Thesis (M.A.)--University of Texas at El Paso, 2009. / Title from title screen. Vita. CD-ROM. Includes bibliographical references. Also available online.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Texas at El Paso, 2009. / Title from title screen. Vita. CD-ROM. Includes bibliographical references. Also available online.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Canterbury, 2008. / Typescript (photocopy). "March 2008." Includes bibliographical references (leaves 90-95). Also available via the World Wide Web.

Thesis (doctoral)--Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität zu München, 1958. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. iii-v) and index.

M.A. (Politics) / This study represents an empirical inquiry into the attitudes of South African Members of Parliament towards the credibility of the South African press. The study was conducted in the field of Political Science, but literature from the field of Communication Science was also used to explain certain aspects of mass media behaviour and political communication. In any governmental system political leaders are the most important people in the decision-making process. In most societies with a high level of technological development the mass media is the primary and most frequently used instrument for disseminating information and influencing public opinion. It can be used very effectively by political leaders to make contact with the electorate. Chapter One deals with the research problem of the study. Political leaders in South Africa are confronted by a specific reality when reading different newspapers. This reality is one created by the criteria of newsworthiness and editorial policy, as well as by the political interests of newspapers. This study attempts to determine to what extent political leaders. experience this reality of newspaper reporting as credible. This question is answered by an analysis of the attitudes of South African MPs toward the credibility of the press. The interaction between the political leader and the press is the most important aspect of the theoretical framework for this study. Different dimensions of this relationship are analysed. Influence is regarded as one of the major concepts in this relationship. In the communication process the relationship of influence between sender and receiver is of major importance. This relationship consists of the following elements: (1) the situation or context in which the communication occurs; (2) communicator or message characteristics; (3) receiver characteristics; (4) effects. To isolate certain of these...

The theories of cognitive dissonance (Festinger, 1957) and self-perception (Bern, 1965) are reviewed in terms of the "insufficient justification" and "observer replication" laboratory paradigms. The controversy generated by their competing explanatory claims was evaluated in three separate contexts: as debate, theory, and metatheory. In a debating context it was concluded that Ben got the better of the controversy by observing the input requirements of his theory and marshalling against his critics evidence generated by their own failure to do likewise. Analytical and epistemological errors committed by the dissonance theory advocates were major factors in this csnclusion. With respect to the more substantive context of theory-testing, it was concluded that Bern failed to establish the plausibility of the cognitive process postulated by the self-perception theory. A unique counter-instance was cited to demonstrate that self-perception is not a wholly viable alternative analysis of cognitive dissonance phenomena. In addition, an examination of Bern's adherence to a functional analysis in conjunction with a simulation methodology raised doubts that such a strategy could deliver the desired information concerning plausibility of the self-perception process. When viewed at the level of metatheory, however, Bern was considered to have had a substantial influence upon the working commitments of a small community of his colleagues. This conclusion was derived from a metaphorical application of Kuhn's (1962) thesis concerning scientific revolutions to events in the recent history of Social Psychology. In this view, the self-perception theory is an historical marker which brings clearly into focus the transition of attitudinal research from a motivational-consistency "paradigm" to an information processing/attributional "paradigm". Three experiments are reported which make use of Bern's credibility cueing procedure to articulate the newer "paradigm". The first experiment provides support for a fundamental hypothesis derived from the self-perception theory. Subjects' recall of a task was systematically influenced by external discriminative stimuli for self-credibility when internal memory cues were relatively weak, but net when such cues were relatively strong. The use of a statistic which takes into account subjects' differential guessing strategies increased confidence in the self-perception interpretation of these results. The second experiment attempted to extend the credibility cueing effect beyond the traditional impersonal cueing situation to one involving interpersonal discriminative stimuli for self-credibility. Although procedural insights rendered the results inconclusive, a serendipitous observation was made. The results suggested a novel hypothesis that different stimulus persons could have differential effects on subjects' self-credibility. A third experiment provided support for this hypothesis. When one live interviewer was manipulated as a discriminative stimulus for self-credibility, subjects' recall of a task was systematically influenced in accord with self-perception predictions. These effects did net occur in the presence of a second live interviewer. Speculation was advanced concerning the psychological basis for differential credibility cueing properties of parties to social interactions with particular reference to the credibility cueing potential of police interrogations. / Arts, Faculty of / Psychology, Department of / Graduate

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“Parsing Truth in Merovingian Gaul: Evidence and the Early Medieval Critic” considers how people distinguished truth from falsehood in a set of post-Roman kingdoms occupying much of modern France and western Germany from c. 450 to 751. Using Merovingian saints’ lives, legal documents, law codes, letters, and theological and philosophical texts, I consider how people and institutions navigated the possibility that information might be presented with the intent to deceive, or might just be wrong. Responses to questions about the reliability of information ranged from the practical to the abstractly epistemological, and the period produced multiple and contradictory arguments about how knowledge could, indeed, be certain. The dissertation concludes by examining some points of contact between Merovingian critical practices and Early Modern ones, looking specifically at the management of knowledge about relics at Sens.

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With the continuing spread of misinformation and disinformation online, it is of increasing importance to develop combating mechanisms at scale in the form of automated systems that can find checkworthy information, detect fallacious argumentation of online content, retrieve relevant evidence from authoritative sources and analyze the veracity of claims given the retrieved evidence. The robustness and applicability of these systems depend on the availability of annotated resources to train machine learning models in a supervised fashion, as well as machine learning models that capture patterns beyond domain-specific lexical clues or genre-specific stylistic insights. In this thesis, we investigate the role of models for argument structure and argument quality in improving tasks relevant to fact-checking and furthering our understanding of misinformation and disinformation. We contribute to argumentation mining, misinformation detection, and fact-checking by releasing multiple annotated datasets, developing unified models across datasets and task formulations, and analyzing the vulnerabilities of such models in adversarial settings. We start by studying the argument structure's role in two downstream tasks related to fact-checking. As it is essential to differentiate factual knowledge from opinionated text, we develop a model for detecting the type of news articles (factual or opinionated) using highly transferable argumentation-based features. We also show the potential of argumentation features to predict the checkworthiness of information in news articles and provide the first multi-layer annotated corpus for argumentation and fact-checking. We then study qualitative aspects of arguments through models for fallacy recognition. To understand the reasoning behind checkworthiness and the relation of argumentative fallacies to fake content, we develop an annotation scheme of fallacies in fact-checked content and investigate avenues for automating the detection of such fallacies considering single- and multi-dataset training. Using instruction-based prompting, we introduce a unified model for recognizing twenty-eight fallacies across five fallacy datasets. We also use this model to explain the checkworthiness of statements in two domains. Next, we show our models for end-to-end fact-checking of statements that include finding the relevant evidence document and sentence from a collection of documents and then predicting the veracity of the given statements using the retrieved evidence. We also analyze the robustness of end-to-end fact extraction and verification by generating adversarial statements and addressing areas for improvements for models under adversarial attacks. Finally, we show that evidence-based verification is essential for fine-grained claim verification by modeling the human-provided justifications with the gold veracity labels.