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Summary

Research on propaganda as a political form of mass communication started in the 20th century. In recent years, philosophy has started to pay increasing attention to studying its nature, mechanisms and effects. The current predominant sense of the word in English refers to political propaganda, and it has a negative connotation. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, for instance, propaganda is “the systematic dissemination of information, esp. in a biased or misleading way, in order to promote a political cause or point of view.” (OED). Paradigm examples of propaganda include Nazi calls for the extermination of Jewish people from as early as 1933, the messaging of the Bolshevik revolution, anti-communist campaigns in Indonesia prior to the 1960s mass killings, or the discourse in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda in the 1990s. Propaganda in the sense illustrated by these cases involves intent, exploits mass media, and can influence entire populations to engage in acts of mass violence. It is especially consequential and hence worth close study. However, not all paradigmatic instances of propaganda are associated with mass violence. 

Philosophers have been interested in the nature,  language and epistemology of propaganda, as well as its weighty moral and political dimensions. Early analyses of propaganda can be grouped in three categories: (1) As an attempt by individuals or groups to convey a message deliberately designed to influence the opinions and actions of other individuals or groups towards a certain end; (2) As an attempt to influence public opinion by conveying falsehoods; (3) As an attempt to persuade the public by arousing irrational emotions.

Each analysis faces problems. There are virtuous forms of communication that aim at legitimately persuading; there are forms of propaganda that rely on cherry-picking truthful information, rather than on conveying falsehoods; there are forms of propaganda that do not arouse irrational emotions.

Despite this, many authors seem to agree that propaganda is epistemically defective. However, since the 2010s, several philosophers have advanced a revision of the concept of propaganda, and suggested that it is not a necessarily negative form of communication. The debate about the justification for this revisionary project and the defectiveness of propaganda is ongoing. Similarly ongoing is the delineation of the differences between propaganda and related phenomena, such as disinformation, advertising, fake news, and political rhetoric.

Key works Among early work on propaganda, see  for instance Propaganda Institute for 1938, Klemperer 1957Arendt 1951, Lippmann 1925.  For criticism of propaganda as an appeal to irrational emotions, see Russell 1956 or Oreskes & Conway 2010.  For criticism of the idea that propaganda involves the communication of falsehoods, see Walton 1996.  The idea that propaganda is somehow epistemically defective has been defended in different forms by, e.g., Herman & Chomsky 1988, Marlin 2013, Tuttle Ross 2002. Recent revisionary approaches that try to rehabilitate some propaganda as a neutral or even positive phenomenon include, among others, Stanley 2015, Dutilh Novaes 2018, Ross 2013.  On the ongoing debate and defense of the defectiveness of propaganda, see for instance Bonard et al 2024, Godber & Origgi 2023.
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  1. On an Alleged Case of Propaganda: Reply to McKinnon.Sophie R. Allen, Elizabeth Finneron-Burns, Mary Leng, Holly Lawford-Smith, Jane Clare Jones, Rebecca Reilly-Cooper & R. J. Simpson - manuscript
    In her recent paper ‘The Epistemology of Propaganda’ Rachel McKinnon discusses what she refers to as ‘TERF propaganda’. We take issue with three points in her paper. The first is her rejection of the claim that ‘TERF’ is a misogynistic slur. The second is the examples she presents as commitments of so-called ‘TERFs’, in order to establish that radical (and gender critical) feminists rely on a flawed ideology. The third is her claim that standpoint epistemology can be used to establish (...)
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  2. The classics as propaganda in modern italy.Edward F. D'Arms - forthcoming - Social Research: An International Quarterly.
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  3. The Harms of the Internalized Oppression Worry.Nicole Dular & Madeline Ward - forthcoming - Journal of Social Philosophy.
    In this paper, we locate a general rhetorical strategy employed in theoretical discourse wherein philosophers argue from the mere existence of internalized oppression to some kind of epistemic, moral, political, or cognitive deficiency of oppressed people. We argue that this strategy has harmful consequences for oppressed people, breaking down our analysis in terms of individual and structural harms within both epistemic and moral domains. These harms include attempting to undermine the self-trust of oppressed people, reinforcing unjust epistemic power hierarchies, undermining (...)
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  4. Stanley on Ideology, or How to De-Moralise Democracy.Rossi Enzo - forthcoming - Global Discourse.
    In *How Propaganda Works* Jason Stanley argues that democratic societies require substantial material equality because inequality causes ideologically flawed belief, which, in turn, make demagogic propaganda more effective. And that is problematic for the quality of democracy. In this brief paper I unpack that argument, in order to make two points: (a) the non-moral argument for equality is promising, but weakened by its reliance on a heavily moralised conception of democracy; (b) that problem may be remedied by whole-heartedly embracing a (...)
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  5. Goebbels'conception of propaganda.Hans Herma - forthcoming - Social Research: An International Quarterly.
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  6. German propaganda instructions of 1933.Ernst Kris - forthcoming - Social Research: An International Quarterly.
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  7. United States Propaganda Abroad: Notes on the USIS in Italy.J. A. Raffaele - forthcoming - Social Research: An International Quarterly.
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  8. Nazi Propaganda and its Decline.Hans Speier - forthcoming - Social Research: An International Quarterly.
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  9. On propaganda.Hans Speier - forthcoming - Social Research: An International Quarterly.
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  10. Resistance to Position Change, Motivated Reasoning, and Polarization.Matthew L. Stanley, Paul Henne, Brenda Yang & Felipe De Brigard - forthcoming - Political Behavior.
    People seem more divided than ever before over social and political issues, entrenched in their existing beliefs and unwilling to change them. Empirical research on mechanisms driving this resistance to belief change has focused on a limited set of well-known, charged, contentious issues and has not accounted for deliberation over reasons and arguments in belief formation prior to experimental sessions. With a large, heterogeneous sample (N = 3,001), we attempt to overcome these existing problems, and we investigate the causes and (...)
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  11. La propaganda como imagen de perpetrador. Escorzos de la Guerra de Malvinas en 1982, de Lucas Gallo.Natalia Taccetta & Mariano Veliz - forthcoming - Thémata Revista de Filosofía.
    Este artículo explora los modos en que las imágenes de perpetradores pueden encarnarse en las maquinarias propagandísticas. En este sentido, analiza parte del material de archivo de la televisión oficial argentina durante la Guerra de las Islas Malvinas que aparece en el film documental 1982 (Lucas Gallo, 2020), a fin de elaborar una revisión no sólo de la imbricación de las imágenes con las políticas de exterminio, sino para discutir la concepción del archivo como ficción y como instrumento de la (...)
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  12. How Propaganda Works By Jason Stanley. [REVIEW]Jonathan Wolff - forthcoming - Analysis:anw046.
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  13. Data Figleaves: Statistics and their Power to Conceal Racism.Felix Bräuer - 2025 - Open for Debate.
  14. Propaganda Model in Slovak Media Space: A Case Study.Martin Karas & Tomáš Imrich Profant - 2025 - Human Affairs 35 (1):36-60.
    This article reports results of an empirical study of Slovak media coverage of international affairs. The goal of the article is to determine whether the outputs of selected Slovak media correspond to the expectations of the Propaganda Model. In order to accomplish this goal, a content analysis of coverage of two cases of international conflict was performed and two hypotheses were evaluated. The hypotheses amount to an expectation that there will be a quantitative and qualitative difference in the way that (...)
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  15. Hacking Reality: Propaganda and Epistemology in Online Environments.Eric D. Berg - 2024 - Dissertation, University of Connecticut
    This dissertation presents a theory of online propaganda and radicalization which highlights the interaction between communication, epistemology, and technology. The central focus is providing an analysis of online media communications, content posted on social media platforms and transmitted by automated recommendation systems, which better explains how propaganda and radicalization have adapted so well to this technological environment. First, propaganda is interpreted as a unique approach to communication which manipulates the expectations an audience has of successful communications, and not simply as (...)
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  16. AI and Democratic Equality: How Surveillance Capitalism and Computational Propaganda Threaten Democracy.Ashton Black - 2024 - In Bernhard Steffen (ed.), Bridging the Gap Between AI and Reality. Springer Nature. pp. 333-347.
    In this paper, I argue that surveillance capitalism and computational propaganda can undermine democratic equality. First, I argue that two types of resources are relevant for democratic equality: 1) free time, which entails time that is free from systemic surveillance, and 2) epistemic resources. In order for everyone in a democratic system to be equally capable of full political participation, it’s a minimum requirement that these two resources are distributed fairly. But AI that’s used for surveillance capitalism can undermine the (...)
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  17. The Defectiveness of Propaganda.Constant Bonard, Filippo Contesi & Teresa Marques - 2024 - Philosophical Quarterly (4).
    We argue that political propaganda is a negative phenomenon, against a recent strain of philosophical theorizing that argues that political propaganda can sometimes be neutral or even positive. After an exploration of the sense and connotation of the word ‘propaganda’ in ordinary use and in the scholarly literature, we discuss Ross’s (2002) account of propaganda as an epistemically defective form of political communication. We claim that, with some refinements, it is an explanatorily useful analysis. We then assess two prominent attempts (...)
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  18. Online astroturfing: A problem beyond disinformation.Jovy Chan - 2024 - Philosophy and Social Criticism 50 (3):507-528.
    Coordinated inauthentic behaviours online are becoming a more serious problem throughout the world. One common type of manipulative behaviour is astroturfing. It happens when an entity artificially creates an impression of widespread support for a product, policy, or concept, when in reality only limited support exists. Online astroturfing is often considered to be just like any other coordinated inauthentic behaviour; with considerable discussion focusing on how it aggravates the spread of fake news and disinformation. This paper shows that astroturfing creates (...)
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  19. (1 other version)Group Lies and the Narrative Constraint.Säde Hormio - 2024 - Episteme 21 (2):478-497.
    A group is lying when it makes a statement that it believes to be untrue but wants the addressee(s) to believe. But how can we distinguish statements that the group believes to be untrue from honest group statements based on mistaken beliefs or confusion within the group? I will suggest a narrative constraint for honest group statements, made up of two components. Narrative coherence requires that a new group statement should not conflict with group knowledge on the matter, or beliefs (...)
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  20. Moderating Racism: The Attempt to Restrain Anti-Japanese Racism in World War II Propaganda Films.Gary James Jason - 2024 - Reason Papers 44 (1):92-106.
    In this essay, I want to explore one of the most ironic episodes in the history of propaganda, the attempt by various federal agencies to moderate American WWII anti-Japanese propaganda films. My texts will be four films, two produced by the military, and two by Hollywood: December 7th (1943), directed by Gregg Toland and revised by John Ford; Air Force (1943), directed Howard Hawks; Know Your Enemy: Japan (1945), directed by Frank Capra; and Betrayal for the East (1945), directed by (...)
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  21. On the Rationality of Propaganda.Gary James Jason - 2024 - Philosophy International Journal 7 (3):1-14.
    In this article, I set forth a theory of propaganda explaining what it is, how it relates to marketing, and the nature and types of ideology. I discuss the criteria by which we can judge the rationality or deceitfulness of propaganda. I defend the view that while propaganda can be perfectly rational, it rarely is, and I explain why that is the case. I finish by explaining why the question of the rationality or deceitfulness of propaganda is different from the (...)
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  22. What is this thing called peace?Fabio Lampert - 2024 - Studia Philosophica Estonica 17:80-95.
    This article scrutinizes discourse surrounding the Russia-Ukraine war in Western nations, where, despite widespread support for Ukraine, a contingent advocates for peace by rejecting military aid. This “pacifist” stance gains traction through public demonstrations in European countries and political endorsement. However, by opposing military aid while advocating peace, these messages, while ostensibly altruistic, distort genuine efforts for establishing peace in Ukraine. The article argues that recent developments from the philosophy of language, combined with the realities of Russia’s invasion and main (...)
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  23. How does pornography change desires? A pragmatic account.Junhyo Lee & Eleonore Neufeld - 2024 - Philosophical Quarterly 74 (4):1228-1250.
    Rae Langton and Caroline West famously argue that pornography operates like a language game, in that it introduces certain views about women into the common ground via presupposition accommodation. While this pragmatic model explains how pornography has the potential to change its viewers’ beliefs, it leaves open how pornography changes people's desires. Our aim in this paper is to show how Langton and West's discourse-theoretic account of pornography can be refined to close this lacuna. Using tools from recent developments in (...)
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  24. Fictions that don’t tell the truth.Neri Marsili - 2024 - Philosophical Studies 181 (5):1025-1046.
    Can fictions lie? According to a classic conception, works of fiction can never contain lies, since their content is not presented as true, nor is it meant to deceive us. But this classic view can be challenged. Sometimes fictions appear to make claims about the actual world, and these claims can be designed to convey falsehoods, historical misconceptions, and even pernicious stereotypes. Should we conclude that some fictional statements are lies? This article introduces two views that support a positive answer, (...)
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  25. Ideology and Intersectionality.Matthew McKeever - 2024 - In Ernest Lepore & Luvell Anderson (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Applied Philosophy of Language. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
    Analytic philosophers increasingly make reference to the concept of ideology to think about how representational structures can lead to oppression, and argue that the distinctively pernicious functioning of things like propaganda and generic generalizations need to be explained in terms of ideology. The aim of this paper is two-fold. First, it aims to serve as an introduction to (some of) the best contemporary work on ideology in the analytic tradition. Second, it proposes a novel challenge for any such theory. The (...)
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  26. Political Bald-Faced Lies are Performative Utterances.Susanna Melkonian-Altshuler - 2024 - In Adam C. Podlaskowski & Drew Johnson (eds.), Truth 20/20: How a Global Pandemic Shaped Truth Research. Synthese Library. pp. 211-231.
    Sometimes, political bald-faced lies pass for truth. That is, certain groups of people behave according to them – behave as if the political bald-faced lies were true. How can this phenomenon be explained? I argue that to explain it we need to take political bald-faced lies to be performative utterances whose goal is to bring about a worldly state of affairs just in virtue of making the utterance. When the former US-President tweeted ‘we won the election’, people stormed Capitol Hill (...)
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  27. Leitmotifs of anti-Ukrainian propaganda in the Romanian media sphere.Catalin Negoita (ed.) - 2024 - Bucuresti: Tritonic.
    This article highlights the underlying themes or leitmotifs of anti-Ukrainian war propaganda that resonate in the Romanian media sphere. Utilizing the method of thematic analysis, we dissect the messages related to the war in Ukraine that have been disseminated in mass media and social media. Our research, which is primarily descriptive, focuses on the content of the messages, not their authors’ personal, financial, or ideological motivations. To achieve our research goal, we will present the essential features of propaganda messages and (...)
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  28. The Philosophy of Indoctrination: Epistemology, Ethics, and Politics.Chris Ranalli - 2024 - New York, NY: Routledge.
    "This book develops and defends a novel social epistemological account of indoctrination. It answers important epistemological, ethical, and political questions about what indoctrination is, why it is epistemically harmful, how it can be practiced, and how we should talk about indoctrination. The author presents three views related to the epistemology of indoctrination. First, he argues that indoctrination is most fundamentally a structural epistemic phenomenon which results in closed-minded beliefs. The sources of indoctrination are diverse: institutional structures, technological systems, ideological frames, (...)
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  29. Characteristics of Russian Propaganda in Latin America with Regard to Russian Aggression Against Ukraine: Case of Brazil.Anna Taranenko - 2024 - Empirio 1 (1):55-62.
    Russian aggression against Ukraine has become one of the most serious challenges for the international security system. One of the regions where Russian propaganda has been spread widely is Latin America. And one of the countries especially influenced by the Russian disinformation in the region is Brazil. The goal of this article is to define characteristics of the Russian propaganda in Latin America regarding Russian aggression against Ukraine, particularly, look at the case of Brazil, trace features of the Kremlin propaganda (...)
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  30. Presupposition and Propaganda: A Socially Extended Analysis.Michael Randall Barnes - 2023 - In Laura Caponetto & Paolo Labinaz (eds.), Sbisà on Speech as Action. Palgrave-Macmillan. pp. 275-298.
    Drawing on work from Marina Sbisà’s “Ideology and the Persuasive Use of Presupposition” (1999), Rae Langton has developed a powerful account of the subtle mechanisms through which hate speech and propaganda spread. However, this model has a serious limitation: it focuses too strongly on individual speech acts isolated from their wider context, rendering its applicability to a broader range of cases suspect. In this chapter, I consider the limits of presupposition accommodation to clarify the audience’s role in helping hate speakers, (...)
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  31. Emotion and Language in Philosophy.Constant Bonard - 2023 - In Gesine Lenore Schiewer, Jeanette Altarriba & Bee Chin Ng (eds.), Emotion and Language. An International Handbook.
    In this chapter, we start by spelling out three important features that distinguish expressives—utterances that express emotions and other affects—from descriptives, including those that describe emotions (Section 1). Drawing on recent insights from the philosophy of emotion and value (2), we show how these three features derive from the nature of affects, concentrating on emotions (3). We then spell out how theories of non-natural meaning and communication in the philosophy of language allow claims that expressives inherit their meaning from specificities (...)
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  32. Telling Propaganda from Legitimate Political Persuasion.Amelia Godber & Gloria Origgi - 2023 - Episteme 20 (3):778-797.
    How does propaganda differ from the legitimate persuasive practices that animate a healthy democracy? The question is especially salient as digital technologies facilitate new modes of political persuasion and the public square saturates with information factual and fabricated alike. In answer, we propose a typology based on the rhetorical strategies that propaganda and its legitimate counterpart each employ. We argue that the point of contrast between the phenomena turns on two key features: whether the rhetorical strategy sufficiently engages our deliberative (...)
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  33. Against Irrationalism in the Theory of Propaganda.Megan Hyska - 2023 - Journal of the American Philosophical Association 9 (2):303-317.
    According to many accounts, propaganda is a variety of politically significant signal with a distinctive connection to irrationality. This irrationality may be theoretical, or practical; it may be supposed that propaganda characteristically elicits this irrationality anew, or else that it exploits its prior existence. The view that encompasses such accounts we will call irrationalism. This essay presents two classes of propaganda that do not bear the sort of connection to irrationality posited by the irrationalist: hard propaganda and propaganda by the (...)
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  34. Historical Narratives: Propaganda, War, Politics of Reconciliation.Svitlana Loznytsia - 2023 - Filosofska Dumka (Philosophical Thought) 3:59-68.
    The article examines three dimensions of the interpretation of both historical and modern war events as they are perceived and undretstood at the level of official propaganda. First, it indicates that consequences of such propaganda are various manifestations of violence, and particular in many cases the emergence of repressive regimes and wars. Second, the article raises the issue of “politics of reconciliation”, the interpretive basis of which is a compromise reading of historical events by participants of conflicts or hostilities. Since (...)
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  35. On Media Reports, Politicians, Indirection, and Duplicity.Mary Kate McGowan - 2023 - Topoi 42 (2):407-417.
    We often say one thing and mean another. This kind of indirection (concerning the content conveyed) is both ubiquitous and widely recognized. Other forms of indirection, however, are less common and less discussed. For example, we can sometimes address one person with the primary intention of being overheard by someone else. And, sometimes speakers say something simply in order to make it possible for someone else to say that they said it. Politicians generating sounds bites for the media are an (...)
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  36. A Simple Theory of Overt and Covert Dogwhistles.Luca Alberto Rappuoli - 2023 - Manuscrito 46 (3):1-38.
    Politicians select their words meticulously, never losing sight of their ultimate communicative goal. Sometimes, their objective may be that of not being fully understood by a large portion of the audience. They can achieve this by means of dogwhistles; linguistic expressions that, in addition to their literal meaning, convey a concealed message to a specific sub-group of the audience. This paper focuses on the distinction between overt and covert dogwhistles introduced by J. Saul (2018). I argue that, even if the (...)
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  37. Privacy, Propaganda, and Digital ID: Why Our Delicate Values Must Be Deliberately Defended.Matthew Tiessen - 2023 - Washington University Review of Philosophy 3:16-40.
    In this paper I explore privacy as a concept that becomes relevant and sometimes necessary under specific circumstances, but unnecessary in others. Privacy, I suggest, can be thought of as the right to be left alone and is integral to related concepts such as freedom, liberty, and independence. In light of the ongoing expansion of data-mining technologies, business models, and emerging modes of governance, I suggest that privacy is simultaneously more necessary and more at risk than ever. Privacy, in other (...)
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  38. Propaganda: More Than Flawed Messaging.Cory Wimberly - 2023 - Journal of Applied Philosophy 40 (5):849-863.
    Most of the recent work on propaganda in philosophy has come from a narrowly epistemological standpoint that sees it as flawed messaging that negatively impacts public reasonableness and deliberation. This article posits two problems with this approach: first, it obscures the full range of propaganda's activities; and second, it prevents effective ameliorative measures by offering an overly truncated assessment of the problems to be addressed. Following Ellul and Hyska, I argue that propaganda aims at shaping actions and not just beliefs, (...)
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  39. Online Extremism, AI, and (Human) Content Moderation.Michael Randall Barnes - 2022 - Feminist Philosophy Quarterly 8 (3/4).
    This paper has 3 main goals: (1) to clarify the role of Artificial Intelligence (AI)—along with algorithms more broadly—in online radicalization that results in ‘real world violence’; (2) to argue that technological solutions (like better AI) are inadequate proposals for this problem given both technical and social reasons; and (3) to demonstrate that platform companies’ (e.g., Meta, Google) statements of preference for technological solutions functions as a type of propaganda that serves to erase the work of the thousands of human (...)
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  40. The Church Fathers and the Ethics of Propaganda: A Christian Approach to Public Rhetoric.Andrew J. Blosser - 2022 - Studies in Christian Ethics 35 (1):140-154.
    Although religious ethicists commonly assess the content of public communication to determine its merits, this article argues that the style and techniques of communication deserve similar analysis. Propaganda often employs rhetorical techniques that impress the recipient through persuasive sleight-of-hand or emotional appeal. Drawing on the church fathers’ suspicion of classical rhetoric, as well as Augustine's guarded defense of a specific type of rhetoric, the author formulates two principles of ethical propaganda that may assist public communicators in persuading ethically. These two (...)
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  41. What Is Wrong with ‘All Lives Matter’? What and How ‘Black Lives Matter’ Means.Lenny Clapp - 2022 - Journal of Applied Philosophy 39 (2):346-358.
    Journal of Applied Philosophy, EarlyView.
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  42. The Use of Non-verbal Displays in Framing COVID-19 Disinformation in Europe: An Exploratory Account.Delia Dumitrescu & Mina Trpkovic - 2022 - Frontiers in Psychology 13.
    While online disinformation practices have grown exponentially over the past decade, the COVID-19 pandemic provides arguably the best opportunity to date to study such communications at a cross-national level. Using the data provided by the International Fact-Checking Network, we examine the strategic uses of non-verbal and verbal arguments to push disinformation through social media and websites during the first wave of lockdowns in 2020 across 16 European countries. Our paper extends the work by Brennen et al. on the use of (...)
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  43. Making a Video Documentary on Fake News and Disinformation in Bangladesh: Critical Reflections and Learning.Md Mahmudul Hoque - 2022 - Advances in Journalism and Communication 10 (2):136-148.
    The issue of fake news and disinformation remains widespread in Bangladesh. The author produced a video documentary “Making OR Faking” that focuses on how this issue affects journalism practices in the mainstream media in Bangladesh. In this piece, the author reflects on how the making of the documentary shaped his understanding of the issue. Undertaking a qualitative approach, the author used semi-structured interviews to explore the insights and perspectives of key informants. Critical reflections on the methodological aspects of the filmmaking (...)
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  44. Martin Luther King Jr. on Democratic Propaganda, Shame, and Moral Transformation.Meena Krishnamurthy - 2022 - Political Theory 50 (2):305-336.
    This essay develops an account of Martin Luther King Jr.’s justification for and use of what I will call “democratic propaganda”—truthful propaganda that is aimed at promoting and fostering democratic political action by stirring readers’ emotions. I interpret King’s famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail” in the broader context of his work and argue that it is a piece of democratic propaganda. I give an account of what led King to support the use of democratic propaganda and why he hoped it (...)
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  45. Disputatio nova contra Mulieres, Qua probatur eas Homines non esse of 1595 and its Two Eighteenth-Century French Translations.Monika Malinowska - 2022 - Lumen: Selected Proceedings From the Canadian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies 41:21.
    Le texte latin Disputatio nova contra Mulieres, Qua probatur eas Homines non esse de la fin du xvie siècle, a connu un grand succès après sa première publication. Aujourd’hui, ce livre, dont le titre soulève des doutes sur l’humanité des femmes, s’inscrit dans le cadre de la querelle des femmes. Il en existe deux traductions françaises : la première d’Anne-Gabriel Meusnier de Querlon réalisée en 1744, la seconde de Charles Clapiès publiée, en 1766. Les deux textes reflètent parfaitement le débat (...)
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  46. Distorted Debates.Claudia Picazo - 2022 - Topoi 42 (2):561-571.
    One way to silence the powerless, Langton has taught us, is to pre-emptively disable their ability to do things with words. In this paper I argue that speakers can be silenced in a different way. You can let them speak, and obscure the meaning of their words afterwards. My aim is to investigate this form of silencing, that I call retroactive distortion. In a retroactive distortion, the meaning of the words of a speaker is distorted by the effect of a (...)
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  47. Rethinking conspiracy theories.Matthew Shields - 2022 - Synthese 200 (4):1-29.
    I argue that that an influential strategy for understanding conspiracy theories stands in need of radical revision. According to this approach, called ‘generalism’, conspiracy theories are epistemically defective by their very nature. Generalists are typically opposed by particularists, who argue that conspiracy theories should be judged case-by-case, rather than definitionally indicted. Here I take a novel approach to criticizing generalism. I introduce a distinction between ‘Dominant Institution Conspiracy Theories and Theorists’ and ‘Non-Dominant Institution Conspiracy Theories and Theorists’. Generalists uncritically center (...)
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  48. Propaganda, fiscalidad y teología. Un inédito de Domingo Báñez sobre el servicio de millones en Burgos.David Torrijos Castrillejo - 2022 - Investigaciones Históricas, Época Moderna y Contemporánea 42:353-386.
    The subject matter of this article is a pamphlet printed in 1597 by the Corregidor of Burgos, Diego de Vargas Manrique. The document intends to persuade the aldermen of Burgos to grant the controversial servicio de millones. For this purpose, the Corregidor prints, together with his speeches, the opinions of various theologians. An opinion written by Domingo Báñez supporting the servicio de millones with certain reasons stands out for its length. After some historical context and the description of the document, (...)
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  49. Propaganda, Politics, Philosophy: A Critical Review of Jason Stanley's How Propaganda Works.Maarten van Tunen - 2022 - Krisis 42 (1):144-152.
    Review of: Jason Stanley (2015) How Propaganda Works. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 353 pp.
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  50. En las antípodas de la democracia deliberativa: la propaganda populista en la era digital.Juan Carlos Velasco - 2022 - Dilemata 38:59-67.
    This article considers the extent to which the technological revolution of digital communications increases the flow of contrasted information and favors informed choices among the different alternatives and electoral offers. Common phenomena today in forums and social networks such as disinformation or the rise of forms of propaganda more typical of non-democratic systems - with little or no respect for facts and truth - do not seem to contribute to creating a favorable scenario for public deliberation and the active participation (...)
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