Insincere self-attributions of ignorance
False intellectual humility in particular, and false modesty in general, find their natural home in public life, where our tendencies to arrogance inevitably run up against our socio-political needs to appear virtuous.
Consider insincere self-attributions of ignorance, i.e. cases in which someone claims not to know something that they, in fact, take themselves to know. This is a pervasive feature of Donald Trump's political rhetoric — if Trump could be said to have an epistemology, it would be a skeptical one, which posits ignorance of the answers to various crucial questions about “what is going on.” As a presidential candidate,Trump repeatedly insisted that “we have to figure out what's going on” when it came to various topics. For example, on then-President Barack Obama's connection to the Pulse nightclub shooting,Trump said,we're led by a man that either is not tough, not smart or he's got something else in mind[.] He doesn't get it or he gets it better than anybody understands. It's one or the other.... There's something going on.7
Implications of ignorance are part of some ofTrump's most arrogant moments, such as his call for a “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country's representatives can figure out what the hell is going on.”8
Why think that these are insincere self-attributions of ignorance? Trump, like a bad novel, tends to resist interpretation, but it seems like there are two possibilities here. One is that Trump is quite sure, such that he takes himself to know, that Muslims are dangerous and should be excluded from the United States — in which case he is insincere when he implies that he does not know “what the hell is going on.” Another possibility is that Trump knows full well that nothing of consequence is “going on” — in which case he is also insincere when he implies that he does not know “what the hell is going on.” In this second case, he follows a strategy famously employed by Hillary Clinton when she said that there was no basis, “as far as I know,” for the claim that Obama was a Muslim.9 Clinton knew full well that Obama was not a Muslim, but by hedging, she implied that she was not quite sure.
Insincere self-attributions of ignorance are standard fare when politicians seek to silence reports of sexual assault and sexual harassment.
One kind of strategy resembles a kind of skepticism about the past. In connection with the Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore, Sean Hannity maintained that “none of us knows the truth of what happened 38 years ago.”10 (As with Trump, there are two possibilities here: either Hannity is confident that Roy Moore did not sexually assault anyone 38 years ago, in which case his claim is insincere, or he is confident that Moore did sexually assault someone 38 years ago, in which case his claim is insincere.) Another strategy resembles a kind of skepticism about testimony. For example, defenders of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh frequently cited the dearth of evidence against him, with the implication that the testimony of his victims was not evidence. This strategy exploits an ordinary-language and quasi-legal distinction between “testimony” and “evidence.”11 Appeals are sometimes made to the need for “hard” evidence, and an epistemic vocabulary borrowed from the law — “corroborating evidence,”“due process,”“burden of proof” — is adopted.12 In all these ways, a politician or pundit can under-state the strength of their evidence and suggest a state of doubt. (Again, we find the same two possibilities: either the relevant testimony is being rejected or ignored, in which case the implication of doubt is insincere, or it is being accepted, in which case the implication of doubt is insincere.)27.3