I’m not Steven, but I know a handful of people who have no care for the truth and will say whatever they think will make them look good in the short term or give them immediate pleasure. They lie a lot. Some of them are sufficiently sophisticated to try to only tell plausible lies. For them debates are games wherein the goal is to appear victorious, preferably while defending the stance that is high status. When interacting with them, I know ahead of time to disbelieve nearly everything they say. I also know that I should only engage with them in debates/discussions for the purpose of convincing third party listeners.
It is useful to have a term for someone with a casual disregard for the truth. Liar is one such word, but also carries the connotation of accusing them that the specific thing they are saying in the moment is factually incorrect—which isn’t always true with an accusation of bad faith. They’re speaking without regard to the truth, and sometimes the truth aligns with their pleasure, and so they say the truth. They’re not averse to the truth, they just don’t care. They are arguing in bad faith.
They’re bullshitters. “Both in lying and in telling the truth people are guided by their beliefs concerning the way things are. These guide them as they endeavour either to describe the world correctly or to describe it deceitfully. For this reason, telling lies does not tend to unfit a person for telling the truth in the same way that bullshitting tends to. …The bullshitter ignores these demands altogether. He does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.” —Harry G. Frankfurt, On Bullshit
Note that bullshitting is only one subtype of bad faith argument. There are other strategies of bad faith argument that don’t require making untrue statements, such as cherry picking, gish galloping, making intentional logical errors, or being intentionally confusing or distracting.
Oh yes, of course. I was only talking about the people Stephen mentioned, “who have no care for the truth and will say whatever they think will make them look good in the short term or give them immediate pleasure”.
I’m not Steven, but I know a handful of people who have no care for the truth and will say whatever they think will make them look good in the short term or give them immediate pleasure. They lie a lot. Some of them are sufficiently sophisticated to try to only tell plausible lies. For them debates are games wherein the goal is to appear victorious, preferably while defending the stance that is high status. When interacting with them, I know ahead of time to disbelieve nearly everything they say. I also know that I should only engage with them in debates/discussions for the purpose of convincing third party listeners.
It is useful to have a term for someone with a casual disregard for the truth. Liar is one such word, but also carries the connotation of accusing them that the specific thing they are saying in the moment is factually incorrect—which isn’t always true with an accusation of bad faith. They’re speaking without regard to the truth, and sometimes the truth aligns with their pleasure, and so they say the truth. They’re not averse to the truth, they just don’t care. They are arguing in bad faith.
They’re bullshitters.
“Both in lying and in telling the truth people are guided by their beliefs concerning the way things are. These guide them as they endeavour either to describe the world correctly or to describe it deceitfully. For this reason, telling lies does not tend to unfit a person for telling the truth in the same way that bullshitting tends to. …The bullshitter ignores these demands altogether. He does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.”
—Harry G. Frankfurt, On Bullshit
Note that bullshitting is only one subtype of bad faith argument. There are other strategies of bad faith argument that don’t require making untrue statements, such as cherry picking, gish galloping, making intentional logical errors, or being intentionally confusing or distracting.
Oh yes, of course. I was only talking about the people Stephen mentioned, “who have no care for the truth and will say whatever they think will make them look good in the short term or give them immediate pleasure”.