Are Bald‐Faced Lies Deceptive after All?

Ratio 28 (1):81-96 (2014)
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Abstract

According to the traditional philosophical definition, you lie if and only if you say something that you believe to be false and you intend to deceive someone into believing what you say. However, philosophers have recently noted the existence of bald-faced lies, lies which are not intended to deceive anyone into believing what is said. As a result, many philosophers have removed deception from their definitions of lying. According to Jennifer Lackey, this is ‘an unhappy divorce’ because it precludes an obvious explanation of the prima facie wrongness of lying. Moreover, Lackey claims that there is a sense of deception in which all lies are deceptive. In this paper, I argue that bald-faced lies are not deceptive on any plausible notion of deception. In addition, I argue that divorcing deception from lying may not be as unhappy a result as Lackey suggests

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Don Fallis
Northeastern University

Citations of this work

Lying, speech acts, and commitment.Neri Marsili - 2020 - Synthese 199 (1-2):3245-3269.
Group Assertions and Group Lies.Neri Marsili - 2023 - Topoi 42 (2):369-384.
Can You Lie Without Intending to Deceive?Vladimir Krstić - 2019 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 100 (2):642–660.
Lying and knowing.Ben Holguín - 2019 - Synthese 198 (6):5351-5371.

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Signals: Evolution, Learning, and Information.Brian Skyrms - 2010 - Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press.
Groundwork of the metaphysics of morals.Immanuel Kant - 2007 - In Elizabeth Schmidt Radcliffe, Richard McCarty, Fritz Allhoff & Anand Vaidya (eds.), Late modern philosophy: essential readings with commentary. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.

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