Bald-faced bullshit and authoritarian political speech: Making sense of Johnson and Trump
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Tim Kenyon
Abstract
Donald Trump and Boris Johnson are notoriously uninterested in truthtelling. They also often appear uninterested even in constructing plausible falsehoods. What stands out above all is the brazenness and frequency with which they repeat known falsehoods. In spite of this, they are not always greeted with incredulity. Indeed, Republicans continue to express trust in Donald Trump in remarkable numbers. The only way to properly make sense of what Trump and Johnson are doing, we argue, is to give a greater role to audience relativity - and in some cases, audience participation - in notions like bullshitting and bald-faced lying. In this paper, we develop a new understanding of bullshitting, one that includes bald-faced lying, and recognizes that different communicative acts may be directed at different audiences with a single utterance. In addition, we argue for recognition of the category of bald-faced bullshitting, a particular speciality of both Trump and Johnson, and one especially useful to authoritarian leaders.
Abstract
Donald Trump and Boris Johnson are notoriously uninterested in truthtelling. They also often appear uninterested even in constructing plausible falsehoods. What stands out above all is the brazenness and frequency with which they repeat known falsehoods. In spite of this, they are not always greeted with incredulity. Indeed, Republicans continue to express trust in Donald Trump in remarkable numbers. The only way to properly make sense of what Trump and Johnson are doing, we argue, is to give a greater role to audience relativity - and in some cases, audience participation - in notions like bullshitting and bald-faced lying. In this paper, we develop a new understanding of bullshitting, one that includes bald-faced lying, and recognizes that different communicative acts may be directed at different audiences with a single utterance. In addition, we argue for recognition of the category of bald-faced bullshitting, a particular speciality of both Trump and Johnson, and one especially useful to authoritarian leaders.
Chapters in this book
- Frontmatter I
- Contents VII
- Introduction: On lying and disleading 1
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I Lies and deception: The landscape of falsehood
- Lying, deception, and related concepts: A conceptual map for ethics 15
- The morality of deception 41
- Kant tell an a priori lie 65
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II Lying, deception, and speaker commitment: Empirical evidence
- Is lying morally different from misleading? An empirical investigation 89
- “I was only quoting”: Shifting viewpoint and speaker commitment 113
- Memefying deception and deceptive memefication: Multimodal deception on social media 139
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III Puffery, bluffery, bullshit: How to not quite lie
- Bald-faced bullshit and authoritarian political speech: Making sense of Johnson and Trump 165
- Practice to deceive: A natural history of the legal bluff 195
- Just saying, just kidding: Liability for accountability-avoiding speech in ordinary conversation, politics and law 227
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IV Crossing the perjury threshold: Deceit and falsehood in the courtroom
- Perjury cases and the linguist 261
- Trickery and deceit: How the pragmatics of interrogation leads innocent people to confess – and factfinders to believe their confessions 289
- The context of mistrust: Perjury ascriptions in the courtroom 309
- What counts as a lie in and out of the courtroom? The effect of discourse genre on lie judgments 353
- Lies, deception, and bullshit in law 381
- Index 409
Chapters in this book
- Frontmatter I
- Contents VII
- Introduction: On lying and disleading 1
-
I Lies and deception: The landscape of falsehood
- Lying, deception, and related concepts: A conceptual map for ethics 15
- The morality of deception 41
- Kant tell an a priori lie 65
-
II Lying, deception, and speaker commitment: Empirical evidence
- Is lying morally different from misleading? An empirical investigation 89
- “I was only quoting”: Shifting viewpoint and speaker commitment 113
- Memefying deception and deceptive memefication: Multimodal deception on social media 139
-
III Puffery, bluffery, bullshit: How to not quite lie
- Bald-faced bullshit and authoritarian political speech: Making sense of Johnson and Trump 165
- Practice to deceive: A natural history of the legal bluff 195
- Just saying, just kidding: Liability for accountability-avoiding speech in ordinary conversation, politics and law 227
-
IV Crossing the perjury threshold: Deceit and falsehood in the courtroom
- Perjury cases and the linguist 261
- Trickery and deceit: How the pragmatics of interrogation leads innocent people to confess – and factfinders to believe their confessions 289
- The context of mistrust: Perjury ascriptions in the courtroom 309
- What counts as a lie in and out of the courtroom? The effect of discourse genre on lie judgments 353
- Lies, deception, and bullshit in law 381
- Index 409
