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Open for Debate

Poisonous Words: Arrogance, Bullshit and Accusations of Lying in Public Discourse

Posted on 23 April 2018 by Chris Heffer

As is common with international incidents today, the Skripal case, in which a Russian double agent and his daughter were poisoned with a nerve agent in Salisbury, England, has generated an abundance of fake news, conspiracy theories, deceptions, misleading, bullshit and lying. There have been many accusations of lying and one or two of these
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Open for Debate

TRUST and Trump: investigating sincerity and accuracy in discourse

Posted on 9 April 2018 by Daisy Sax

When exploring discursive untruthfulness, modern American politics is an obvious example. Donald Trump’s presidency has been continuously criticised for his use of falsity, with the aim of promoting his own biased views. However, untruthfulness is irrefutably underpinned by the notion of ‘lying’, an act that is near impossible to identify: in order to lie, the
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Reflections on Transcribing Multimodal Texts

Posted on 26 March 2018 by Tom Martin

Since the election of Donald Trump in 2017 the media has often seemed to be in a continual state of shock at the brusque manner of the forty-fifth president’s speech. During the summer of 2017 I conducted a research project into transcription methods for multimodal discourse, contributing to the Changing Attitudes in Public Discourse study.
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Intellectual Humility and Conviction

Posted on 12 March 2018 by Duncan Pritchard

Here is a puzzle. On the one hand, we laud people in public life for their conviction, for sticking to their principles come what may. Indeed, we take to be crucial to someone’s authenticity. On the other hand, however, don’t we also think that it is important that those in public life are intellectually humble
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