MLAG RESEARCH SEMINAR 2017-2018

INSINCERITY FOR FRAGMENTED MINDS

Elmar Unnsteinsson (Pós-doutorando, University College Dublin)

9 de abril 2018 (segunda-feira)

15h30 | Sala de Reuniões 2

Entrada livre

Resumo: A popular and intuitive idea about the nature of insincerity is that it consist in acts of communicating something that does not correspond to the speaker's actual attitudes. But what type of mental attitude is involved here? And what happens to this theory when we assume that humans are often self-deceived about their own attitudes and that their minds might be fragmented, their contents being largely opaque? Andreas Stokke (2014) has recently argued that insincerity, even in cases of self-deception, must be determined by the speaker's conscious attitudes at the time of utterance. My goal in this talk is to present two arguments against this view and argue that, roughly, a speaker's utterance is insincere if and only if what is intentionally communicated fails to correspond to the speaker's actual attitudes, which may very well be nonconscious. Having a conscious intention to be insincere is neither necessary nor sufficient for insincerity. To many, this is a surprising result, but the arguments do point in this direction. The first argument shows that nonconscious propositional attitudes determine various kinds of communicative success and I suggest that this result ought to be generalized to cover whatever mental state determines insincerity. The second argument proposes an identification between some kinds of self-talk and other-directed speech, and shows that when the former is insincere (or self-deceptive) it is nonconsciously insincere. It should follow that other-directed insincerity can or prefers to be nonconscious. Humans have badly designed lie detectors, even when they are directed at the self.

Imagem: René Bertholo, S/Título (1968). Museu Calouste Gulbenkian

Programa MLAG Research Seminars: https://ifilosofia.up.pt/activities/mlag-research-seminar-2017-2018

Organização:
Research Group Mind Language and Action Group (MLAG)
MLAG Seminars 2017-2018 (Sofia Miguens, Luís Veríssimo, Diana Couto, José Pedro Correia)

Instituto de Filosofia da Universidade do Porto - FIL/00502
Financiamento: FCT