Chris Heffer is Reader in Linguistics in the School of English, Communication, and Philosophy at Cardiff University. He is the author of The Language of Jury Trial (2005) and editor of Legal-Lay Communication: Textual Travels in the Law (OUP 2013).

• Acknowledgments


• Preface: On Epistemic Partisanship and Trust


• INTRODUCTION


• PART 1: THEORETICAL UNDERPINNINGS


• 1 Trust, Co-operation and Insincerity


• 2 Bullshit, Inquiry and Irresponsibility


• PART 2: THE TRUST FRAMEWORK


• 3 Claims of and Evidence for Untruthfulness


• 4 Justified Untruthfulness


• 5 Insincere Discourse Strategies


• 6 Epistemically Irresponsible Discourse


• 7 Culpability and Breach of Trust


• PART 3: CASE STUDIES


• 8 Discourse and Democracy: The TRUST Heuristic and Sample Analyses


• 9 Poisoning and Partisanship: An Analysis of the Salisbury Nerve Agent Attack


• CONCLUSION


• References.

Drawing on linguistic pragmatics, philosophy, psychology and law, All Bullshit and Lies? develops a comprehensive framework for analyzing not just the deliberate insincerity of lying, misleading, and withholding, but also pathological forms of untruthfulness such as dogma, distortion, and bullshit, deriving from an irresponsible approach to knowledge.