My thesis examines the “New Sincerity,” a recent movement in contemporary fiction, which relies upon and reclaims the ethical concept of sincerity. Rather than accept sincerity at face value, however, I outline a historical trajectory of the concept in order to understand the reasons for its decline and the current attempts to resituate it. Contrasting sincerity with its ancient Grecian root of parrhēsia, I argue that sincerity has been historically mobilized as a mechanism of oppression. Since the traditional conception of sincerity was founded upon the depth model of subjectivity, certain individuals were denied the possibility of professing sincerity; rather, their outward appearances marked them a priori as being deceitful, hypocritical and insincere. Despite the recent theoretical decline of the depth model of subjectivity, I claim that the model has persisted in an afterlife that continues to govern who is given the license and freedom to speak. As such, sincerity has had a significant role in how marginalized subjects, who are often denigrated for being overly emotional, have been categorized as insincere and sentimental. For this reason, my thesis rejects the alleged return of sincerity in favor of a reconceptualization of it. Drawing from the “performative turn,” I claim that sincerity must be continually at risk for it to draw its affective potential. If sincerity with intention is insincere, sincerity is an impossible event that cannot be claimed in advance. Rather, we must bind ourselves to the truth similar to the parrhēsiates of Ancient Greek and take care to question the other. In doing so, sincerity becomes a truth-telling based on actions instead of judgments. / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA)

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The epistemological problem of sincerity in testimony is often approached in the following way: We, as a matter of fact, accept utterances as sincere. We do so in the face of knowledge that people lie and deceive,and yet we still count these beliefs as good beliefs. Therefore there must be some reason or argument that we can cite in order to justify our acceptance of the sincerity of the speaker. In this thesis I will argue, contra this, that there is no reason, per se, that justifies our of a speakers sincerity: this is because recognition of the obligation to accept the sincerity is a necessary condition on the possibility of communication and interpretation. In the first three of the thesis I will argue against three of the main approaches to the problem by focusing on what I believe to be the strongest accounts of each: Elizabeth Fricker's reductionism, Tyler Burge's non-reductionism, and Paul Faulkner's trust account of testimony. In the final chapter I will put forward my positive account. I will argue that it is a constitutive rule of language that a speaker be sincere, and then make the further claim, that it is a constitutive rule of interpretation that the hearer take an utterance as sincere. On my account, successful communication does not just depend on a speaker making sincere utterances,but just as importantly,, on the hearer recognising an obligation to take those utterances as being sincere.

Academic Abstract: Famous Performances examines the complications and struggles that people face attempting to maintain a sense of authentic humanity in the twenty-first century. Through various performances, the collection deals with how human-made phenomena like popular culture, technology, and consumer society, to name a few, affect identity formation, complicating the ways in which the self, as well as the world of today, is both similar and remarkably distinct from the world of only fifteen or twenty years ago. These stories run the gamut of the above mentioned interests, including a story about a television writer and his sister, a performance artist, who tour the country, acting in a bizarre, improvisatory show together, while debating the merits of commercial versus avant-garde art; as well as a story about a wealthy and emotionally unstable man who grapples with his famous activist mother's death, when her face is printed on a commemorative coin. General Abstract: Famous Performances is a short story collection that attempts to investigate the complexities of the modern world and the importance of performance in people's everyday lives. Each story dramatically examines a particular type of performance and its effects on people's inner and social lives. The characters in this collection are grappling with the various ways performance is presented to us in modern society, through technology, the media, pop culture, social media, and more. Throughout the collection the reader is forced to confront their own iterations of authenticity and performance. / MFA

This essay presents a conceptual analysis of my piece Unavoidably Sentimental for Large Ensemble. Specifically, the paper traces the roots of the musical thinking in the piece to a notion of Sincerity that emerges from David Foster Wallace’s books and essays. The term New Sincerity, coined by Adam Kelly, is deployed to consider what a post-postmodern Sincerity could sound like in contemporary music. The paper provides general background to the literary discourse around the concept of New Sincerity as an extension of Lionel Trilling’s formalization of Sincerity and Authenticity. It suggests some examples of how a renewed sense of Sincerity could incarnate in contemporary music. As a background for the analysis of Unavoidably Sentimental itself, the paper provides background to my prior engagement with concepts like irony and authenticity in music. Unavoidably Sentimental is analyzed as a linear process, in which the piece tries to emerge out of a net of self-aware referential musical objects into the creation of sonic states of unmediated human communication between the musicians and the audience. I present different musical strategies in which the piece confronts the limitations of human communication through music, contextualized with reference to the portrayal of communication in Wallace’s writings.

What is an emotion, and what does an emotional reaction signify? In this thesis I critically defend Aaron Ben-Ze’ev’s theory of emotion as a mode of social engagement. Building on the idea that an emotional reaction is the opposite of indifference, emotions express one’s concerns. They are most intense with regard to the shifting dynamics of personal relationships and social status. Thus, in order to think well about social and personal issues, attention to emotional views of the world is paramount. The social concern of emotion opens what may seem private about our reactions to an interpersonal reading. Emotions are contrasted with an intellectual form of engagement, the latter being characterized by deliberative thinking, which focuses on generalities and stable patterns. Emotions, on the other hand, are more closely aligned with action tendencies and tend to disrupt detached styles of thinking by narrowing one’s focus to the emotion’s target. Because emotions express one’s concerns, Ben-Ze’ev argues that they tend to sincerely express our “profound values,” a view which I argue against. Building on Diane Meyers’s conception of the five-dimensional self, I argue that emotions are a source of deeply held convictions, but avoid conflating this with notions of sincerity. Instead, emotional concerns can be integrated into the cultivation of personal autonomy, in terms of self-definition and self-discovery. I apply this conception of emotion to the popular concept of emotional intelligence, and argue that emotional intelligence involves a capacity to handle with skill the emerging and chaotic urgency of emotional reactions.

Preface: A consideration of the New Sincerity movement in contemporary American poetics in the work of Tao Lin, Matt Hart, and Dorothea Lasky. Creative work: A three section book of poetry exploring elegy, form, and the intersection of strangeness and domesticity.

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This study explores the impact of sincerity of terrorists on committing terrorist activities in Turkey. The researcher is a Chief of Police in Turkey and has worked in the Anti-terror Department for a considerable part of his professional career. His professional experience has shown that the more sincere a terrorist is the more violent or heedless the terrorist activity is. Thus this research academically and statistically examines this observation and finds that sincerity affects level of violence. Attachment and adherence to the terrorist organization turn even the characteristically non-violent people into blood seeking terrorists.

Cette thèse traite de l'utilisation et de la dispense de conseils dans un contexte de conflit d'intérêts avéré ou suspecté entre le juge et le conseiller. Une première partie s'intéresse aux conseils vagues et explore les différentes interprétations que le juge peut en faire. Le résultat principal est la mise en évidence du rôle prépondérant joué par la bienveillance perçue chez le conseiller dans l'interprétation de ce type de conseils. Une deuxième partie étudie les effets de la bienveillance et de la compétence du conseiller sur la confiance qui lui est accordée mais également sur la fiabilité de ses conseils en comparant une situation où les intérêts du juge et du conseiller sont en conflit à une situation où ils ne le sont pas. Nos résultats montrent que les participants ne sont pas sensibles au conflit lorsqu'ils utilisent des conseils: ils se basent uniquement sur les paramètres individuels du conseiller. Par contre, ils se montrent attentifs au conflit lorsqu'ils dispensent des conseils: dans ce cas, leur bienveillance détermine la hauteur de l'aide qu'ils apportent au juge; leur compétence détermine la qualité et l'honnêteté de leurs conseils. La dernière partie traite exclusivement de la dispense de conseils en situation de conflit d'intérêts et approfondit l'étude du lien entre compétence du conseiller et honnêteté des conseils. Nos résultats montrent que l'incertitude ressentie par les conseillers les moins compétents vis à vis de leurs conseils peut les pousser à donner des conseils malhonnêtes car elle réduit la probabilité que ces conseils aient des conséquences néfastes. Ce même phénomène se manifeste lorsque l'incertitude est générée par la situation. / This phD thesis studies advice-giving and advice-taking in a situation of conflicting interests between judges and advisors. The first part looks more specifically at vague advice and examines all possible interpretations advisors can make of this vagueness. Our main result shows that perceived benevolence positively influences advice-taking. The second part investigates the effects of advisors' benevolence and competence on judges' trust when they use advice and on advisors' actual trustworthiness when they give advice. We compare situations with and without conflict of interests. Our results show that people are not sensitive to conflict of interests for advice-taking: they only use dispositional cues concerning the advisor. By contrast, they take into account the conflict when they give advice: the amount of help given to the judge depends on benevolence; the quality and sincerity of advice depend on advisors' competence. In the last part, we only study advice-giving in a situation of conflicting interests and we investigate more deeply the relation between advisors' competence and their sincerity. Our results show that uncertainty experienced by the least competent advisors about their advice can lead them to give unsincere advice because it less likely has a negative impact on judge. This phenomenon also occurs when uncertainty comes from the situation.