I wonder if there’s something interesting in epistemic cognition and the ways people mislead/lie (along the same lines as I wonder about how people deal with the “when no answer is answer enough” issue). Misleading, lying, bullshitting, the specific ways in which people do these things and to whom, the facts (or, commissions of flat lies/inaccuracies of them), omissions, misdirections, and value claims made, etc. Hm…very preliminary idea brought on by [a recent discussion of Nadine Dorries]1 (think appalling MP caught doing something which – by her own words – only a very stupid MP would do). That article ends: “As the Princeton philosophy professor Harry G Frankfurt observed in his classic monograph ‘On Bullshit’. It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction. A person who lies is thereby responding to the truth, and he is to that extent respectful of it. When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he considers his statements to be false. For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose. For me, that describes Dorries perfectly”