New Books In Language

The implied answer to the titular question of All Bullshit and Lies? (Oxford University Press 2020) is no, it’s not. In this book, subtitled Insincerity, Irresponsibility, and the Judgment of Untruthfulness, Chris Heffer argues that to analyze untruthfulness, we need a framework which goes beyond these two kinds of speech acts, bullshitting and lying. With his TRUST framework (Trust-related Untruthfulness in Situated Text), Heffer analyzes untruthfulness which includes irresponsible attitudes towards truth, like dogma and distortion, as well as manipulations of the putatively true, like withholding information or misleading. He considers not only epistemic responsibility but moral culpability, taking up real-world cases such as presidential tweets and sloganeering. The book draws on work in philosophy of language, linguistics, and epistemology, along with discourse analysis, psychology, and sociology to provide a flexible framework which can help cut through increasing epistemic partisanship, believing for th