“Fakes” – people or texts? Round table discussion

Fakes have become one of the most acute problems of social and political communication. We discuss its logical-semantic and pragmasemantic aspects. It allows us to draw on the theoretical apparatus of modern philosophy of language, the theory of speech acts, and modal semantics. This makes it possible to distinguish this phenomenon from adjacent ones and propose new theoretical approaches that also have practical application. The participants in the discussion concluded that despite popular belief, fakeness is not directly related to the criterion of truth. This phenomenon lies in pragmatics, it is connected not so much with the content of the utterance as with those intentions that the addressee attributes to the addressant. Concerning specific manifestations of fakeness, it is possible to distinguish which types of relations between the components of a speech act are shifted in regard to some standard conventional model – this can be both the content of the message and modality, a chain of speakers, a transmission channel, even a place of expression, and an addressee himself. The participants of the discussion considered that these shifts cause phenomena of fakeness.