Research Group
in Analytic Philosophy

Abstract

Theories of sincerity and insincerity have generally focused on one-on-one conversations.  Interestingly, even the most sophisticated extant theories cannot handle cases involving speakers who are talking to larger audiences and who have different communicative attitudes towards different members of that audience.  I make the obvious moves to fix these theories before introducing a more serious dilemma: either we need to re-assess the degree to which speakers can control who it is they are talking to, something which presumably determines the scope of the second-person pronoun 'you', or else we are going to be unable to explain why politicians and other public figures cannot be sincere when they knowingly say something bound to mislead to a large portion of their actual audience, simply be not intending to address those people.  I suggest that a proper understanding of sincerity may, in fact, require us to appreciate the sorts of specifically linguistic duties that we take on in virtue of inhabiting certain public roles.  These duties will, in turn, constrain the very things that we are capable of meaning with our words..