In this paper I offer a philosophical analysis of the act of ‘liking’ a post on social media. First, I consider what it means to ‘like’ something. I argue that ‘liking’ is best understood as a phatic gesture; it signals uptake and anoints the poster’s positive face. Next, I consider how best to theorise the power that comes with amassing many ‘likes’. I suggest that ‘like’ tallies alongside posts institute and record a form of digital social capital. Finally, I consider (...) whether ‘likes’ have ultimately improved online discourse. I argue that while the ‘liking’ function itself is relatively innocuous, public ‘like’ tallies introduce a corrosive motivation to online communication. By making the prospect of increased social capital perpetually salient to us, they encourage us to prioritise high levels of engagement over meaningful engagement. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In Habgood-Coote : 1033–1065) I argued that we should abandon ‘fake news’ and ‘post-truth’, on the grounds that these terms do not have stable public meanings, are unnecessary, and function as vehicles for propaganda. Jessica Pepp, Eliot Michaelson, and Rachel Sterken and Étienne Brown : 144–154) have raised worries about my case for abandonment, recommending that we continue using ‘fake news’. In this paper, I respond to these worries. I distinguish more clearly between theoretical and political reasons for abandoning (...) a term, assemble more evidence that ‘fake news’ is a nonsense term, and respond to the worries raised by Pepp, Michaelson and Sterken, and Brown. I close by considering the prospects for anti-fascist and anti-authoritarian conceptual engineering. (shrink)

We spend a good deal of time thinking about advising, but philosophical discussions of advising have been scattered and somewhat disconnected. The most focused discussion has come from philosophers of language interested in whether advising is a kind of assertive or directive speech act. This paper argues that the ordinary category of advising is much more heterogenous than has been appreciated: it is possible to advising by asserting relevant facts, by issuing directives, and by asking questions and other kinds of (...) adviceless advising. The heterogeneity of advising makes speech act-theoretic accounts of advising look like accounts of special cases, and motivates us to look elsewhere for an account of what advising is. Instead, I suggest that we think about advising as a kind of joint practical thinking--collaborative deliberation--, which answers to our need to pool various kinds of deliberative resources. (shrink)

People care very much about being listened to. In everyday talk, we make moral-sounding judgements of people as listeners: praising a doctor who listens well even if she does not have a ready solution, or blaming a boss who does not listen even if the employee manages to get her situation addressed. In this sense, listening is a normative behaviour: that is, we ought to be good listeners. Whilst several disciplines have addressed the normative importance of interpersonal listening—particularly in sociology, (...) psychology, media and culture studies—analytic philosophy does not have a framework for dealing with listening as a normative interpersonal behaviour. Listening usually gets reduced mere speech-parsing, or into a matter of belief and trust in the testimony of credible knowers. My preliminary task is to analyse why this reductive view is taken for granted in the discipline; to diagnose the problem behind the reduction and propose a more useful alternative approach. The central task of my work is to give an account of listening which captures its distinctively normative quality as an interpersonal way of relating to someone: one listens not because the speaker is an epistemic expert, but because the speaker is a person, worthy of recognition and care. I created a framework which accomplishes this by deploying the conceptual resources of conversation sociology and psycholinguistics, in counterpoint to the standing philosophical work on the ethics and politics of speech and silencing, to create a practical ethics of listening to people. (shrink)