The trouble with being sincere

Canadian Journal of Philosophy 41 (2):215-234 (2011)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

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 ..

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 90,616

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Similar books and articles

The trouble with Harrison's 'the trouble with Tarski'.Daniel R. Boisvert - 1999 - Philosophical Quarterly 49 (196):376-383.
An Argument against Causal Theories of Mental Content.Todd Buras - 2009 - American Philosophical Quarterly 46 (2):117-129.
The Kantian good will and the confucian sincere will.A. T. Nuyen - 2011 - Journal of Chinese Philosophy 38 (4):526-537.
The Proof of the Sincere.Hajj Muhammad Legenhausen - 2005 - Journal of Islamic Philosophy 1 (1):44-61.
Sincere Apology Without Moral Responsibility.Bruce N. Waller - 2007 - Social Theory and Practice 33 (3):441-465.
Gender trouble at Abu Ghraib?Timothy Kaufman-Osborn - 2008 - In Terrell Carver & Samuel Allen Chambers (eds.), Judith Butler's Precarious Politics: Critical Encounters. Routledge.
Was Descartes sincere in his appeal to the natural light?Louis E. Loeb - 1988 - Journal of the History of Philosophy 26 (3):377-406.
Standards, Advice, and Practical Reason.Chrisoula Andreou - 2006 - Journal of Moral Philosophy 3 (1):57-67.
Sophisticated Voting Under the Sequential Voting by Veto.Fany Yuval - 2002 - Theory and Decision 53 (4):343-369.

Analytics

Added to PP
2011-04-29

Downloads
245 (#75,588)

6 months
8 (#158,054)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Author Profiles

Guy Kahane
Oxford University
Timothy Chan
Oxford University (DPhil)

Citations of this work

Wondering on and with Purpose.Daniel Drucker - 2022 - Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Mind 2:58-84.
Lying and Certainty.Neri Marsili - 2018 - In Jörg Meibauer (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Lying. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford Handbooks. pp. 170-182.
Authentic Speech and Insincerity.Elmar Unnsteinsson - 2023 - Journal of Philosophy 120 (10):550-576.
Insincerity.Andreas Stokke - 2012 - Noûs 48 (3):496-520.

View all 12 citations / Add more citations

References found in this work

Unprincipled virtue: an inquiry into moral agency.Nomy Arpaly - 2003 - New York: Oxford University Press.
Studies in the Way of Words.Paul Grice - 1989 - Philosophy 65 (251):111-113.
On Bullshit.Harry G. Frankfurt - 1986 - Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Intention.P. L. Heath - 1960 - Philosophical Quarterly 10 (40):281.

View all 30 references / Add more references