Conduits of confidence and doubt

Abstract

Oreskes and Conway’s (2010) paradigmatic cases for agnotology show how misplaced doubt can be deliberately produced in the minds of one’s audience, even when everything one asserts is strictly true. This phenomenon is well captured by a Gricean framework that places stress on the ability to convey false implicatures via true utterances. This paper uses the Gricean framework to expose the possibility that misleading audience impressions may be predictably generated by false implicatures even when—in contrast to Oreskes and Conway’s central cases—no strategy of deliberate manipulation is in place. This structural aspect of agnotology is illustrated by the controversy over the hormone pregnancy test Primodos, and it brings with it suggestions for how to expose and combat these problems of miscalibrated epistemic attitudes.