Communication is still hard.

Beyond its academic value, this reading had a unique entertainment value akin to watching someone solve a Sudoku puzzle. Shiffrin tackles a phenomena that is obviously bad––government lies––in the context of the current political climate, where it is somehow an insufficient critique to call the presidential assault on free speech what it is. Instead, Shiffrin recharges previously uncontroversial political norms and sidesteps overeager pragmatism to provide a robust argument for how social media companies should respond. 

While I strongly agree with Shiffrin's argument, I'm curious about how Shiffrin would more directly address the administration's abuse of a gray area in communicative norms. In reading Speech Matters, I was concerned that justifications against lying grounded in epistemic necessity may obscure some nuance in how we actually communicate meaning. I think the persistence of that nuance may impede the argument's ability to universally reprimand the nonsense of the current administration. 

Sincere communication aims at conveying our beliefs as accurately as possible. Although in a majority of situations a strict adherence to facts is the most effective way to achieve that end, limits on time, attention, listener capability, and other logistical constraints complicates the picture. In my understanding, the current administration––and its large base of supporters that continue to believe trust the administration despite the known lack of credibility––justifies its lies by arguing that disregarding a strict adherence to facts enables them to better communicate their meaning. JD Vance's guiltless acknowledgement that it was okay for the president to say that Haitian immigrants were eating pets despite knowing it wasn't true was a shockingly transparent assertion of this fact negligent view. His view was that the president's communication was sincere because it revealed his true beliefs about the magnitude of the immigrant problem in a way a strict adherence to facts couldn't. 

It's difficult to give examples of when a strict adherence to facts inhibits the communication of beliefs because they only occur in non-ideal situations. The value of fiction or abstract art to communicate an experience rather than strictly accurate auto-biography or realist drawing could be an example. Professor Hurley insisting that our work has value despite not being able to fully break down what he thinks of our writing due to our bias to focus on negative feedback is another (unless I've been duped). To some extent, I think all simplification fall into this gray area, but we hardly find it necessarily problematic. One could argue that this form of communication is only justifiable when presented as an abstraction from the facts or that it must accompany access to the facts, though I don't think this is sufficient either. Even if Trump were to say that all of his communication was in this abstract sense it would still be problematic. And I don't expect Professor Hurley to make his true thoughts on my writing accessible somewhere. 

I believe it is very difficult to pull-off this kind of justification in a position of political authority due to what I value, but I don't know where the line is that definitively puts the administration's communication outside of the acceptable gray area. I can come up with outcome centered accounts, but can only see these being successful when applied retroactively. 

Sorry to belabor the same point. I find it too distracting to ignore :P

Best,

Aidan