Mind's Eye Deception

This from an academic article sent to me on 'bullshit attacks'.

Walter Carnielli
We want to argue that falling into a specific deceptive reasoning
which
we call bullshit attack is not anything irrational from our side, but
rather a
rational response from an opponent maneuver, and that the entire
episode can
bee seen as a game, where logic and a certain principle of rational
discussion
play essential roles. Indeed, an opponent may act coercively into our
reasoning
process by using irrelevant facts or assertions, and by telling half
truths in such
a way that we feel forced to "complete" the story in a way that
interest the
opponent, perhaps contrary to our own interests.
Even to define what is "to deceive" is not easy. The act of deceiving
would
have to be intentional, and to involve causing a belief - but what
about acting
as to prevent a false belief to be revised by the other person? And to
act as to
make the other person to cease to have a true belief, or to prevent
the person
from acquiring a certain true belief? Of course one can deceive by
gestures, by
irony and also by just making questions. So there seems to be no
universally
accepted definition of "deceiving" yet; we assume currently a
definition stated
in [17]:
To deceive = to intentionally cause another person to have or
continue
to have a false belief that is truly believed to be false by the
person
intentionally causing the false belief by bringing about evidence on
the basis of which the other person has or continues to have that
false
belief.

Summary. This paper intends to open a discussion on how certain
dangerous kinds
of deceptive reasoning can be defined, in which way it is achieved in
a discussion,
and which would be the strategies for defense against such deceptive
attacks on the
light of some principles accepted as fundamental for rationality and
logic.

Last lines (after much on Tarski and Godel) - Starting from the
understanding that what I am proposing here is not to use methods of
formal or informal logic to analyze fallacies, but to pay due
attention to principles that also affect logic, discerning the reasons
why we
succumb under a bullshit attack may help us to understand why we
commit
other illusions of reasoning.

Anyone interested can get the full paper from me by email.

On a Theoretical Analysis of Deceiving: How
to Resist a Bullshit Attack
Walter Carnielli
GTAL/CLE and Department of Philosophy–IFCH, State University of
Campinas,
walter.carnielli@cle.unicamp.br

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