) outside or beyond the law where states tolerate or encourage unrestrained brutality. Using case studies of Serbian paramilitary attacks on Bosnian Muslims and Israeli practices in the West Bank, Gaza, and southern Lebanon, Ron shows how the same state actors could behave with “savage restraint” in one zone and unleash indiscriminate violence in another. -/- These findings help explain the devastating trajectory of Gaza today. As Ron warned two decades ago, once Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005 and reclassified it as a “frontier” rather than a “ghetto,” the enclave became vulnerable to catastrophic levels of violence. The war of 2023–25 tragically confirms this prediction. -/- Frontiers and Ghettos has influenced scholarship on political violence, human rights, and international law, offering a framework that remains urgently relevant. (shrink)

A standing presumption in the literature is that devil’s advocacy is an inherently beneficial argumentative move; and that those who take on this role in conversation are paradigms of argumentative virtue. Outside academic circles, however, devil’s advocacy has acquired something of a notorious reputation: real-world conversations are rife with self-proclaimed devil’s advocates who are anything but virtuous. Motivated by this observation, in this paper we offer the first in-depth exploration of non-ideal devil’s advocacy. We draw on recent analyses of two (...) better known discursive practices—mansplaining and trolling—to illuminate some of the signature traits of vicious devil’s advocacy. Building on this comparative examination, we show that all three practices trade on a manipulation of illocutionary force; and we evaluate their respective options for securing plausible deniability. (shrink)

This paper aims to deepen our understanding of so-called covert dogwhistles. I discuss whether a covert dogwhistle is a specific sort of mechanism of manipulation or whether, on the contrary, it draws on other already familiar linguistic mechanisms such as implicatures or presuppositions. I put forward a series of arguments aimed at illustrating that implicatures and presuppositions, on the one hand, and covert dogwhistles, on the other, differ in their linguistic behaviour concerning plausible deniability, cancellability, calculability and mutual acceptance. (...) I concluded this paper by outlining a simple theory for covert dogwhistles according to which they are attitude-foregrounders. (shrink)

The insinuating speaker, when successful, achieves two goals: they introduce a contentious content into a conversation while simultaneously marking it as not being officially stated. This positioning allows the speaker to plausibly deny any intention behind the implied message when challenged. I argue that reconciling the communicative nature of insinuation and its off-record status within the Gricean framework of overt communication appears to present a significant conceptual puzzle. In this paper, I address this challenge by introducing the notion of Gricean (...) insinuation, which I define as communication that is both partially overt and partially covert. I start by exploring the nature and complexity of the insinuation puzzle mentioned earlier and reviewing two existing Gricean solutions to it. Then, I proceed to analyse three concepts relevant to the insinuation phenomenon: indirectness, cancellability, and plausible deniability. Following this, I introduce the concept of Gricean insinuation. In particular, I use the common ground framework to elucidate what I refer to as the ‘Fake One-Way Mirror Effect’, and apply the resulting model to explain some examples of insinuation as acts of off-record communication. In conclusion, I assess the model’s effectiveness and propose directions for future research. (shrink)