[00:00:02.660] - Wesley You're listening to Journal Entries, a podcast about philosophy and cognitive science, where researchers open up about the articles they publish. I'm Wesley Buckwalter. In this episode, Joshua Habgood-Coote talks about his paper Stop Talking about Fake News!, which was published in the journal Inquiry in 2019. Joshua is the vice chancellors fellow at the University of Bristol, where he conducts research in social epistemology, formal pragmatics, and the role of linguistics in philosophy. [00:00:32.480] - Joshua So the key claim of the paper is that we should abandon the phrases fake news and post truth. [00:00:38.870] And I offer three kinds of arguments for that little bit of advice. So the first argument is based on the idea that these phrases do not have stable public meanings, meaning they're not good devices for communicating. The second argument is that they're unnecessary in the light of our kind of already established rich vocabulary for thinking about, yeah, epistemic dysfunction and different kinds of false and problematic information. The third argument is that these terms in our current political environment have pretty bad political effects. They act as a kind of vehicles of propaganda, fake news for authoritarian propaganda and post truce for a kind of centrist or perhaps conservative propaganda. [00:01:22.230] Like a first question that you might have when you're when you hear that the title of the paper is in the imperative mood, it's kind of who put you in charge of language and placing language. So I guess I want to hope that no one's put me in charge of language that seems like a big responsibility and really not trying to give commands to anyone about which words they should use. The kind of spirit to take "stop talking about fake news" in is in the spirit of advice. Right. So it's meant to be understood like "eat your greens" or "take regular exercise". Not like "shoot that man" or "drop on the floor and do 50 press ups". [00:02:02.130] What got me interested in the topic was reading a bunch of philosophy papers where people were either using post truth as a kind of framing device or they were trying to analyze fake news or use that term to do some analysis of our current like epistemic situation. And I got kind of worried reading those papers that it wasn't clear what post truth or fake news really meant. [00:02:24.700] So at the time I was trying to do some blogging and I wrote a quick like 2000 blog post and the kind of activity of writing up that blog post got me more and more worried that really these terms just didn't mean anything at all. Not only that they didn't mean anything, but that they had some really quite worrying political effects at the same time. So I should say, like it wasn't just me. I'm not claiming like like I had a genius insight here. [00:02:53.660] So it turns out there are a bunch of other people at the same time having this kind of worry. And simultaneously people were working on papers like making the same kinds of arguments. So there's really interesting papers by Lorna Finlayson, by Freada Vogelman, Robert Talisse, David Cody, Johan Farquharson, Yannick Schuh and kind of more public facing work by Claire Wardle, which all expressed concerns about either fake news or post truth and kind of advocate some kind of abandonment. [00:03:26.150] So the first kind of reason to abandon fake news and post truth is that these terms don't have stable public meetings. So starting with fake news, we should ask the question, what does fake news really mean? Philosophers of language have kind of pulled apart a bunch of different senses of meaning. There are different ways of making these kinds of distinctions. But here's a kind of overview of different kinds of meanings the terms can have. So they can have descriptive content, which has to do with expressing properties about the world. [00:03:59.230] So the word "snow" might expect the property of being snow or "walks" the property of walking times got to have expressive contents content like the kind of emotionally express I think about saying "ouch" is expressing pain and they can have evaluative content. So terms like "naughty" or "bad" can evaluate the thing they're applied to as bad. When I say that fake news doesn't have a stable public meaning, what I mean is that it doesn't have a stable descriptive content. First warning sign that fake news doesn't have a clear referent or a clear descriptive content is that it's just used by so many people in so many different ways. [00:04:41.000] Two kinds of diversity here. So there's diversity at the current moment. So there are lots of different communities of people who are using the term with different kinds of meanings to refer to different things. And then there's also a bunch of historical differences. So if we look back in history, fake news, it turns out, goes back to 1890 where it was used just to, I think, refer to bad or to false news stories. It got kind of established in the 90s to refer to satire. [00:05:10.640] So like American satire shows that look like news, but were really taken at poking fun at the news were fake news. Then it came to me and something to do with malicious spreading of false content and then something to do with profit motivated news. And then at the moment, it's just really unclear. It's used by lots of different people to mean lots of different things. So the other kind of sociological fact, I think we should kind of be worried given that so many people are using the term to refer to so many different things. [00:05:45.590] One kind fo worry you might have at this point is that I'm just raising a kind of set of concerns about fake news that we have with lots of ordinary terms of English. So famously epistemologists have spent I guess nearly 80 years like really, really trying in a concentrated way to define terms like belief and knows and they haven't succeeded in doing so right. There are these ongoing questions about what kind of thing knowledge or belief is. [00:06:14.950] So I want to be clear that lots of terms of English have these kinds of problems. They're unclear, they're vague, they're open, textured and different kinds of ways. But it feels to me like there's a kind of qualitative difference that terms like knowledge and belief have fringe cases which are unclear. So there's a set of core cases of knowledge, core cases of belief or like clear different options for ways we might use the term. But when we turn to fake news, it's actually really not clear to me even what the core cases are meant to be. [00:06:48.760] So people do come up with lists of like a kind of fake news stories, but none of them are uncontestable. And similarly, whereas like there might be two different ways we could talk about belief, maybe belief refers to dispositions to a certain dispositions to act in certain ways with fake news there are like about eight or nine different ways that we might disambiguate the term. It doesn't have like a couple of clear different senses. There are lots of different senses and they are closely related in a way that makes it extremely confusing when we try and communicate with the term. [00:07:22.720] One thing we might kind of try and do at this point is to look at a dictionary definition. So a bunch of dictionaries in 2016 2017 introduced fake news into their set of words they define. So we might look at those definitions as a way to kind of pin down the term. This is actually kind of interesting. So if we look at the Oxford English Dictionary definition, they say that it's originally US news which conveys or incorporates false, fabricated or deliberately misleading information. [00:07:54.820] So they think it's gonna be false or made up or misleading...those are different things. But they also say that it could be news which is characterized as false, fabricated or misleading or accused of being that. So this seems like actually a really bad definition because it means that as soon as you characterize something as being forced, fabricated or deliberately misleading, it counts as fake news. So it's impossible for people to characterize something as fake news, maybe a group people to characterize it without it, in fact, being fake news. [00:08:30.250] So this definition just seems like it's bad on its own merits. The college dictionary's definition is a bit simpler. So they say that if you describe the information as fake news, you mean that it's false even though it's being reported as news. This raises another kind of interesting question. So what it is to be reported as news. And one of the interesting issues in the background of lots of issues about the definition of fake news is that we don't really have clear definitions of what news is. Right. So is news like referring to a story which is passed around by people and considered interesting at a time? [00:09:13.060] Is it something that comes out of a news organization? It's really not clear. And it might be that some of the issues about the definition about fake news, at least some of them might be ironed out if we had like a clearer definition of news. So at the same time that dictionaries are starting to define fake news, the word is being declared as the word of the year by various dictionaries and other linguistic organizations. And I think the thought of these kind of word of the year is this is some kind of like term which refers to some phenomena which is like zeitgeist-y, or of the spirit of the moment. I think it's interesting that lots of dictionaries were declaring this term their word of the year. Others did it for post truth. But it's also interesting to think about other language that have similar terms in them. So in German, there's a term, lügenpresse or lying press, which has a long history going back to the 19th century and a significant use by the Nazi Party in the 1930s, in the 1940s. [00:10:21.020] And it does get used as an attack word in a similar way to fake news. So it's interesting to kind of notice at the same time, English speaking dictionaries were declaring fake news their word of the year. In Germany, an association of linguistic professionals declared Lügenpresse to be their un-word of the year. That's to say a bad word, a word which we shouldn't try and use to analyze anything at all. [00:10:48.710] So let's turn over to post truth for a second. So the characteristic use of the phrase post truth is in this phrase the post truth era. And this usage was first coined by Steve Tesich to talk about the Iran Contra scandal. And when he introduced this term, it was extremely unclear what he meant. He had some kind of spiritual condition in mind. He didn't have like a really clear definition of the term. [00:11:18.310] So at the inception of the term, it didn't have a clear meaning already. Following on from that, the term has kind of got all kinds of different uses and two kinds of issues to consider here. So one is when the post truth era is supposed to be. And the second is what kind of characteristics of the post true era are. The kind of question of when the post truth era is in focus on where and when it's supposed to start. [00:11:45.560] Different authors writing about post truth. A big. Popular. That's right. There's a lot of popular books with titles post truth or talk about post truth a lot. In those books we find massively different sets of supposed like starting dates for the post through there. So people talk about Trump's claims around his inauguration, about the numbers of people in the crowd, the kind of amounts of false information in the 2016 U.S. election and in the Brexit referendum in the UK. [00:12:20.760] But then people go back a bit further, talk about Karl Rove's comments about the reality based community or even go back to the Iran Contra scandal. So. Even though this term is used a lot, people are not clear about when the era is supposed to start. So there's a kind of thought that something has changed, but no one has a clear historical sense of when it changed. [00:12:41.940] The second set of issues. So what are the characteristics of the post truth era? So we're meant to be after truth in some sense, but what could that mean? So one kind of definition we might have is that the post truth era refers to an era without truth. But that's the kind of pretty obviously not a good thing to refer to because truth still exists like sentences are still true, like proposition's are still true or false. Historical events aren't going to affect that. Maybe it's got more to do with the value of truth. Maybe people aren't valuing truth enough, truth doesn't play a role in public discourse. Or maybe it's not playing enough influence. [00:13:22.630] Some definitions as well refer to like the influence of truth. So they make claims like people are not believing things based on the truth. And it's just like it's really difficult to see how you could come up with any kind of evidence for these massive broad claims about our current political situation. [00:13:41.230] So. There's two problems here. One is that the definitions are just like massively different, shifty, they mean different things. And the other is that there are these big broad brush characterizations of our politics being offered, but without any real evidence. And a kind of thing to hold in your mind here as well is the question of whether there was ever a pre post truth era. So whether there was an era that had like the existence of truth or truth being properly valued. [00:14:14.260] There's a question here for philosophers of language, so how should we treat terms like fake news and post truth, that are used in different ways in different kinds of communities and used in different ways across time? [00:14:27.400] So in the paper I consider three kinds of diagnosis of this kind of term. The first is that they are nonsense. The second context sensitive. And the third that they're contested. So if a term is nonsense, it just doesn't mean anything at all. So when people use the term, they don't express any content and their words are, so to speak, empty. So here I'm tapping into a tradition that goes back through the work of Herman Cappelen to the logical positivists and Carnap, who claimed that lots of terms in metaphysics, especially metaphysics that was associated with the Nazi Party were nonsense, so the people making these kind of claims were uttering empty speech. So fake news and post truth are nonsense then whenever people use the terms, they're not expressing anything at all. They're kind of failing to communicate in any way. [00:15:22.930] The second kind of diagnosis of these terms are context sensitive, that's to say that they have different meanings in different contexts. Just like a word like tall can mean different things if we're talking about basketball players or talking about primary school children, maybe fake news means different things in different contexts. This is still bad because it's often not clear what context we're in and it's not clear which contexts are the people that we're speaking to are in as well. And the third diagnosis is that these terms are contested. So that's to say that when people use terms like fake news and post truth, they're not just trying to say something about the worl, they're trying to say something about how these words should be used. Right. So they're engaged in what philosophers of language and linguists call meta linguistic negotiation, they're negotiating about the meaning of the words. And that's also not good for communication, because really what's happening when people are arguing about whether some story is fake news or not is arguing about how to use the term, not about whether the story is really fake news. So I want to be neutral on which of these diagnosis is correct, but to kind of suggests that there's something bad for communication no matter which one of them is correct. [00:16:35.790] We're not going to be succeeding in communicating with one another if we're using terms that are either nonsense, massively context sensitive, or are severely contested. [00:16:48.060] The second reason for abandoning these terms is that they are unnecessary. So here I was thinking about philosophers who might take on all of these kind of linguistic confusions and say, well, what we really need to do is to kind of reclaim, ameliorate, or improve the meanings of these terms. [00:17:06.630] And what I was trying to push against those people is that there wasn't really much there isn't really a good reason to try and reclaim these terms. And that's because we've already got lots of other terms in our language, which are pretty clearly defined, maybe not perfectly defined, and that can do the kind of descriptive work that's associated with fake news and post truth. So here I'm thinking about like ordinary terms, like false or lie or misleading. Right. [00:17:37.360] But also there might be some terms really useful to bring in from philosophy. So it might be useful to think not only about lies, people saying things that are false, intending to mislead, but also about bullshit. So people who are saying things without regard to the truth, Frankfurtean sense of bullshit. [00:17:52.660] And the idea here is that it's unnecessary to reclaim fake news, to have it mean something, because you've already got a rich vocabulary in ordinary language for thinking about yeah, kinds of false information, kinds of epistemic problems with political content. And it's kind of worth noting here as well that there's a big movement in media studies to move away from talking about fake news, towards talking about what they call misinformation, disinformation, mal information. So like content that's false, that's deliberately shared because it's false and content that's harmful. [00:18:28.900] So I think that kind of help support my argument here. So they're kind of whether they're introducing new terms, they're defined using these ordinary terms of English. And there isn't a role for fake news there. An extra kind of consideration here is that reclamation isn't like a cost neutral exercise. So reclaiming a term is hard work. And that's a lesson that we can draw from the history of like social slur terms or racial slur terms. And this kind of just as a practical question to be asked, like, is it worth reclaiming terms like fake news or post truth if they had these messy meanings, given that it is to be such hard work? [00:19:06.570] And a kind of extra problem I had in the back of my mind here was that trying to reclaim particularly fake news might lead to a bunch of kind of discourse level problems. So I was really concerned that if people were trying to reclaim fake news, they might have different definitions in mind and that the fight over the definition of fake news would kind of devolve into a fight over which problems people thought were important. And and that's kind of it gets quite pessimistic here but you might worry that different groups of academics might propose different definitions of fake news, at least in part because they're interested in getting funding for their own kinds of projects. Right. So there's kind of fight over the subject matter associated with fake news by people who think the different problems are important when really they should be arguing about in a straightforward and clear way, what problems they think are important. [00:19:59.730] And the kind of interesting little anecdote here in Safiya Noble's book, Algorithms of Oppression, which was written before 2016, she talks about a bunch of kinds of false and stereotyped information that comes out through Google search results. So particularly Google search results for race categories. So times like black girls come back with a bunch of false stereotypes, but also a lot of pornographic content. [00:20:26.340] So she's interested in critiquing the kind of politics of this information and false information that's produced by online systems. In her postscript to that book, it was written after 2016. She kind of wryly notes that lots of people were talking about fake news after she'd written most of it. And she was kind of like surprised that they were using this new term. And I guess a little put out because she'd been talking about these kinds of problems for ages. Right. [00:20:54.070] So. She'd been interested in online misinformation, particularly with search results for years and years. But it was only when people started using fake news when public interest started to be focused on it. And a kind of concern I have here is that if fake news gets defined in a kind of narrow set of ways, it's going to leave some people out. And I'm concerned that particularly people who are interested in epistemology, but also in critical race theory and feminism are going to get left out of that tent. [00:21:24.180] So they're not going to be considered as like studying like fake news. That's really a problem that computer scientists or psychologists study. [00:21:34.310] So the third kind of reason that I think we have for abandoning fake news and post truth is that the terms are associated with and can in lots of cases be vehicles for bad propaganda. [00:21:47.310] A little bit of ground clearing work to start off here. So we need to get clear on what I mean by propaganda and what I mean by ideology. So I have in mind a very broad definition of propaganda where it's any kind of contribution to public discourse which aims to manipulate people with some political aim. So these might be kind of explicitly political messaging, so like messaging to vote for someone involving different kinds of manipulation. Some might be advertising. We might think that advertising involves a political aim, capitalism, and it manipulates people by playing on their emotions within that very broad definition of propaganda, I want to focus on the specific kind, which is introduced by Jason Stanley in his book How Propaganda Works, which is called undermining propaganda. So the notion of undermining propaganda is super interesting on its own terms. It picks out a really interesting kind of mechanism by which propaganda works. So undermining propaganda is a kind of speech which appeals to some kind of ideal while at the same time working to undermine the realization of that ideal. So the kind of clearest examples which Stanley has are climate conspiracy theories which are interested in scientific value. So interested in like questioning scientific orthodoxy, the scientific method, not taking claims from authority too seriously. So these are all real values of science. But although climate conspiracy theories appeal to those ideals, they actually function to undermine their realization so they're blocking up scientific progress by making scientists have to engage in the project of debunking all of these conspiracy theories and they're confusing the public in general. So although they're appealing to legitimate values, they work to undermine them. [00:23:44.040] And this kind of propaganda is particularly interesting because it's particularly pernicious kind of propaganda. Right. You need to have done some work to unpack this mechanism before you can understand what's really going on in these kinds of cases. [00:23:59.060] In the paper, I make the argument that fake news at least in an important set of cases functions as a kind of undermining propaganda. So two parts of that claim that it appeals to a set of values and works to undermine them. So I think when we use when lots of people use fake news appeals to kind of a set of epistemic ideals which are important to democratic society. So ideals about the value of speech, free speech, the value of truth to democracy and the importance of a well-functioning media. [00:24:30.580] You want to call out claims that are false and that's part of a well-functioning democracy. But the effects of the use of fake news are to undermine the realization of those very values. Right. [00:24:42.250] So we're appealing to like an open press, to free speech to the public, having well-informed and true opinions. But the effects of using fake news are to undermine the realization of those ideals. Right. So we're undermining a free press, undermining freedom of speech and making people less well informed. So two kinds of examples of fake news playing this kind of pernicious role. So first kind of example of this pernicious effect of fake news is it's used to motivate censorship laws. [00:25:17.080] There are at this point, actually too many examples to count of different countries coming in with so-called like fake news or misinformation laws which say, look, truth is really important. We want to crack down on people sharing false or fake news claims. And the effects of those laws is that the government gains the power to censor whoever they want. And the kind of arguments that appeals to legitimate values of democracy. Right. So. The government's suddenly get this right to massively clamp down and censor both on social media and in the news more generally. [00:25:57.220] So I'm really worried about these kinds of censorship laws. I think they're a bad thing. I think that anti-democratic and that when fake news is used to motivate them, it's playing this role of being undermining propaganda. Right. We've got legitimate values to do with truth, but the effects of the laws is to undermine truth. [00:26:14.880] A second kind of example where we get this undermining effect is in think of the kind of broadly right wing or authoritarian anti-media discourse. So what happens in the US when authoritarians in the right wing use fake news is it is used as a way of attacking a particular news source. So what we're really used to hearing Trump talk about the fake news media about like if you look through his tweets, there's all of these examples of like talking about fake news, CNN, often more often than not, in full caps to express emphasis. [00:26:52.920] And what he's doing when he says fake news is issuing an order saying don't believe this new source in the future. He's trying to slur that new sources to say it's untrustworthy, corrupt, and not worth taking seriously. And he's like signalling a set of other set of sources to look looked to for your news. All right. Don't go to the so-called mainstream media. Go to alternative news sites. Two things to say about this. So first is that this kind of speech is replacing kind of open and clear discussion about who to believe, which news sources to trust with kind of hidden commands about who to trust. [00:27:34.390] That seems like it's problematic from the point of view of democracy, because hidden commands aren't the kind of things that we should want in a well-functioning democratic community. But also the news sources that Trump is pushing people towards are sharing a bunch of false and problematic politically bad stories which are in large part propaganda. So if people move over these alternative news sites, they're going to believe more false things [00:28:04.480] I think the phrase post truth also has this like propagandistic function, and what happens here is that post truth is used as a kind of like way of signalling what you might think of as like a return to norms narrative. So. The idea is that we had some crisis event, some huge epistemic crisis. We've entered into some situation where things are bad, where our norms aren't being met, our epistemic norms aren't being met. People aren't valuing truth. People aren't double checking their sources, and aren't trusting who they ought to trust. [00:28:37.810] And the kind of return part of the narrative is that the solution to having entered this bad situation is to roll that kind of clock back to a former era, the pre post truth era where everything was fine. [00:28:49.810] So the thought is like things aren't what they used to be and we should move like our epistemic institutions or maybe move people back to how they were behaving in the past. Now. There's a bunch of issues with this kind of narrative. One issue is that it seems to kind of move the blame from having bad institutions to individuals not valuing truth enough. So kind of like does a weird kind of transformation of a structural problem into an individual problem. But I think it's also just false that there was ever like a pre post truth era. [00:29:22.270] Right. We've had widespread epistemic problems like for as long as there have been democracies. Right. This is an ongoing issue and it's a deeply political move and a problematic move to say that there was some kind of like golden era in the past where things were epistemically speaking, fine. And everyone believes the truth, like there were big problems, particularly for minority groups in kind of what you might think of like traditional news media in whatever the golden era is, the 1940s or the 1960s. [00:29:58.560] Kind of interesting question here is why so many academics and philosophers got caught up in using a set of terms that have a set of actually quite serious problems. So I think that two things were going on here. So one thing is that philosophers were quite rightly interested in engaging with public discourse, doing public philosophy, and they took up terms that they were seeing being used in public discourse, perhaps like a little bit uncritically. And they needed to be like a kind of extra step of thinking about what was going on with the politics of those terms. [00:30:32.850] And another thing that was kind of happening perhaps in academia more broadly was that people felt like 2000, the kind of events of 2016, the EU referendum vote and the election of Donald Trump were this kind of like rupture event where all of our narratives, for thinking about the progress of democracy and the epistemic life of democracy broke that broke down. And people started thinking that this was like a massive crisis, a kind of crisis of knowledge or a crisis of the role of truth in democracy. [00:31:04.560] And although I kind of think it's understandable to try and want narratives for thinking about these kind of surprising events, the crisis narrative isn't the right one to pull on. If we think about democracies like historically, there have been examples of like widespread falsehoods spread by news media, spread by politicians, spread by public servants as long as there have been democracies. So there's the crisis narrative has like how hides up the fact that democracy historically has always been in a state of epistemic crisis. [00:31:38.050] Since I'm recording this, right, I'm recording this from home under lockdown because of the coronavirus and like we're collectively in a situation where there's a huge amount of false information floating around the Internet and newspapers about like potential cures for coronavirus, like different things to be worried about transmission rates. And then this kind of situation, you might think that it's actually really helpful to have a term which we can use as a kind of shorthand to say, like, don't believe this person, like this is a bad source or like this is like a bad story. Right? You get some false message through your Whatsapp feed like you can respond back saying like, that's fake news. So the kind of thought here is that even though fake news might be kind of like a weapon word, it might actually have some useful uses as a weapon. [00:32:33.840] So I think I've got two kinds of thoughts about that kind of objection. So the first is that actually there are a bunch of other words we can use which aren't fake news as ways of indicating like this is really bad, like this is false. Don't believe the source. So you look at scientists who are involved in debunking coronavirus misinformation. They tend to use misinformation rather than fake news. And that seems to do the same thing. You could just say like that's false. [00:32:59.590] Like that's false and unsupported. Like put an exclamation mark after it. And even if it's true that fake news can be like a positive weapon in the hands of like someone who's got a good view of what like is plausible, what's implausible. We need to think about the cost benefit analysis. Right. So are the positive uses of fake news to debunk false stories, is the effects of those better than the negative effects of people calling true stories fake news, or politicians getting this hand that they can use to tar the media? [00:33:33.630] So my sense is, even though there are potentially positive uses of fake news overall, we should be trying to move towards a position where we don't use the term what we're trying to abandon. But one thing I stay here is I don't think like we should start talking about online misinformation and the problems that we face. Like online and the news media. It's not that like what people are trying to get out with fake news isn't real. It's just there are better tools for thinking about the problems we face. [00:33:57.030] And there are so many different problems we're facing. Right. So like people sharing things without like looking at the evidence, things that aren't true or things they don't know, like bad systems, like bad incentive structures, there are lots of different problems. But we need, like a new set of, maybe if we need new terms then like lots of new terms which are all kind of specialised for different kinds of problems. I'd love it people were like here's 14 different new things but like, none of them has any connection to fake news. Like, that'd be good. [00:34:31.030] - Wesley That's it for today's episode. Visit our web site at Journal entries dot Fireside dot fm. for more information about Joshua Habgood-Coote, his work, and some of the resources mentioned in this episode. Special thanks to two cheers for creating our theme music and Christopher McDonald for sound engineering.