Deceptive Speech in Context: A Social Perspective

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From everyday matters to subjects in specialised fields of knowledge, we are critically dependent on others' words in obtaining information about the world. While this reliance on others' testimonies allows us to vastly expand the horizon of knowledge each of us can access, it also renders us vulnerable to the flow of misinformation that others may pass onto us, either intentionally or unintentionally. This project focuses on the former variety of intentionally caused epistemic ills that target our reliance on testimonies - the broad range of devious speech that deceives, misleads, or eludes individuals and potentially affects society on a larger scale.In this project, I will offer an epistemology of testimony that can account for the possibility of these epistemic ills by looking at them from a structural and holistic point of view hitherto underexplored in the philosophical literature. Applying the resulting theory, I aim to obtain analyses of the mechanisms and effects of various novel forms of deceptive speech that contemporary societies have been increasingly plagued with, such as mis/disinformation on traditional and social media, coded speech in politics, and shilling in online spaces.