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Lying
Edited by Neri Marsili (Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia)
About this topic
| Summary | Lying raises fundamental questions in ethics, epistemology, and philosophy of language. As a first approximation, lying involves asserting a proposition that one believes to be false, typically with the intention of deceiving. Philosophers have long debated the exact definition of lying and how it differs from other forms of deception. Definitional questions include: Does lying require an intent to deceive? Are all lies falsehoods, or can true statements be lies? Can one lie merely by implicating something false, or by non-verbal means? The ethics of lying is another important area of philosophical analysis. Philosophical work in this field focuses on determining what makes lying wrong, and whether this wrongness admits exceptions. While influential thinkers like St. Augustine and Kant argue for a strict prohibition on lying, others allow for exceptions under the right circumstances. Related issues concern the moral permissibility of other forms of deception, and discussion of lying in applied ethics. Finally, lying also connects to epistemological issues surrounding knowledge, belief, and testimony. The possibility of lying threatens to undercut the status of testimony as a source of knowledge. Consequently, epistemologists explore whether and to what extent insincerity threatens our ability to share knowledge by communicating. |
| Key works | Augustine's treatise On Lying (De Mendacio) is one of the earliest sustained analyses of lying, arguing for a strict moral prohibition. Kant’s work (Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, "On a Supposed Right to Lie from Philanthropy") also defends an unconditional duty not to lie. Key contemporary works on the philosophy of lying include Chisholm & Feehan 1977, Adler 1997, Korsgaard 1998, Meibauer 2005, Carson 2006 , Sorensen 2007, Fallis 2009, Stokke 2013. Book-length treatments include Bok 1978, L. Carson 2010, Jay 2010, Saul 2012, and Michaelson & Stokke 2018. |
| Introductions | Mahon 2008 provides a thorough overview of philosophical issues concerning the definition of lying. Stokke 2013 covers the distinction between lying and misleading and its moral implication. The Oxford Handbook of Lying (Meibauer 2018) offers a more advanced introduction on specific subtopics. For an introduction to experimental work on the definition of lying, Wiegmann & Meibauer 2019. |
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Related
Subcategories
See also
- Sincerity (122)
- Assertion (1,038 | 196)
- Deception (460 | 110)
- Testimony (1,323 | 203)
- Speech Acts (1,170 | 911)
Contents
190 found
Order:
| 1 — 50 / 190 |
Material to categorize
- Lying by Asserting What You Believe is True: a Case of Transparent Delusion.Vladimir Krstić - 2024 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology (4):1-21.In this paper, I argue (1) that the contents of some delusions are believed with sufficient confidence; (2) that a delusional subject could have a conscious belief in the content of his delusion (p), and concurrently judge a contradictory content (not-p) – his delusion could be transparent, and (3) that the existence of even one such case reveals a problem with pretty much all existing accounts of lying, since it suggests that one can lie by asserting what one consciously and (...)
- On lying.Saint Augustine - 395
- Lying with Slurs and Other Evaluative Terms.Brian Haas - forthcoming - Analysis.Are slurring statements, when applied to members of the slurred group, true, false, or a little bit of both? Intuitions are mixed. And investigating more truth-value judgments is unlikely to cure the stalemate we find ourselves in. Truth-value judgments are just not up to the task. In their place, I propose we look to judgments of lying instead. This change in focus provides a new and better tool for understanding the complex semantics and pragmatics of slurs. As I argue, it (...)
- Lying and Insincerity.Neri Marsili - forthcoming - In Hilary Nesi & Petar Milin (eds.), International Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics. Elsevier.What is lying? This entry provides a general overview of scholarly attempts to define lying in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions. First, it addresses the distinction between lying and misleading, considering whether only explicit statements can be lies. The second topic is insincerity, and how it can vary in degrees under conditions of uncertainty. Its final part discusses whether lying requires an intent to deceive and genuine assertoric force.
- Deepfakes and Dishonesty.Tobias Flattery & Christian B. Miller - 2024 - Philosophy and Technology 37 (120):1-24.Deepfakes raise various concerns: risks of political destabilization, depictions of persons without consent and causing them harms, erosion of trust in video and audio as reliable sources of evidence, and more. These concerns have been the focus of recent work in the philosophical literature on deepfakes. However, there has been almost no sustained philosophical analysis of deepfakes from the perspective of concerns about honesty and dishonesty. That deepfakes are potentially deceptive is unsurprising and has been noted. But under what conditions (...)
- (1 other version)Group Lies and the Narrative Constraint.Säde Hormio - 2024 - Episteme 21 (2):478-497.A group is lying when it makes a statement that it believes to be untrue but wants the addressee(s) to believe. But how can we distinguish statements that the group believes to be untrue from honest group statements based on mistaken beliefs or confusion within the group? I will suggest a narrative constraint for honest group statements, made up of two components. Narrative coherence requires that a new group statement should not conflict with group knowledge on the matter, or beliefs (...)
- Lug und Selbstbetrug.Marc Andree Weber - 2024 - Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 72 (3):323-343.People who, by intention or negligence, deceive themselves put other people at risk of being misinformed. The paper argues that this kind of misinforming other people is to be avoided for largely the same reasons for which lying is to be avoided – regardless of what exactly these reasons are. This makes the ethical evaluation of self-deception in part dependent on the ethical evaluation of lying. In order to bring out this result as clearly as possible, detailed characterisations of the (...)
- The poet affirmeth.Emanuel Viebahn - manuscriptThis paper is concerned with fictive utterances, the authorial utterances that make up works of fiction. It is widely held that fictive utterances cannot be constative speech acts, such as assertions. Instead, fictive utterances are construed as pretended speech acts, as invitations to make-believe or as declarations. My aim is to challenge the non-constative consensus and to defend a view on which fictive utterances are constative speech acts after all, namely constatives that have a story as their target. I motivate (...)
- True lies and attempted lies.Emanuel Viebahn - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.Sometimes speakers try to lie and inadvertently assert something true. Subjectivists about lying hold that such speakers are lying despite telling the truth. Objectivists hold that such speakers are not lying: they try to lie but fail. The first aim of this paper is to point to novel cases supporting subjectivism that do not involve speakers inadvertently asserting something true. Its second aim is to use these and other cases to explore the distinction between lying and trying to lie. Which (...)
- Bald-faced lying to institutions: deception or manipulation.Vladimir Krstić - 2024 - Synthese 203 (4):1-13.Deceptionism about lying is the view that all lies are intended to deceive. This view sits uneasily with some cases that seem to involve lies not intended to deceive. We call these lies bald-faced because the liar lies while believing that the hearer knows that they are lying. The most recent deceptionist argument put forward by Rudnicki and Odrowąż-Sypniewska (this journal) defends the view that all genuine bald-faced lies are intended to deceive some of their hearers. I argue that this (...)
- Bald-Faced Lies, Blushing, and Noses that Grow: An Experimental Analysis.Vladimir Krstić & Alexander Wiegmann - 2022 - Erkenntnis 89 (2):479-502.We conducted two experiments to determine whether common folk think that so-called _tell-tale sign_ bald-faced lies are intended to deceive—since they have not been tested before. These lies involve tell-tale signs (e.g. blushing) that show that the speaker is lying. Our study was designed to avoid problems earlier studies raise (these studies focus on a kind of bald-faced lie in which supposedly everyone knows that what the speaker says is false). Our main hypothesis was that the participants will think that (...)
- Political Bald-Faced Lies are Performative Utterances.Susanna Melkonian-Altshuler - 2024 - In Adam C. Podlaskowski & Drew Johnson (eds.), Truth 20/20: How a Global Pandemic Shaped Truth Research. Synthese Library. pp. 211-231.Sometimes, political bald-faced lies pass for truth. That is, certain groups of people behave according to them – behave as if the political bald-faced lies were true. How can this phenomenon be explained? I argue that to explain it we need to take political bald-faced lies to be performative utterances whose goal is to bring about a worldly state of affairs just in virtue of making the utterance. When the former US-President tweeted ‘we won the election’, people stormed Capitol Hill (...)$139.99 new (collection) View on Amazon.comRemove from this list Direct download (2 more)Export citation
Bookmark - Norms of Constatives.Grzegorz Gaszczyk - 2023 - Acta Analytica 38 (3):517-536.According to the normative approach, speech acts are governed by certain norms. Interestingly, the same is true for classes of speech acts. This paper considers the normative treatment of constatives, consisting of such classes as assertives, predictives, suggestives, and more. The classical approach is to treat these classes of illocutions as species of constatives. Recently, however, Simion (Shifty Speech and Independent Thought: Epistemic Normativity in Context, Oxford University Press, 2021) has proposed that all constatives (i) are species of assertion, and (...)
- Norms of Speech Acts.Grzegorz Gaszczyk - 2022 - Studia Semiotyczne 36 (11):45-56.This paper offers a systematic classification and characterization of speech acts and their norms. Recently, the normative approach has been applied to various speech acts, most notably to constatives. I start by showing how the work on the norms of assertion has influenced various approaches to the norms of other speech acts. I focus on the fact that various norms of assertion have different extensions, i.e., they denote different clusters of illocutions as belonging to an assertion. I argue that this (...)
- Don’t be deceived: bald-faced lies are deceitful assertions.Jakub Rudnicki & Joanna Odrowąż-Sypniewska - 2023 - Synthese 201 (6):1-21.The traditional conception of lying, according to which to lie is to make an assertion with an intention to deceive the hearer, has recently been put under pressure by the phenomenon of bald-faced lies i.e. utterances that _prima facie_ look like lies but because of their blatancy allegedly lack the accompanying intention to deceive. In this paper we propose an intuitive way of reconciling the phenomenon of bald-faced lies with the traditional conception by suggesting that the existing analyses of the (...)
- Lying to others, lying to yourself, and literal self-deception.Vladimir Krstić - 2023 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.This paper examines the connection between lies, deception, and self-deception. Understanding this connection is important because the consensus is that you cannot deceive yourself by lying since you cannot make yourself believe as true a proposition you already believe is false – and, as a liar, you must assert a proposition you believe is false. My solution involves refining our analysis of lying: people can lie by asserting what they confidently believe is true. Thus, self-deceivers need not replace one belief (...)
- (1 other version)Lying: revisiting the ‘intending to deceive’ condition.Vladimir Krstić - 2023 - Analysis.This paper refines the received analysis of deceptive lies. This is done by assessing some cases of lies that are supposedly not intended to deceive and by arguing that they actually involve sophisticated strategies of intentional deception. These lies, that is, merely seem not to be intended to deceive and this is because our received analysis of deceptive lies is insufficiently sophisticated. We need to add these strategies to our analysis of deceptive lying. The argument ends by presenting this refined (...)
- Lies, Common Ground and Performative Utterances.Neri Marsili - 2021 - Erkenntnis 88 (2):567-578.In a recent book (_Lying and insincerity_, Oxford University Press, 2018), Andreas Stokke argues that one lies iff one says something one believes to be false, thereby proposing that it becomes common ground. This paper shows that Stokke’s proposal is unable to draw the right distinctions about insincere performative utterances. The objection also has repercussions on theories of assertion, because it poses a novel challenge to any attempt to define assertion as a proposal to update the common ground.
- An empirical perspective on pictorial lies.Emanuel Viebahn & Alex Wiegmann - manuscriptTheorists in the debate on how to define lying disagree whether it is possible to lie with pictures. At the same time, they agree that definitions of lying should be consistent with how laypersons use the term ‘lie’. This calls for an empirical perspective on whether ordinary usage allows for pictorial lies. The present paper provides some initial data on this question by reporting an experiment with 623 participants investigating layperson judgements about cases of insincere linguistic and pictorial communication. The (...)
- Defending Joint Acceptance Accounts of Group Belief against the Challenge from Group Lies.Lukas Schwengerer - 2022 - Logos and Episteme 13 (4):421-428.Joint acceptance accounts of group belief hold that groups can form a belief in virtue of the group members jointly accepting a proposition. Recently, Jennifer Lackey (2020, 2021) proposed a challenge to these accounts. If group beliefs can be based on joint acceptance, then it seems difficult to account for all instances of a group telling a lie. Given that groups can and do lie, our accounts of group belief better not result in us misidentifying some group lies as normal (...)
- On the Connection between Lying, Asserting, and Intending to Cause Beliefs.Vladimir Krstic - 2022 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.According to one influential argument put forward by, e.g. Chisholm and Feehan, Pfister, Meibauer, Dynel, Keiser, and Harris, asserting requires intending to give your hearer a reason to believe what you say (first premise) and, because liars must assert what they believe is false (second premise), liars necessarily intend to cause their hearer to believe as true what the liars believe is false (conclusion). According to this argument, that is, all genuine lies are intended to deceive. ‘Lies’ not intended to (...)
- (1 other version)Lying, Tell-Tale Signs, and Intending to Deceive.Vladimir Krstic - forthcoming - Dialectica:1-27.Arguably, the existence of bald-faced (i.e. knowingly undisguised) lies entails that not all lies are intended to deceive. Two kinds of bald-faced lies exist in the literature: those based on some common knowledge that implies that you are lying and those that involve tell-tale signs (e.g. blushing) that show that you are lying. I designed the tell-tale sign bald-faced lies to avoid objections raised against the common knowledge bald-faced lies but I now see that they are more problematic than what (...)
- Everybody lies: deception levels in various domains of life.Kristina Šekrst - 2022 - Biosemiotics (2).The goal of this paper is to establish a hierarchical level of deception which does not apply only to humans and non-human animals, but also to the rest of the living world, including plants. We will follow the hierarchical categorization of deception, set forth by Mitchell (1986), in which the first level of deception starts with mimicry, while the last level of deception includes learning and intentionality, usually attributed to primates. We will show how such a hierarchy can be attributed (...)
- Lying, Deception, and Dishonesty: Kant and the Contemporary Debate on the Definition of Lying.Stefano Bacin - 2022 - In Luigi Caranti & Alessandro Pinzani (eds.), Kant and the Problem of Morality: Rethinking the Contemporary World. New York, NY: Routledge Chapman & Hall. pp. 73-91.Although Kant is one of the very few classical writers referred to in the current literature on lying, hardly any attention is paid to how his views relate to the contemporary discussion on the definition of lying. I argue that, in Kant’s account, deception is not the defining feature of lying. Furthermore, his view is able to acknowledge non-deceptive lies. Kant thus holds, I suggest, a version of Intrinsic Anti-Deceptionism. In his specific version of such a view, furthermore, dishonesty is (...)$175.10 used (collection) View on Amazon.comRemove from this list Direct download (2 more)Export citation Bookmark
- Lying: Knowledge or belief?Neri Marsili - 2021 - Philosophical Studies 179 (5):1445-1460.A new definition of lying is gaining traction, according to which you lie only if you say what you know to be false. Drawing inspiration from “New Evil Demon” scenarios, I present a battery of counterexamples against this “Knowledge Account” of lying. Along the way, I comment upon the methodology of conceptual analysis, the moral implications of the Knowledge Account, and its ties with knowledge-first epistemology.
- The Oxford Handbook of Lying.Jörg Meibauer (ed.) - 2018 - Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford Handbooks.This handbook brings together past and current research on all aspects of lying and deception, with chapters contributed by leading international experts in the field. We are confronted daily with cases of lying, deception, bullshitting, and 'fake news', making it imperative to understand how lying works, how it can be defined, and whether it can be detected. A further important issue is whether lying should always be considered a bad thing or if, in some cases, it is simply a useful (...)
- Eliot Michaelson and Andreas Stokke (eds.), Lying: Language, Knowledge, Ethics, and Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 320. [REVIEW]Neri Marsili - 2021 - Utilitas 33 (4):502-505.
- Lying, speech acts, and commitment.Neri Marsili - 2020 - Synthese 199 (1-2):3245-3269.Not every speech act can be a lie. A good definition of lying should be able to draw the right distinctions between speech acts that can be lies and speech acts that under no circumstances are lies. This paper shows that no extant account of lying is able to draw the required distinctions. It argues that a definition of lying based on the notion of ‘assertoric commitment’ can succeed where other accounts have failed. Assertoric commitment is analysed in terms of (...)
- Lies in Art.Daisy Dixon - 2022 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 100 (1):25-39.This paper aims to show that any account of how artworks lie must acknowledge (I) that artworks can lie at different levels of their content—what I call ‘surface’ and ‘deep’—and (II) that, for an artwork to lie at a given level, a norm of truthful communication such as Grice’s Maxim of Quality must apply to it. A corollary is that it’s harder than you might think for artworks to lie: Quality is not automatically ‘switched on’ during our engagement with art. (...)
- On the nature of indifferent lies, a reply to Rutschmann and Wiegmann.Vladimir Krstić - 2020 - Philosophical Psychology 33 (5):757-771.In their paper published in 2017 in Philosophical Psychology, Ronja Rutschmann and Alex Wiegmann introduce a novel kind of lies, the indifferent lies. According to them, these lies are not intended to deceive simply because the liars do not care whether their audience is going to believe them or not. It seems as if indifferent lies avoid the objections raised against other kinds of lies supposedly not intended to deceive. I argue that this is not correct. Indifferent lies, too, are (...)
- Disagreement with a bald‐faced liar.Teresa Marques - 2020 - Ratio 33 (4):255-268.How can we disagree with a bald-faced liar? Can we actively disagree if it is common ground that the speaker has no intent to deceive? And why do we disapprove of bald-faced liars so strongly? Bald-faced lies pose problems for accounts of lying and of assertion. Recent proposals try to defuse those problems by arguing that bald-faced lies are not really assertions, but rather performances of fiction-like scripts, or different types of language games. In this paper, I raise two objections (...)
- Assertion and its Social Significance: An Introduction.Bianca Cepollaro, Paolo Labinaz & Neri Marsili - 2019 - Rivista Italiana di Filosofia del Linguaggio 13 (1):1-18.This paper offers a brief survey of the philosophical literature on assertion, presenting each contribution to the RIFL special issue "Assertion and its social significance" within the context of the contemporary debate in which it intervenes. The discussion is organised into three thematic sections. The first one concerns the nature of assertion and its relation with assertoric commitment – the distinctive responsibility that the speaker undertakes in virtue of making a statement. The second section considers the epistemic significance of assertion, (...)
- Review of E. Michaelson and A. Stokke (eds.): Lying: Language, Knowledge, Ethics, and Politics. [REVIEW]Emanuel Viebahn - 2019 - Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 10.
- Lying and knowing.Ben Holguín - 2019 - Synthese 198 (6):5351-5371.This paper defends the simple view that in asserting that p, one lies iff one knows that p is false. Along the way it draws some morals about deception, knowledge, Gettier cases, belief, assertion, and the relationship between first- and higher-order norms.
- Immoral lies and partial beliefs.Neri Marsili - 2022 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 65 (1):117-127.In a recent article, Krauss (2017) raises some fundamental questions concerning (i) what the desiderata of a definition of lying are, and (ii) how definitions of lying can account for partial beliefs. This paper aims to provide an adequate answer to both questions. Regarding (i), it shows that there can be a tension between two desiderata for a definition of lying: 'descriptive accuracy' (meeting intuitions about our ordinary concept of lying), and 'moral import' (meeting intuitions about what is wrong with (...)
- Why the Revised Grotian Definition of Lying Still Fails: A Reply to Vincelette.John Skalko - 2018 - Bogoslovni Vestnik 1 (78):67-77.In a recent article (2017), Alan Vincelette attempts to defend the Grotian definition of lying. In much of the article he argues when it is licit to tell a formal falsehood. This focus, however, is a mistake. In particular, Vincelette conflates two distinct questions: a) is lying ever morally permissible?, and b) is the Grotian definition of lying an adequate definition? Much of Vincelette‘s response to my earlier criticisms (Skalko 2015) of the Grotian definition focuses on (a), but neglects (b). (...)
- The Truth About Deception.Japa Pallikkathayil - 2017 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 98 (1):147-166.The prohibition on lying is often thought to be very stringent. Some have even been tempted to think that it is absolute. In contrast, the prohibition on other forms of deception seems to be looser. This paper explores the relationship between the duty not to deceive and the duty not to lie. This discussion is situated in the context of a broadly Kantian account of morality. Kant himself infamously claimed that one ought not lie to a murderer at the door (...)
- Lying, fast and slow.Angelo Turri & John Turri - 2019 - Synthese 198 (1):757-775.Researchers have debated whether there is a relationship between a statement’s truth-value and whether it counts as a lie. One view is that a statement being objectively false is essential to whether it counts as a lie; the opposing view is that a statement’s objective truth-value is inessential to whether it counts as a lie. We report five behavioral experiments that use a novel range of behavioral measures to address this issue. In each case, we found evidence of a relationship. (...)
- The Meaning of White Lie.Hossein Atrak - 2013 - Journal of Philosophical Investigations at University of Tabriz 7 (12):1-25.There is no doubt that “lying” is an unethical practice. But, in some situations, such as; where the life of an innocent person to be at risk, it is considered permissible by both the intelligence and law. The “white lie”, for ordinary people, is the lie that is permissible. But this term has become a victim of personal interpretations. As a result, many of non-permissible lies in the intelligence and law's view, because of the personal interpretation of white lie, have (...)
- Little White Lies.S. K. Wertz - 2018 - International Journal of Applied Philosophy 32 (1):49-55.Samuel Johnson has an interesting comment on consequences and the telling of “white lies.” For example “Sick People and Children are often to be deceived for their Good.” David Hume apparently endorses this concept in one of his letters. Both Johnson and Rousseau anticipate Kant’s argument about consequences in that one is to tell the truth under all circumstances. Hume, I argue, would take issue with this claim in that there are cases that warrant telling white lies. Elsewhere he speaks (...)
- Making Sense of Lies, Deceptive Propaganda, and Fake News.Bonnie Brennen - 2017 - Journal of Media Ethics 32 (3):179-181.
- Can You Lie Without Intending to Deceive?Vladimir Krstić - 2019 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 100 (2):642–660.This article defends the view that liars need not intend to deceive. I present common objections to this view in detail and then propose a case of a liar who can lie but who cannot deceive in any relevant sense. I then modify this case to get a situation in which this person lies intending to tell his hearer the truth and he does this by way of getting the hearer to recognize his intention to tell the truth by lying. (...)
- Why Did Aquinas Hold That Killing is Sometimes Just, But Never Lying?John Skalko - 2016 - Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 90:227-241.Aquinas held that lying is always a sin, an evil action. In later terminology it falls under what would be called an intrinsically evil action. Under no circumstances can it be a good action. Following Augustine, Aquinas held that even if others must die, one must still never tell a lie. Yet when it comes to self-defense and capital punishment Aquinas’s reasoning seems at odds with itself. One may kill a man in self-defense. Similarly, just as a diseased limb may (...)
- Sex By Deception.Berit Brogaard - 2022 - In Manuel Vargas & John Doris (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Moral Psychology. Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press. pp. 683-711.In this paper I will use sex by deception as a case study for highlighting some of the most tricky concepts around sexuality and moral psychology, including rape, consensual sex, sexual rights, sexual autonomy, sexual individuality, and disrespectful sex. I begin with a discussion of morally wrong sex as rooted in the breach of five sexual liberty rights that are derived from our fundamental human liberty rights: sexual self-possession, sexual autonomy, sexual individuality, sexual dignity and sexual privacy. I then argue (...)$195.94 new (collection) View on Amazon.comRemove from this list Direct downloadExport citation Bookmark 3 citations
- The Noble Art of Lying.James Mahon - 2017 - In Alan H. Goldman (ed.), Mark Twain and Philosophy. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. pp. 95-111.In this chapter, I examine the writings of Mark Twain on lying, especially his essays "On the decay of the Art of Lying" and "My First Lie, and How I Got Out of It." I show that Twain held that there were two kinds of lies: the spoken lie and the silent lie. The silent lie is the lie of not saying what one is thinking, and is far more common than the spoken lie. The greatest silent lies, according to (...)
- The Moral Gradation of Media of Deception.Shlomo Cohen - 2018 - Theoria 84 (1):60-82.A central debate in the ethics of deception concerns the moral comparison among the three media through which deception is executed: lying, falsely implicating, or nonlinguistic deception. The two prominent views are that lying is morally worse or that the choice of medium is morally insignificant. This article refutes both and argues for a new position. The article first presents a theory on the moral significance of the medium of deception as such: it argues that the medium of communication affects (...)
- Lying and Christian Ethics by Christopher O. Tollefsen. [REVIEW]John Skalko - 2016 - Nova et Vetera 14 (3):1045-1048.
- Does the Lie Contradict the Truth?Urszula Wybraniec-Skardowska - 2010 - Studies in Logic, Grammar and Rhetoric 20 (33).The main task of this work is not to determine the bases for a moral evaluation of the lie; neither is it to describe its negative qualification. We are interested rather in the very problemate of the truth and the lie itself, considered as a juxtaposition of two of its notions: the truth and the lie, one that aims to provide a positive – as it would seem obvious – answer to the question contained in the title of the present (...)
- You don't say! Lying, asserting and insincerity.Neri Marsili - 2017 - Dissertation, University of SheffieldThis thesis addresses philosophical problems concerning improper assertions. The first part considers the issue of defining lying: here, against a standard view, I argue that a lie need not intend to deceive the hearer. I define lying as an insincere assertion, and then resort to speech act theory to develop a detailed account of what an assertion is, and what can make it insincere. Even a sincere assertion, however, can be improper (e.g., it can be false, or unwarranted): in the (...)
- Lying, risk and accuracy.Sam Fox Krauss - 2017 - Analysis 77 (4):726-734.Almost all philosophers agree that a necessary condition on lying is that one says what one believes to be false. But, philosophers haven’t considered the possibility that the true requirement on lying concerns, rather, one’s degree-of-belief. Liars impose a risk on their audience. The greater the liar’s confidence that what she asserts is false, the greater the risk she’ll think she’s imposing on the dupe, and, therefore, the greater her blameworthiness. From this, I arrive at a dilemma: either the belief (...)
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