Lorenzo Magnani1,2 and Emanuele Bardone1
1 Department of Philosophy and Computational Philosophy Laboratory, University of Pavia, ITALY
2 Department of Philosophy, Sun Yat-sen University, P.R.CHINA
The present paper aims at bringing into light a particular issue related to those situations in which a chance is faked. That is, when an agent acts as if a chance were present in his cognitive niche, when it is not. In illustrating the idea of chance-faking, we will take advantage of the notion of bullshit introduced by Frankfurt. The notion of bullshit has quite recently acquired a theoretical and philosophical dignity. Described as the careless attitude that an agent has towards the truth-value of what he believes in, the notion of bullshit will be taken as a case in point for shedding light on the phenomenon of chance-faking. In the last part of the paper, we will present the case of shilling attack as a case in point for illustrating how bullshitting as chance-faking may threaten the robustness and accuracy of recommender systems.