Picture this scenario in a business: An employee, Brad, disclosed some information that wound up in the hands of a competitor. He may not have meant to, but he did, and a few people at the firm know this. So, at the next company meeting, another employee, Linda, looks pointedly at Brad and says, "I know that no one would ever dream of leaking information, intentionally or otherwise, from our discussions."
Linda means the opposite of what she says, of course. She is letting people know that Brad is to blame. However, while Linda is making her message public, she also wants what we often call "plausible deniability" for her statement. If anyone asks later if she was insinuating anything about Brad, she can claim she was just making a general comment about the firm.
From the boardroom to the courtroom, the talk show, and beyond, people frequently seek plausible deniability for their statements. It seems to work, too. Indeed, to have plausible deniability, the denial need not be plausible.
"People can say, 'That's not what I meant,' and completely get away with it, even though it's totally obvious they're lying," says MIT philosopher Sam Berstler. "They wouldn't be getting away with it in the same respect by putting the content in explicit words."
She adds: "This should be very puzzling to us, because in both cases the intent is maximally obvious."
So why does plausible deniability work, and work like this? And what does it tell us about how we interact? Berstler, who studies language and communication, has published a new paper on plausible deniability, examining these issues. It is part of a larger body of work Berstler is generating, focused on everyday interactions involving deception.
To understand plausible deniability, Berstler thinks we should recognize that our conversations cannot be understood simply by analyzing the words we use. Our interactions always take place in social contexts, often have a performative aspect, and occasionally intersect with "non-acknowedgement norms," the practice of keeping quiet about what we all know. Plausible deniability is bound up with social practices that incentivize us to not be fully transparent.
"A lot of indirect speech is designed, as it were, to facilitate this kind of deniability," Berstler says.
The paper, " Non-Epistemic Deniability ," is published in the journal MIND. Berstler, the Laurance S. Rockefeller Career Development Chair and assistant professor of philosophy at MIT, is the sole author.
Managing a personal "Cold War"
In Berstler's view, there are multiple ways to create plausible deniability. One is through the practice of open secrets , the subject of one of her previous papers. An open secret is widely known information that is never acknowledged, for reasons of power or in-group identification, among other things. Indeed, no one even acknowledges that they are not acknowledging the open secret.
Examining open secrets led Berstler directly to her analysis of plausible deniability. However, the new paper focuses more on another way of creating plausible deniability, which she calls "two-tracking norms." Two-tracking is when a group divides its communications into two parts: One track consists of official, limited, courteous interaction, and the second track consists more of informal, resentful, uncooperative interactions. Linda, in our example, is engaging in two-tracking.
But why do we two-track at all? Why not just be fully transparent? Well, in an office scenario, if Linda is mad that Brad divulged some company secrets, calling out Brad directly might lead to recriminations and conflict beyond what Linda is willing to tolerate for the sake of critizing Brad on the record.
"It's like a Cold War situation where we each have an interest in not letting the conflict go to a state where we're firing warheads at each other, but we can't just purely manage relations around the negotiating table because we're adversaries," Berstler says. "We're going to aggress against each other, but in a limited way. In a two-track conversation, communicating in the second track is like fighting a proxy battle, but we're also providing evidence to each other that we're only going to engage in a proxy battle."
In this way, Linda takes Brad to task and some people pick up on it, but Brad is not explicitly publicly shamed. And though he might be unhappy, he is less likely to wreck all company norms in an attempt to retaliate. The firm more or less rolls on as usual.
Waiting for Goffman
Where Berstler differs in part from other philosophers is in her emphasis on the extent to which social practices are integral to our ways of deploying deniability. Our interactions are not just limited to rhetoric, but have additional layers.
"What we mean can often be different from what we say, or enhanced from what we say," Berstler says. "Sometimes we figure out what others mean by relying on what they say in literal language. But sometimes we're relying on other things, like the context."
So, back at the firm, the colleagues of Linda and Brad might have some knowledge of a confidentiality breach, or they might know that Linda does not usually speak up at meetings, or they might read things into her tone of voice and the way she appeared to look at Brad. There is more to be gleaned than her literal words.
In this kind of analysis, Berstler finds illumination in the work of the midcentury sociologist Erving Goffman, who studied in minute detail the performative parts of our everyday interactions and speech. Goffman, as Berstler notes in the paper, proposed that we have a ritualized, social self (or "face") and that normal, everyday behavior generally allows us, and others, to keep this face intact.
Relatedly, Goffman and some of his intellectual followers concluded that habits such as two-tracking are very common in everyday life; the price we pay for saving face is a bit less transparency, and a bit more secrecy and deniability.
"What I'm suggesting is we have these other established practices like two-tracking and open secrecy, where the deniability is just a byproduct," Berstler says.
What's the solution?
By bringing sociological ideas into her work, Berstler is moving beyond the normal philosophical discussion of the subject. On the other hand, she is not directly disputing core ideas in linguistics or the philosophy of language; she is just suggesting we add another layer to our analysis of communication and meaning.
Digging into issues of plausible deniability also raises the question of what to do about it. There may be something pernicious in the practice, but calling out plausible deniability threatens to dismantle our social guardrails and break the "Cold War" norms used to help people co-exist.
Berstler, though, has another suggestion: Instead of calling out such subterfuge, we can become verbally and performatively skilled enough to counteract it.
"I think the actual answer is becoming rhetorically clever," Berstler says. "It's being the person who uses indirect speech to respond strategically, without violating these norms. That is possible. It also means you have agency. You could become very good at verbal sparring."
Besides, Berstler says, "Often that can be more powerful than just calling them out, and demonstrates your own verbal fluency. I think we admire it when we see it. Conversational skill is an important component of being morally good, in these cases by reprimanding someone in a way that's not going to be counterproductive."
She adds: "People who buy into the rhetoric of transparency can be setting back their own interests. Maybe speaking transparently is morally virtuous in some respects, but given the reality of our speech practices, transparency is not necessarily going to be the most effective way of handling things."
