This week I'm thinking a lot about the relationship between propaganda/the media's framing and language around certain events, and how it influences our salience structures.
Philosopher Elizabeth Camp has done some great work on the notion of a "perspective", which is a bundle of dispositions to take on a particular conceptual framing, to see some things as significant and other things as insignificant or outliers, to see certain things as possible and certain things as impossible, all of which reinforce each other.
Philosopher Paulina Sliwa has done some excellent recent work extending the idea of 'perspectives' into the domain of moral inquiry (Here's something forthcoming in PPR: https://philpapers.org/rec/SLIMSO). Jessie Munton has also done work on the role of salience structures in prejudice.
But one thing that is interesting about perspectives (in this technical sense) and salience structures is that they are going to be heavily influenced by our social environment and need to communicate, collaborate, and plan with others. That's really cool, but: It means that propaganda and media manipulation are about more than simply getting us to believe things that aren't true. Its about getting us to adopt conceptual frameworks that encourage certain explanations of phenomenon, make certain actions available as solutions, and also make certain problems seem significant in ways that others seem like necessary evils. It also results in unequal distributions of empathy, even where our beliefs would strongly reject such unequal distributions.
None of this is particularly new or shocking, but I think the work by Camp and Sliwa might be providing a direction to think more precisely and analytically about these things than analytic philosophers have been able to before.