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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.
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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

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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).

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