In the U.S. there has been considerable interest in connecting low-income households to alternative food networks like Community Supported Agriculture. To learn more about this possibility we conducted a statewide survey of CSA members in California. A total of 1149 members from 41 CSAs responded. Here we answer the research question: How do CSA members’ socioeconomic and demographic backgrounds, household conditions potentially interfering with membership, and CSA membership experiences vary between lower-income households and higher-income households? We divided members into LIHHs (...) and HIHHs. We present comparisons of LIHHs’ and HIHHs’ employment, race/ethnicity, household composition and education, use of food support, and enjoyment of food-related activities; conditions interfering with membership and major life events; and sources of information influencing decision to join, reasons for joining, ratings of importance of and satisfaction with various CSA attributes, gaps between importance of and satisfaction with various CSA attributes, valuing of the share and willingness to pay more, and impacts of membership. We find that LIHHs are committed CSA members, often more so than HIHHs, and that CSA members in California are disproportionately white, but that racial disproportionality decreases as incomes increase. We conclude by considering: the economic risks that LIHHs face in CSA membership, the intersection of economic risks with race/ethnicity and cultural coding in CSA; and the possibilities of increasing participation of LIHH in CSA. (shrink)

Knowledge, like other things of value, can be faked. According to Hawley (2011), know-how is harder to fake than knowledge-that, given that merely apparent propositional knowledge is in general more resilient to our attempts at successful detection than are corresponding attempts to fake know-how. While Hawley’s reasoning for a kind of detection resilience asymmetry between know-how and know-that looks initially plausible, it should ultimately be resisted. In showing why, we outline different ways in which know-how can be faked even when (...) a given performance is successful; and in doing so, we distinguish how know-how can be faked (no less than know-that) via upstream and downstream indicators of its presence, and within each of these categories, we’ll distinguish (in connection with detection resilience) both faking symptoms and (various kinds of) criteria. The unappreciated resilience of faked knowledge-how to successful detection highlights a largely overlooked dimension of social-epistemic risk – risk we face not just in our capacity as recipients of testimony, but in our capacity as both (would-be) apprentices and clients of knowledge-how. (shrink)

This paper contributes to the growing literature in social epistemology of diagnosing the epistemically problematic features of fake news. I identify two novel problems: the problem of relevant alternatives; and the problem of the degradation of the epistemic environment. The former arises among individual epistemic transactions. By making salient, and thereby relevant, alternatives to knowledge claims, fake news stories threaten knowledge. The problem of the degradation of the epistemic environment arises at the level of entire epistemic communities. I introduce the (...) notion of an epistemic environment, roughly the totality of resources and circumstances relevant to assessing the epistemically interesting statuses, such as knowledge. Fake news degrades our epistemic environment by undermining confidence in epistemic institutions and altering epistemic habits, thereby making the environment less conducive to achieving positive epistemic statuses. This is problematic even if the decrease in confidence and the altering of habits are rational. I end by considering solutions to these problems, stressing the importance of reproaching each other for proliferating fake news. I argue that we should reproach even faultless purveyors of fake news. This is because fake news typically arises in abnormal epistemic contexts, where there is widespread ignorance of, and noncompliance with, correct epistemic norms. (shrink)

This paper focuses on extant approaches to counteract the consumption of fake news online. Proponents of structural approaches suggest that our proneness to consuming fake news could only be reduced by reshaping the architecture of online environments. Proponents of educational approaches suggest that fake news consumers should be empowered to improve their epistemic agency. In this paper, we address a question that is relevant to this debate: namely, whether fake news consumers commit mistakes for which they can be criticized and (...) that they could easily avoid by reforming their doxastic conduct. Proponents of structural approaches, like R. Rini and B. Millar, have defended in different ways a negative answer to this question. In this paper, we criticize their views and suggest that individual users could improve on their epistemic practice by widening their information diet. (shrink)

Across two studies, one of which was pre-registered, we find that a simple questionnaire that measures intellectual virtue and vice predicts how many fake news articles and conspiracy theories participants accept. This effect holds even when controlling for multiple demographic predictors, including age, household income, sex, education, ethnicity, political affiliation, religion, and news consumption. These results indicate that self-report is an adequate way to measure intellectual virtue and vice, which suggests that they are not fully immune to introspective awareness or (...) “stealthy” in the sense that Cassam (2015) argues. This is an important methodological result and may pave the way for future research on intellectual virtue and vice. (shrink)

The topic of fake news has received increased attention from philosophers since the term became a favorite of politicians (Habgood-Coote 2016; Dentith 2016). Notably missing from the conversation, however, is a discussion of fake news and conspiracy theory media as a market. This paper will take as its starting point the account of noxious markets put forward by Debra Satz (2010), and will argue that there is a pro tanto moral reason to restrict the market for fake news. Specifically, we (...) begin with Satz’s argument that restricting a market may be required when i) that market inhibits citizens from being able to stand in an equal relationship with one another, and ii) this problem cannot be solved without such direct restrictions. Our own argument then proceeds in three parts: first, we argue that the market for fake news fits Satz’s description of a noxious market; second, we argue against explanations of the proliferation of fake news that are couched in terms of “epistemic vice”, and likewise argue against prescribing critical thinking education as a solution to the problem; finally, we conclude that, in the absence of other solutions to mitigate the noxious effects of the fake news market, we have a pro tanto moral reason to impose restrictions on this market. At the end of the paper, we consider one proposal to regulate the fake news market, which involves making social media outlets potentially liable in civil court for damages caused by the fake news hosted on their websites. (shrink)

Did you know that Hillary Clinton sold weapons to ISIS? Or that Mike Pence called Michelle Obama “the most vulgar First Lady we’ve ever had”? No, you didn’t know these things. You couldn’t know them, because these claims are false.1 But many American voters believed them.One of the most distinctive features of the 2016 campaign was the rise of “fake news,” factually false claims circulated on social media, usually via channels of partisan camaraderie. Media analysts and social scientists are still (...) debating what role fake news played in Trump’s victory.2 But whether or not it drove the outcome, fake news certainly affected the choices of some individual voters.Why were people willing to believe easily... (shrink)

Many languages allow for “fake” uses of their past tense marker: the marker: can occur in certain contexts without conveying temporal pastness. Instead it appears to bear a modal meaning. Iatridou :231–270, 2000) has dubbed this phenomenon Fake Tense. Fake Tense is particularly common to conditional constructions. This paper analyzes Fake Tense in English conditional sentences as a certain kind of ambiguity: the past tense morphology can mark the presence of a temporal operator, but it can also signal a specific (...) modal operator. The ambiguity is proposed to be the result of recategorization: the Simple Past develops a second, modal meaning because of structural similarities between the temporal and the modal/epistemic domain. The proposal is spelled out in the generative semantics framework, using the restrictor approach to conditionals Semantics from different points of view, 1979; in: A. von Stechow and D. Wunderlich Semantics: an international handbook of contemporary research, 1991), and building on von Stechows et al.’s recent work on the English tense system The expression of time in language, 2010; Romero and von Stechow, Tense: introduction, 2008). (shrink)

An important way in which philosophy can contribute to public discourse is by clarifying concepts that are central to it. This paper is a philosophical contribution in that spirit. It offers an account of fake news—a notion that has entered public debate following the 2016 US presidential election. On the view I defend, fake news is Frankfurtian bullshit that is asserted in the form of a news publication. According to Frankfurt’s famous account, bullshit has two characteristics. There is, firstly, an (...) “indifference to how things really are” on the part of the bullshitter. This does not mean that what a bullshitter says is always false. It might well be true. What it does mean, however, is that, unlike a liar, who tries to convince us that a given statement he believes to be false is true, a bullshitter simply does not care whether what he says is true. The same, I believe, is true of the publisher of fake news. Secondly, the bullshitter misrepresents “in a certain way … what he is up to”. Likewise, the publisher of fake news seems to misrepresent what he is up to. It appears that he wants to hide his actual motives. At any rate, so I will argue. (shrink)

Despite being a new term, ‘fake news’ has evolved rapidly. This paper argues that it should be reserved for cases of deliberate presentation of false or misleading claims as news, where these are misleading by design. The phrase ‘by design’ here refers to systemic features of the design of the sources and channels by which fake news propagates and, thereby, manipulates the audience’s cognitive processes. This prospective definition is then tested: first, by contrasting fake news with other forms of public (...) disinformation; second, by considering whether it helps pinpoint conditions for the proliferation of fake news. (shrink)

The central thesis of this paper is that fake news and related phenomena serve as defeaters for knowledge transmission via journalistic channels. This explains how they pose a threat to democracy; and it points the way to determining how to address this threat. Democracy is both intrinsically and instrumentally good provided the electorate has knowledge (however partial and distributed) of the common good and the means of achieving it. Since journalism provides such knowledge, those who value democracy have a reason (...) to protect it. Hostile agents, however, can undermine both the effectiveness of democratic decision-making and faith in democracy itself, by deliberately promulgating fake news and hyper-partisan views; moreover, these effects can come about unintentionally on social media. I conclude that we may need to change, not just the way we process information online, but also the informational environment in which we operate. (shrink)

Since the Brexit Referendum in the United Kingdom and the election of Donald Trump as US President in 2016, the term ‘fake news’ has become a significant source of concern. Recently, the European Commission and the British House of Commons have condemned the phenomenon as a threat to their institutions’ democratic processes and values. However, political disinformation is nothing new, and empirical studies suggest that fake news has not decided crucial elections, that most readers do not believe the online fake (...) news stories they read, and that political polarization in Western democracies like the US began to increase long before online fake news existed. The question then is: how exactly does fake news threaten democracies? This paper argues that online fake news threatens democratic processes because it undermines citizens’ epistemic trust in each other. This in turn threatens to undermine the perceived legitimacy and the moral justification of democratic institutions as a whole. While online fake news is a symptom of a much larger issue (how has the Internet affected democracies, and how can we use its positive power while checking its negative effects?), it deserves particular attention given the potential danger it presents for the viability and the legitimacy of the democratic process. (shrink)

The article starts by offering a definition of fake kindness focused on the dissociation between the behavioural components of kindness and the intent to sincerely pay some heed to the needs of others. Using the sociological theory of Pierre Bourdieu, this definition is then used to articulate how fake kindness can be conceptualized as a specific form of symbolic violence. Such a view allows explanations as to how and why the prevalence and effectiveness of fake kindness vary according to microsociological (...) norms and values. The generic definition and conceptualization of fake kindness as a form of symbolic violence are then used to discuss how nursing’s enthrallment with the concept of caring and its operationalization as a moral compass likely fosters the growth of fake kindness within the profession. In this view, the institutional enforcement of propriety and well-behaved professionalism is more likely to lead to toxic environments than to healthy workplaces. We hope that being able to understand how professional norms and institutional rules are sometimes turned into social tools to enforce obedience and existing hierarchies can empower victims of those phenomena to resist them more effectively. It might also contribute to increasing the awareness of well-meaning nurses or people in position of authority who have been socialized in environments where fake kindness is normalized. (shrink)

The problem of fake news and the spread of misinformation has garnered a lot of attention in recent years. The incentives and norms that give rise to the problem, however, are not unique to journalism. Insofar as academics and journalists are working towards the same goal, i.e., publication, they are both under pressures that pervert. This chapter has two aims. First, to integrate conversations in philosophy of science, epistemology, and metaphilosophy to draw out the publishing incentives that promote analogous problems (...) of fake news and misinformation in academic research communities more broadly. Second, to argue for a (partial) solution. This chapter argues that research communities benefit when authors believe what they argue for in print and it warns against attempts to loosen our publication norms to permit publishing without belief. (shrink)

Fake research produces results that are invalid from the start. I take such research to be characterised by three jointly sufficient features. It is severely methodologically defective, and the relevant defects support certain nonepistemic (social, political, economic) interests and objectives, while the relevant objectives typically concern the interference with attempts at political regulation. I deal with two kinds of claimed fake research. One is agnotological ploys in which scientific dissent is created by interested parties from industry or politics in order (...) to support their own partisan goals. Another one is the populist antiscience movement that suspects fake research in the scientific mainstream. I suggest three remedies to reduce or eliminate the impact of fake research: disclosing fallacies, improving the understanding of scientific methods, and distinguishing more clearly between science and politics in political decision-making. (shrink)

I argue that there is a prima facie tension between solutions to the problem of fake news and solutions to the problem presented by various cognitive biases that dispose us to dismiss evidence against our prior beliefs (what might seem to be the driving force behind echo chambers). We can guard against fake news by strengthening belief. But we can exit echo chambers by becoming more sensitive to counterevidence, which seems to require weakening our beliefs. I resolve the tension by (...) arguing against an injunction to weaken belief in the required ways. In particular, there is no injunction to be open-minded in all circumstances toward various counterarguments, even those whose premises seem compelling and in which we can’t expose a flaw. On the contrary, there are circumstances in which you should, in the relevant sense, be closed-minded toward such counterarguments. (shrink)

Recent develops in AI technology have led to increasingly sophisticated forms of video manipulation. One such form has been the advent of deepfakes. Deepfakes are AI-generated videos that typically depict people doing and saying things they never did. In this paper, I demonstrate that there is a close structural relationship between deepfakes and more traditional fake barn cases in epistemology. Specifically, I argue that deepfakes generate an analogous degree of epistemic risk to that which is found in traditional cases. Given (...) that barn cases have posed a long-standing challenge for virtue-theoretic accounts of knowledge, I consider whether a similar challenge extends to deepfakes. In doing so, I consider how Duncan Pritchard’s recent anti-risk virtue epistemology meets the challenge. While Pritchard’s account avoids problems in traditional barn cases, I claim that it leads to local scepticism about knowledge from online videos in the case of deepfakes. I end by considering how two alternative virtue-theoretic approaches might vindicate our epistemic dependence on videos in an increasingly digital world. (shrink)

This book is the first sustained inquiry into the new epistemology of fake news. The chapters, authored by established and emerging names in the field, pursue three goals. First, to analyse the meaning and novelty of 'fake news' and related notions, such as 'conspiracy theory.' Second, to discuss the mechanics of fake news, exploring various practices that generate or promote fake news. Third, to investigate potential therapies for fake news.

Fake news is a worrying phenomenon which is growing increasingly widespread, partly because of the ease with which it is disseminated online. Combating the spread of fake news requires a clear understanding of the nature of fake news. However, the use of the term in everyday language is heterogenous and has no fixed meaning. Despite increasing philosophical attention to the topic, there is no consensus on the correct definition of “fake news” within philosophy either. This paper aims to bring clarity (...) to the philosophical debate of fake news in two ways: Firstly, by providing an overview of existing philosophical definitions and secondly, by developing a new account of fake news. This paper will identify where there is agreement within the philosophical debate of definitions of “fake news” and isolate four key questions on which there is genuine disagreement. These concern the intentionality underlying fake news, its truth value, the question of whether fake news needs to reach a minimum audience, and the question of whether an account of fake news needs to be dynamic. By answering these four questions, I provide a novel account of defining “fake news”. This new definition hinges upon the fact that fake news has the function of being deliberately misleading about its own status as news. (shrink)

Many of our beliefs are acquired online. Online epistemic environments are replete with fake news, fake science, fake photographs and videos, and fake people in the form of trolls and social bots. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the threat that such online fakes pose to the acquisition of knowledge. I argue that fakes can interfere with one or more of the truth, belief, and warrant conditions on knowledge. I devote most of my attention to the effects of (...) online fakes on satisfaction of the warrant condition, as these have received comparatively little attention. I consider three accounts of the conditions under which fakes compromise the warrant condition. I argue for the third of these accounts, according to which the propensity of fakes to exist in an environment threatens warrant acquisition in that environment. Finally, I consider some limitations on the epistemic threat of fakes and suggest some strategies by which this threat can be mitigated. (shrink)

In their recent paper, Esfe et al. present some criteria for fake journals and propose some ‘features’ to recognize them. While I share most of the authors’ concerns about this issue in general, some of the reported criteria are not fit to differentiate fake journals from genuine ones. Here are some examples derived from their list, which illustrate that such criteria are not necessarily specific to fake journals only, but they could also apply to well-established journals and, therefore, should not (...) be considered as is. (shrink)

Looking at the recent spate of claims about “fake news” which appear to be a new feature of political discourse, I argue that fake news presents an interesting problem in epistemology. Te phenomena of fake news trades upon tolerating a certain indiference towards truth, which is sometimes expressed insincerely by political actors. Tis indiference and insincerity, I argue, has been allowed to fourish due to the way in which we have set the terms of the “public” epistemology that maintains what (...) is considered “rational” public discourse. I argue one potential salve to the problem of fake news is to challenge this public epistemology by injecting a certain ethical consideration back into the discourse. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In Habgood-Coote : 1033–1065) I argued that we should abandon ‘fake news’ and ‘post-truth’, on the grounds that these terms do not have stable public meanings, are unnecessary, and function as vehicles for propaganda. Jessica Pepp, Eliot Michaelson, and Rachel Sterken and Étienne Brown : 144–154) have raised worries about my case for abandonment, recommending that we continue using ‘fake news’. In this paper, I respond to these worries. I distinguish more clearly between theoretical and political reasons for abandoning (...) a term, assemble more evidence that ‘fake news’ is a nonsense term, and respond to the worries raised by Pepp, Michaelson and Sterken, and Brown. I close by considering the prospects for anti-fascist and anti-authoritarian conceptual engineering. (shrink)

In a recent contribution to conceptual ethics, Joshua Habgood-Coote argues that philosophers should refrain from using the term “fake news,” which is commonly employed in public discussions focusing on the epistemic health of democracies. In this short discussion note, I take issue with this claim, discussing each of the three arguments advanced by Coote to support the conclusion that we should abandon this concept. First, I contend that although “fake news” is a contested concept, there is significant agreement among contemporary (...) philosophers about its key feature. Second, I argue against the claim that “fake news” is an unnecessary concept by underlying that it is not reducible to other terms we customarily use to describe the epistemic dysfunctions of democracies. Lastly, I suggest that using the term “fake news” need not serve propagandistic aims, and that philosophers can use this concept without engaging in epistemic policing, that is, commanding their interlocutors not to believe specific news stories or sources. (shrink)

The world is swimming in misinformation. Conflicting messages bombard us every day with news on everything from politics and world events to investments and alternative health. The daily paper, nightly news, websites, and social media each compete for our attention and each often insist on a different version of the facts. Inevitably, we have questions: Who is telling the truth? How would we know? How did we get here? What can we do? Beyond Fake News answers these and other queries. (...) It offers a technological and market-based explanation for how our informational environment became so polluted. It shows how purveyors of news often have incentives to mislead us, and how consumers of information often have incentives to be misled. And it chronicles how, as technology improves and the regulatory burdens drop, our information-scape becomes ever more littered with misinformation. Beyond Fake News argues that even when we really want the truth, our minds are built in such a way so as to be incapable of grasping many facts, and blind spots mar our view of the world. But we can do better, both as individuals and as a society. As individuals, we can improve the accuracy of our understanding of the world by knowing who to trust and recognizing our limitations. And as a society, we can take important steps to reduce the quantity and effects of misinformation. (shrink)

Since 2016, there has been an explosion of academic work and journalism that fixes its subject matter using the terms ‘fake news’ and ‘post-truth’. In this paper, I argue that this terminology is not up to scratch, and that academics and journalists ought to completely stop using the terms ‘fake news’ and ‘post-truth’. I set out three arguments for abandonment. First, that ‘fake news’ and ‘post-truth’ do not have stable public meanings, entailing that they are either nonsense, context-sensitive, or contested. (...) Secondly, that these terms are unnecessary, because we already have a rich vocabulary for thinking about epistemic dysfunction. Thirdly, I observe that ‘fake news’ and ‘post-truth’ have propagandistic uses, meaning that using them legitimates anti-democratic propaganda, and runs the risk of smuggling bad ideology into conversations. (shrink)

Environmentalists express concern at the destruction/exploitation of areas of the natural environment because they believe that those areas are of intrinsic value. An emerging response is to argue that natural areas may have their value restored by means of the techniques of environmental engineering. It is then claimed that the concern of environmentalists is irrational, merely emotional or even straightforwardly selfish. This essay argues that there is a dimension of value attaching to the natural environment which cannot be restored no (...) matter how technologically proficient environmental engineers become. The argument involves highlighting and discussing analogies between faking art and faking nature. The pivot of the argument is the claim that genesis is a significant determinant of an area's value. (shrink)

Many of U.S. President Donald Trump’s business interests—and those of his family and close associates—either conflict or could conflict with his position as the country’s top elected official. Despite concerns about the vitality of the journalism industry, these actual or potential conflicts have been reported in great detail across a number of journalism platforms. More concerning, however, are the partisan news organizations on both the right and left that deliberately sow social discord by exciting deeply polarized political tensions among the (...) U.S. populous. Often described as “fake” news, these organizations produce reports that seem designed to create outrage among audiences instead of enlightenment. This paper draws upon social epistemology and information ethics to offer a truth-based ethos for journalism to help overcome this pernicious form of exploitation. (shrink)

The purpose of a study is to critically assess common presupposition, that fake news is a) a threat for civilization as we know it; b) something that appeared only recently or at least that recent examples present a more serious threat for civilization as those from the past. It looks like the fast and global spread of fake news widens the gap between objective reality and that reality asserted by fake news. It is thus accepted especially by so-called liberal media (...) but also a wider intellectual community that we are living in the post-truth era. Such shift is mainly attributed to a strong anti-scientific movement of which one of more important consequence is agnotology that is then understood as one of the major causes for the inefficiency of democracy, post-democracy. (shrink)

Faking Nature explores the arguments surrounding the concept of ecological restoration. This is a crucial process in the modern world and is central to companies' environmental policy; whether areas restored after ecological destruction are less valuable than before the damage took place. Elliot discusses the pros and cons of the argument and examines the role of humans in the natural world. This volume is a timely and provocative analysis of the simultaneous destruction and restoration of the natural world and (...) the ethics related to those processes, in an era of accelerated environmental damage and repair. (shrink)

This study examines the potential of fake news to produce effects on social media engagement as well as the moderating role of education and government approval. We report on a 2x2x2 online experiment conducted in Romania (N=813), in which we manipulated the level of facticity of a news story, its valence, and intention to deceive. Results show that ideologically driven news with a negative valence (rather than fabricated news or other genres, such as satire and parody) have a greater virality (...) potential. However, neither the level of education nor government approval moderate this effect. Additionally, both positive and negative ideologically driven news stories enhance the probability that people will sign a document to support the government (i. e., potential for political engagement on social media). These latter effects are moderated by government approval: Lower levels of government approval lead to less support for the government on social media, as a consequence of fake news exposure. (shrink)

In epistemology, fake-barn thought experiments are often taken to be intuitively clear cases in which a justified true belief does not qualify as knowledge. We report a study designed to determine whether non-philosophers share this intuition. The data suggest that while participants are less inclined to attribute knowledge in fake-barn cases than in unproblematic cases of knowledge, they nonetheless do attribute knowledge to protagonists in fake-barn cases. Moreover, the intuition that fake-barn cases do count as knowledge is negatively correlated with (...) age; older participants are less likely than younger participants to attribute knowledge in fake-barn cases. We also found that increasing the number of defeaters (fakes) does not decrease the inclination to attribute knowledge. (shrink)

The main objective of the present paper is to introduce some features of fake/bogus conferences and some viable approaches to differentiate them from the real ones. These fake/bogus conferences introduce themselves as international conferences, which are multidisciplinary and indexed in major scientific digital libraries. Furthermore, most of the fake/bogus conference holders offer publishing the accepted papers in ISI journals and use other techniques in their advertisement e-mails.

The central thesis of robust virtue epistemology (RVE) is that the difference between knowledge and mere true belief is that knowledge involves success that is attributable to a subject's abilities. An influential objection to this approach is that RVE delivers the wrong verdicts in cases of environmental luck. Critics of RVE argue that the view needs to be supplemented with modal anti-luck condition. This particular criticism rests on a number of mistakes about the nature of ability that I shall try (...) to rectify here. (shrink)

In this paper, we aim to discuss the fake journals and their advertisement and publication techniques. These types of journals mostly start and continue their activities by using the name of some indexed journals and establishing fake websites. The fake journals and publishers, while asking the authors for a significant amount of money for publishing their papers, have no peer-review process, publish the papers without any revision on the fake sites, and put the scientific reputation and prestige of the researchers (...) in jeopardy. In the rest of the paper, we present some viable techniques in order for researchers and students to identify these journals. (shrink)

The term "fake news" ascended rapidly to prominence in 2016 and has become a fixture in academic and public discussions, as well as in political mud-slinging. In the flurry of discussion, the term has been applied so broadly as to threaten to render it meaningless. In an effort to rescue our ability to discuss—and combat—the underlying phenomenon that triggered the present use of the term, some philosophers have tried to characterize it more precisely. A common theme in this nascent philosophical (...) discussion is that contemporary fake news is not a new kind of phenomenon, but just the latest iteration of a broader kind of phenomenon that has played out in different ways across the history of human information-dissemination technologies. While we agree with this, we argue that newer sorts of fake news reveal substantial flaws in earlier understandings of this notion. In particular, we argue that no deceptive intentions are necessary for fake news to arise; rather, fake news arises when stories which were not produced via standard journalistic practice are treated as though they had been. Importantly, this revisionary understanding of fake news allows us to accommodate and understand the way that fake news is plausibly generated and spread in a contemporary setting, as much by non-human actors as by ordinary human beings. (shrink)

Our current understanding of ‘fake news’ is not in good shape. On the one hand, this category seems to be urgently needed for an adequate understanding of the epistemology in the age of the internet. On the other hand, the term has an unstable ordinary meaning and the prevalent accounts which all relate fake news to epistemically bad attitudes of the producer lack theoretical unity, sufficient extensional adequacy, and epistemic fruitfulness. I will therefore suggest an alternative account of fake news (...) that is meant as an explication rather than a traditional conceptual analysis of the term and that understands fake news solely from the consumer’s perspective. I will argue that this new account has the required theoretical unity, that it is epistemically highly fruitful, and that it is still very close to the ordinary usage. I conclude with addressing some of the main objections to this view. (shrink)

The traditional mutual support of scientific progress and social advancement has given way to public reservation. Research is no longer considered worthwhile in general. Parts of the public have come to fear both scientific error and scientific success. This raises the question of how to deal with findings that could have a detrimental impact on society. In a different vein, fake research poses a serious challenge to science in that it could undermine the credibility of scientific accounts. Fake research actively (...) produces ignorance rather than knowledge (agnotology). The question is how such actively misleading approaches are to be identified and separated from usual scientific error. (shrink)

Recently, the term «fake news» has become ubiquitous in political and public discourse and the media. Despite its omnipresence, however, it is anything but clear what fake news is. An adequate and comprehensive definition of fake news is called for. We take steps towards this goal by providing a systematic account of fake news that makes the phenomenon tangible, rehabilitates the use of the term, and helps us to set fake news apart from related phenomena. (You can email us for (...) a penultimate draft of this paper.). (shrink)

_Faking Nature_ explores the arguments surrounding the concept of ecological restoration. This is a crucial process in the modern world and is central to companies' environmental policy; whether areas restored after ecological destruction are less valuable than before the damage took place. Elliot discusses the pros and cons of the argument and examines the role of humans in the natural world. This volume is a timely and provocative analysis of the simultaneous destruction and restoration of the natural world and the (...) ethics related to those processes, in an era of accelerated environmental damage and repair. (shrink)

Philosophers of science have given up on the quest for a silver bullet to put an end to all pseudoscience, as such a neat formal criterion to separate good science from its contenders has proven elusive. In the literature on critical thinking and in some philosophical quarters, however, this search for silver bullets lives on in the taxonomies of fallacies. The attractive idea is to have a handy list of abstract definitions or argumentation schemes, on the basis of which one (...) can identify bad or invalid types of reasoning, abstracting away from the specific content and dialectical context. Such shortcuts for debunking arguments are tempting, but alas, the promise is hardly if ever fulfilled. Different strands of research on the pragmatics of argumentation, probabilistic reasoning and ecological rationality have shown that almost every known type of fallacy is a close neighbor to sound inferences or acceptable moves in a debate. Nonetheless, the kernel idea of a fallacy as an erroneous type of argument is still retained by most authors. We outline a destructive dilemma we refer to as the Fallacy Fork: on the one hand, if fallacies are construed as demonstrably invalid form of reasoning, then they have very limited applicability in real life. On the other hand, if our definitions of fallacies are sophisticated enough to capture real-life complexities, they can no longer be held up as an effective tool for discriminating good and bad forms of reasoning. As we bring our schematic “fallacies” in touch with reality, we seem to lose grip on normative questions. Even approaches that do not rely on argumentation schemes to identify fallacies fail to escape the Fallacy Fork, and run up against their own version of it. (shrink)

Fake news detection involves predicting the likelihood that a particular news article is intentionally deceptive. Arabic FND started to receive more attention in the last decade, and many detection approaches demonstrated some ability to detect fake news on multiple datasets. However, most existing approaches do not consider recent advances in natural language processing, i.e., the use of neural networks and transformers. This paper presents a comprehensive comparative study of neural network and transformer-based language models used for Arabic FND. We examine (...) the use of neural networks and transformer-based language models for Arabic FND and show their performance compared to each other. We also conduct an extensive analysis of the possible reasons for the difference in performance results obtained by different approaches. The results demonstrate that transformer-based models outperform the neural network-based solutions, which led to an increase in the F1 score from 0.83 to 0.95, and it boosted the accuracy by 16% compared to the best in neural network-based solutions. Finally, we highlight the main gaps in Arabic FND research and suggest future research directions. (shrink)

This book is about the intrusive fear that we may not be what we appear to be, or worse, that we may be only what we appear to be and nothing more. It is concerned with the worry of being exposed as frauds in our profession, cads in our love lives, as less than virtuously motivated actors when we are being agreeable, charitable, or decent. Why do we so often mistrust the motives of our own deeds, thinking them fake, though (...) the beneficiary of them gives us full credit? Much of this book deals with that self-tormenting self-consciousness. It is about roles and identity, discussing our engagement in the roles we play, our doubts about our identities amidst this flux of roles, and thus about anxieties of authenticity. (shrink)

Fala-se em fake, mas não se admite que milagres de Cristo ou hagiografias de santos poderiam ser fakes também. As religiões treinaram, no entanto, os políticos no sentido de esperarem que se acredite no que dizem, por mais absurdo que seja. Com que concepção de verdade se tem operado? É possível “operar” com ela, como se coisa fosse, um instrumento? Ou ela nos é, nos abrimos à verdade que em nós assoma e se torna palavra e imagem?

This article makes the case that a deficit or absence of trust in media sources to report on news- worthy items facilitates acceptance of fake news. The article begins by identifying the sort of fake news that is of interest for the purposes of this article. Epistemic cove rage is then explained—in particular, how an individual’s expectations about their epistemic environment can lead them to accepting or rejecting claims. The article explains that when an individual believes that main- stream media (...) report on what is deemed newsworthy, it follows that an individual will have grounds to dismiss a newsworthy claim that has not been reported upon—such as a claim made by fake news. Trust—which has both a believed competence requirement and a believed good- will requirement—is then discussed as part of this explanation. The article concludes with a dis- cussion of the implications of the argument for regulating mainstream media. (shrink)

Fake news is a scourge within modern society, brought about by foreign powers amplifying messages throughout the recently constructed echo chambers of social media and exacerbated by the lack of co...