Deception

This project investigates how Artificial Intelligence (AI), specifically supervised machine learning techniques, can be applied to detect and classify fake news with high accuracy. The motivation stems from the widespread dissemination of misinformation on social media, where false narratives often spread faster than verified content. To address this issue, two distinct classification models were implemented and evaluated: one combining TF-IDF vectorization with Random Forest classifier, and another using TF-IDF with Logistic Regression. The TF-IDF technique was used to convert raw textual data into meaningful numerical features, capturing word frequency and relevance within the corpus. Both models were trained and tested on a balanced dataset of true and fake news articles. Their performance was compared based on key metrics such as accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score. The findings revealed that the Random Forest model consistently outperformed Logistic Regression, particularly when trained on uncleaned (raw) text. This suggests that Random Forest is more robust to linguistic noise, making it a more suitable choice for deployment in real-time fake news detection systems, especially on user-generated content platforms like social media.

The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), a flagship component of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), has increasingly been targeted by disinformation and fake news campaigns. This study critically examines how such narratives function as propaganda tools, strategically influencing public perception and policy debates across cultural, economic, and political dimensions. Using a qualitative case study approach, the research analyses documented instances of viral fake news, corroborated by fact-checking sources and media reports. Applying agenda-setting, framing, soft power, and information disorder theories, the paper uncovers how false narratives, ranging from the so-called ‘debt trap’ to cultural and sovereignty concerns, are deliberately constructed to erode confidence in CPEC. Findings indicate that while these narratives lack empirical validity, their widespread dissemination poses tangible risks to Pakistan’s internal cohesion, foreign investment climate, and bilateral relations with China. The study concludes by proposing multi-layered counter-strategies including fact-checking mechanisms, media literacy programmes, enhanced transparency, and the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools to mitigate disinformation threats. By offering a comprehensive perspective, this research contributes to a better understanding of the geopolitical information warfare surrounding CPEC. JEL Classification Codes: D83, F51, F52, L82, O53 Submitted: July 16, 2025Last Revised: September 10, 2025Accepted: October 22, 2025 Conflict of Interest: The authors declared no conflict of interest.Funding Acknowledgment: There is no funding received for this paper.

Walter Benjamin wrote perhaps the most complex, most interesting essay on the process of translation under the title The Task of the Translator in 1923. This very complex work of literary and translation theory has been analysed and referred to by several literary scholars in the past almost 100 years, the Belgian–American literary scholar Paul de Man among them. The present research article makes an attempt to present a comparative analysis based on close reading of the texts between Benjamin’s original essay and Paul de Man’s commentary, figuring out the possible (and necessary) contradictions and ambiguities of the text, trying to find the answer to the question whether or not translation, at least in the successful sense of the word, exist at all. Deconstructionist way of reading literary and theoretical texts may give multiple answers to the questions about translation, and demonstrate the possibility and impossibility of translation at the same time. Keywords: literary translation, translation theory, literary theory, Walter Benjamin, Paul de Man, deconstruction, close reading.

Postfederman Jeffrey R. Di Leo (bio) As we mourn the recent death of longtime ABR contributing editor Raymond Federman, we also attempt to fully appreciate the scope of his achievement. This task turns out to be easier said than done. Over the past thirty or so years, his fiction has been the subject of a good deal of scholarship in multiple languages. However, in spite of this wealth of attention, the scope of Federman's achievements has yet to be fully recognized by the academic community. One of the reasons for this lack of recognition stems from the ways in which Federman's novels have been categorized. In the US, Federman's work has most commonly been connected with a group of writers that brought "new life" to American fiction in the wake of pronouncements of the death of the novel in the late 1960s. His revitalizing, innovative peers include Donald Barthelme, Robert Coover, Steve Katz, Clarence Major, Ishmael Reed, Gilbert Sorrentino, and Ronald Sukenick. While the identification of Federman with this group of writers is accurate and not without its merits, in the longer run, it has served to exclude or marginalize his work from other—and arguably even more significant—contexts. Far too many accounts treat Federman as merely a member of a small group of writers who created through narrative experimentation a pioneering body of "metafiction" or "postmodern" American literature. Though relevant to those interested in tracing the development of American letters, such accounts neglect the range of his contributions to both the contemporary critical and world literature canons—contributions that scholars are only just beginning to recognize and explore in detail. His recent passing provides a good opportunity for us to reconsider an amazingly creative and daring thinker whose work is significant to not just considerations of the development of innovative fiction in America, but potentially to a number of distinct disciplines, and established and emerging critical discourses. These critical discourses include translation studies, Jewish studies, Holocaust studies, bilingual studies, Beckett studies, cultural studies, philosophy of language, postmodern theory, body criticism, critical theory, identity studies, narrative theory, trauma studies, philosophy of literature, and autobiography theory, among others. It should be noted that the disciplines represented here are far wider than just English, the standard province of Federman scholarship. They include philosophy, comparative literature, foreign languages, history, linguistics, and sociology. Federman's emphasis on voice over character, his playfulness with identity, his use of numerous alter egos, and his investigation of writing in the shadow of the Holocaust make his work a rich source for those invested in contemporary cultural studies and literary theory. His writing is a powerful voice in an age that has redirected attention to the cultural, historical, and political powers of fictional discourse. Federman, who passed away last month at the age of 81, is probably more relevant now than ever. The discourses necessary for appreciating the range and depth of his achievement—discourses such as cultural studies and literary theory—have only recently reached full maturation and institutional acceptance. It is easy to see this when one recalls that when Federman's early masterpiece Double or Nothing came out in 1971, "new criticism" was still considered "radical" by most English departments—departments which rarely if ever considered contemporary fiction as worthy of scholarship. One must also remember that Federman's writing becomes more significant in a critical climate charged by discussions of the relationship between culture, history, language, and narrative. While these discussions were forming in the seventies, they were still far from maturation. The seventies saw the rise of elegant and close structuralist, deconstructive, Marxist, and psychoanalytic interpretations of literature. Increasingly, emphasis on the libidinal, political, and social and/or social nature of signification would come to challenge the very profession of literary studies by laying the foundation for cultural studies. It is in the context of this post-literary or post-literature climate that Federman's fictions can be best understood. While Federman's writing is an amazing resource to engage through structuralist and/or poststructuralist theoretical contexts, it becomes even more powerful when considered through theory sensitive to the personal, social, and political dimensions of interpretation. As the eighties...

Preface. Abbreviations. Part 1: Philosophy of Language. The Social Aspect of Language D. Davidson. Singular Terms B. Hale. Philosophical Theorizing and Particularism: Michael Dummett on Wittgenstein's Later Philosophy of Language D. Pears. Convention and Assertion E. Picardi. Meaning Theory and Anti-Realism D. Prawitz. Part 2: Philosophy of Mathematics. Anti-Realism and the Philosophy of Mathematics G. Oliveri. Dummett and Wittgenstein's Philosophy of Mathematics C. Penco. Vestiges of Realism G. Sundholm. About 'the Philosophical Significance of Godel's Theorem': Some Issues C. Wright. Part 3: Philosophy of Mind, Time and Religion. Dummett, Realism and Other Minds A. Bilgrami. Truth, Time and Deity B.F. McGuinness. Leaving the Past Where it Belongs J. Schulte. Part 4: Dummett's Replies. Reply to Davidson. Reply to Hale. Reply to Pears. Reply to Picardi. Reply to Prawitz. Reply to Oliveri. Reply to Penco. Reply to Sundholm. Reply to Wright. Reply to Bilgrami. Reply to McGuinness. Reply to Schulte. Bibliography. Index.

An ocean of rumors, hearsay, half-truths, fake news, factoids, speculations, and conspiracy theories engulfs us. Rumor is a pervasive characteristic of human communication, a quintessentially social activity in service of making meaning. It is not surprising then that rumor has attracted attention from ancient peoples, from a wide array of scholarly disciplines (e.g., psychology, communication, political science, sociology, philosophy, literature, mathematics, computer science) and from a varied assortment of practice-oriented specializations (e.g., medicine, law, defense, politics, journalism, intelligence, marketing, management, finance, public relations). The intensity of interest in rumor has risen of late in exponential fashion amidst polarized political landscapes, reduced trust in institutional authorities (e.g., the academy, government, business, and the press), the ever-increasing ubiquity of the Internet, and a general lassitude about the concept of truth. This annotated bibliography reflects thinking and research about foundational issues inherent in rumor research (e.g., What is rumor?), features of rumor activity that have attracted longstanding attention (e.g., Why do people believe and transmit rumors? How do they become more accurate or more distorted?), and current areas of active inquiry (e.g., conspiracy theories, rumors about health and risk, organizational rumors, propaganda, intergroup stereotyping and conflict, journalism and fake news, and the prevention and management of harmful rumors).

Ferdinand de Saussure (b. 1857–d. 1913, Geneva) is widely recognized as the founder of modern theoretical linguistics. In his courses in general linguistics he taught at Geneva in 1907–1911—made known to a broad audience as Cours de linguistique générale (CLG, 1916), a book published posthumously under Saussure’s name on the basis of his lectures—Saussure laid out an approach to language whose premises largely followed principles of the turn-of-the-20th-century revolution in philosophy and methodology of science. Defining the object of a field of scholarly studies by postulating its features relevant specifically for that field was the center point of antipositivist critique. Saussure strove to wrestle linguistic studies from empiricism by laying out postulates concerning its nature that should stand as guidelines for its scholarly description. He defined “language” (la langue) as an internalized system of symbolic units (signs), defined by their intrasystemic relations, in contradistinction to “speech” (la parole) as the empirical speech activity. According to Saussure, signs of language are arbitrary, in the sense that the relation between their physical and symbolic distinction from each other has no other grounds but convention. Yet another foundational principle concerned the distinction between “synchrony” as the intrasystemic state of la langue at a given moment and “diachrony” as its development in time. The ideas of CLG gave rise to various strains of European linguistic “structuralism” (i.e., an approach to language from the point of view of its inner structure, as proposed by Nikolai Trubetzkoy, Roman Jakobson, Émile Benveniste, and Louis Hjelmslev); they also influenced parallel developments in America (Leonard Bloomfield, Edward Sapir, Zellig Harris). Eventually, principles of structuralism spread out to various domains of cultural and social studies, from poetics (Jakobson, Yuri Mikhailovich Lotman, Tzvetan Todorov) to anthropology (Claude Lévi-Strauss) and psychology (Jean Piaget). While generative grammar (Noam Chomsky) posited itself as an opponent of structuralism, it upheld some fundamental premises of the CLG; first of all, the transempirical and systemic nature of the internalized language “competence.” Beginning in the late 1960s, structuralism became the target of far-reaching critique, particularly in the domains of literary theory (Roland Barthes, Western reception of Mikhail Bakhtin), philosophy of language and culture (Jacques Derrida), and history of ideas (Michel Foucault). At about the same time, Saussure’s copious private notes on linguistics, of which hitherto only a small part had been known, came to scholars’ attention. As a consequence, CLG came under a double-critical fire: as the presumed harbinger of the now-deflated structural approach, and as a work of dubious authenticity whose text, produced by the book’s editors, ostensibly did not reflect Saussure’s views properly. Saussure’s image as a philosopher of language largely overshadowed his works in other areas, despite their considerable value in their own right. Saussure began his academic career as a specialist in comparative grammar of Indo-European languages. His early book on the reconstruction of the proto-European system of vowels (1879) produced a sensation at the time and made a strong impact on the development of that discipline in the next century. In the 1900s, Saussure was intensely involved in studies of the “anagram”; the discovery in the 1960s of his notes on the subject created a broad if somewhat controversial resonance.

In his paper, "Gustav Shpet's Literary and Theatre Theory," Galin Tihanov introduces Shpet's theoretical work on literature and theatre, until recently little studied. Neither has been sufficient attention paid to Shpet's overall presence on the Russian cultural scene in the 1910s-1930s. As a result, our knowledge and appreciation of the scope of his writings and the variety of Russian literary and theatre life in the first third of the twentieth century have remained less rich and well-informed than they could otherwise have been. Tihanov explains that Shpet's participation in contemporary literature and theatre assumed different forms: he wrote both from a theoretical perspective grounded in his overall aesthetics and through personal friendships and affiliations, as well as through his affiliation and activities he played an important part in a number of informal circles or more formally structured groupings such as the Moscow Linguistic Circle (these groups promoted literature, theatre, and scholarship), and last but not least, Shpet was active as the Russian translator of, and commentator on, several works belonging to the canon of English literature. Tihanov examines of Shpet's contribution in intersecting areas and assesses his contribution to literary and theatre theory in 1920s Russian culture.

Although the concept of truth seems to be taking a beating these days, media ethics continues to provide us with guidance to help distinguish news and information from rumor, innuendo, propaganda, ...

Wittgenstein is one of the most important and influential twentieth-century philosophers in the western tradition. In his Philosophical Investigations he undertakes a radical critique of analytical philosophy's approach to both the philosophy of language and the philosophy of mind. The Routledge Guidebook to Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations introduces and assesses: Wittgenstein's life The principal ideas of the Philosophical Investigations Some of the principal disputes concerning the interpretation of his work Wittgenstein's philosophical method and its connection with the form of the text. With further reading included throughout, this guidebook is essential reading for all students of philosophy, and all those wishing to get to grips with this masterpiece.

Summary This study describes the reception of J. Derrida's language philosophy by the American literary sciences, especially J. Hillis Miller and Paul de Man. A number of central literary categories are investigated: the concepts of plot, metaphor and metonymy, and the reader understood as a ‘self’. The study shows how these literary realities must be seen in the context of the deconstruction project. It also shows the importance of the deconstruction project for the evaluation of the way in which (narrative) texts are manipulated by the actual readers. In fact the study deals with the textuality of language: the plot which is seen as a multiplicity of story lines which can be arbitrarily constructed; the metaphor described as sucked empty by the metonymic force of language; the self understood as a linguistic structure which transfers the text, as it is read via codes, to a different linguistic intervention. The study is written from an exegetical-theological practice. Therefore, it again and again raise...

Introduction: Cross-Cultural Reading

<p>This thesis considers spatial and architectural language used in philosophical text to determine the value of a cross-disciplinary relationship between architecture and philosophy. It approaches architectural figure as more than just metaphor for philosophy, and proposes that philosophy relies on the spatial nature of architectural language to constitute itself. The case studies provided elucidate a realm where architecture and philosophy have been explored simultaneously; where architecture is used as a tool to develop philosophical propositions and where philosophical text generates architectural design. Ludwig Wittgenstein and Adolf Loos worked in this way, rethinking how architecture is done while rebuilding philosophical propositions. Wittgenstein’s work as an architect was not a break from philosophy but an exploration in architectural space that developed his philosophical perspective. The house he designed is considered here as an extension of the ‘visual room’, an aphorism about image forming in The Philosophical Investigations. Loos’s writing on an ethics of style is philosophy bound to a body of architectural work. His architecture, in particular the House for Josephine Baker, and its conflicts of modernity and the relationship between interior and exterior, is inextricably linked to his normative theories of how we should live. Maurice Merleau-Ponty defined phenomenology in spatial terms that depend heavily on the experience of architectural space. His description of the ‘phenomenal body’ and its ability to understand the ‘spatiality of a situation’ is evidence for an epistemological link between phenomenology and architecture. The architecture of Steven Holl is analysed for its reconstruction of Merleau-Pontian spatiality in the Residence for the Swiss Ambassador, a commission that offered Holl a generous affordance of space with which to explore this influence. The main philosophical text used in the thesis is the philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre due to the largely ignored latent spatial nature of it. It is significant that the text relies on spatial relationships to convey its meaning. Sartre’s concepts have been defined, developed and implemented by architecture in the resulting design, ‘A House for Sartre’. The design builds on Sartrean concepts of the self, other people, objects in the world and consciousness. It does this by rethinking and rebuilding on this philosophy, while at the same time rethinking and rebuilding the architecture of the house, a domestic space. The programme of a ‘house’ offers concepts of domesticity as context for the design project, and this adds another dimension to the philosophy. The project pushes the limits of Sartre’s descriptions and tests his examples in the tangible realm of architecture. Through inhabitation of such an architecture, one can better gain an understanding of this philosophy. As Sartre so often appeals to his readers to inspect the state of their own consciousness, then perhaps most significantly, the architecture provides not only a conscious experience of the house, but an experience where inhabitants are conscious of their own consciousness in ‘A House for Sartre’.</p>

Eternity and immortality are phrases to which it is impossible for us to annex any distinct ideas, and the more we attempt to explain them, the more we shall find ourselves involved in contradiction.William Godwin, Political Justice

Theory and the Life of the Critic H. Aram Veeser (bio) Are critics' lives relevant to their criticism? Over time, the answers to this question have veered back and forth, from far left to far right, from alpha to omega. Of course they are, say the phenomenologists. Nietzsche thought that every philosophy was the biography of its author. Sartre, Beauvoir, Camus, and Merleau-Ponty felt that the whole purpose of thinking was to get an understanding of lived experience. Heidegger was like them an existentialist, but he thought it was enough to note that a thinker had been born, lived, and died. The so-called New Critics in North America wanted to keep their aesthetics pure, and they totally ruled out authors' biographies and intentions. Their formalism had no place for the messy aspects of experience including politics, the body, gender, disability, race, or society, although that did not stop them from getting personal in their own writings. The pendulum swung back with a later crop of literary theorists. Paul de Man, Fredric Jameson, Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak, and Walter Benn Michaels have kept the visceral and passionate topics at arm's length because they feel that language, images, and media of all kinds block any attempt directly to address human experience. Paul de Man, for one, tried to get at the deeper in meaning in Rousseau, but, as he put it in Allegories of Reading (1979), I "found myself unable to progress beyond local difficulties of interpretation. I had to shift to the problematic of reading." Problematics of reading occur when language obstructs its own efforts to make logical, straightforward claims. In de Man's extreme formulation, every piece of writing boils down to a figure—a logical proposition or argument—and then the undoing, the self-unravelling of that argument. No matter how brilliant the writer, and Rousseau was brilliant, the ambiguities and antitheses within words and syntax subvert, harass, and defeat every effort to state a meaning. So the current generation never gets out of the representational woods. This failure is a harsh disappointment to readers who long for the passionate engagements that they enjoyed in the old school existentialists. Writers such as Sartre and Camus wrestled with the essential questions. "They remained in touch with the density of life," writes the author of a recent group biography, At the Existentialist Café (2016). "They asked the important questions. Give me that any day." The times were different. Heidegger's and Sartre's and Beauvoir's world produced films like Rebel without a Cause (1955) and À bout de souffle (1960), books like Catcher in the Rye (1951) and A Thief 's Journal (1964). Even the existentialist Heidegger, for all his Nazism and gloom, paints a picture of more inviting world than do Paul de Man or Walter Benn Michaels. Heidegger's most famous image is a beautiful and lyrical scene: the conscious human being is a clearing in the dense canopy of trees. Many still pine for that distant clearing where thinkers could wrestle with meaning and decision. But the time is gone forever. By contrast, no such naturally occurring break in the gloom is imaginable to contemporary critics; instead, the Big Questions of Life's Meaning strike us as woefully sophomoric and sentimental. Critics distrust grand statements because of the statement part: the expressive medium with its intricate, deceptive, self-undermining treasons. Those stirring debates over freedom, purpose, and identity have to be placed indefinitely on hold, at least until we can straighten out this business of representation. In contrast to the self-tormented world of Holden Caulfield and Jack Kerouac, contemporary critics such as Bhabha, Dimock, Fish, Gallop, Garber, Graff, Michaels, Mailloux, Mitchell, and Ken Warren emerged from and within the post-human world of Taxi Driver (1976), Apocalypse Now (1979), Blade Runner (1982), and American Psycho (1991). They doubted the validity of heartfelt appeals to "the human"; we laughed at terms such as "the subject of history," this phrase employed by Marxist Georg Lukács, with its embarrassingly intoxicated, romantic idealism and its laughably inaccurate naming of the working class. Human "subjects" are, after all, nothing more than legal fictions, conveniences invented by [End Page...