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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 26, 2022

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do we need a word other than 'lie' for what I was doing?

I'd distinguish pretty strongly between S-dispositions and lying insofar as the latter is (to at least some degree) an intentional act. We can talk about grey areas here, and lying is a surprisingly complicated state, but in general I think it's part of our concepts of lying and deceit that they require some extra cognitive work and self-awareness compared to telling the truth - e.g. you know that not-P, but you decide to assert that P for some duplicitous motive.

By contrast, S-dispositions as I'm understanding them require less work than regular strict beliefs - you espouse P without ever having seriously subjected P to reflection or scrutiny, but also without any real awareness of doing something epistemically irresponsible.

The vegan case I gave and which you reference might have been misleading in this regard, insofar as it's easy to imagine someone being genuinely deceptive in professing to be a vegan in order to get laid. That's not what I had in mind, though; I was thinking about a slightly naive person who finds themselves swept along with a certain kind of political stance due to interpersonal incentives, and even thinks they believe it at first, but has never actually put in the epistemic leg-work to integrate it with their world-view or figure out if they actually, deep-down endorse it.

I think it's part of our concepts of lying and deceit that they require some extra cognitive work and self-awareness compared to telling the truth

Not that much though. it's, in a sense, 'lying' when someone tells a white lie - plenty of "oh honey you look great tonight"s are plain lies (as opposed to more subtle distinctions), but that doesn't take much effort.

I don't think the separation here of 's-dispositions' as a label that applies to distinct beliefs is useful, even though thinking about how supposed 'beliefs' don't really act like honestly held beliefs in a variety of social situations is useful, because of how fluidly said pseudobeliefs will be part of / relate to other beliefs / purposes / social contexts, and because many very different reasons to "pseudobelieve" will be united under teh same concept. That's more of a general gripe with philosophy/logic as applied to 'thinking' though