Altruistic deception (or the telling of “white lies”) is common in humans. Does it also exist in non-human animals? On some definitions of deception, altruistic deception is impossible by definition, whereas others make it too easy by counting useful-but-ambiguous information as deceptive. I argue for a definition that makes altruistic deception possible in principle without trivializing it. On my proposal, deception requires the strategic exploitation of a receiver by a sender, where “exploitation” implies that the sender elicits a behaviour in (...) the receiver that is beneficial in a different type of situation and is expressed only because the signal raises the probability, from the receiver’s standpoint, of that type of situation. I then offer an example of a real signal that is deceptive in this sense, and yet potentially altruistic (and certainly cooperative): the purr call of the pied babbler. Fledglings associate purr calls with food, and adults exploit this learned association, in the absence of food, to lead fledglings away from predators following an alarm call. I conclude by considering why altruistic deception is apparently so rare in non-human animals. (shrink)

Sorensen says that my assertion that p is a knowledge-lie if it is meant to undermine your justification for believing truly that ∼p, not to make you believe that p and that, therefore, knowledge-lies are not intended to deceive. It has been objected that they are meant to deceive because they are intended to make you more confident in a falsehood. In this paper, I propose a novel account according to which an assertion that p is a knowledge-lie if it (...) is intended not to provide evidence that p but to make you stop trusting all testimonies concerning whether p, which is how they undermine your testimonial knowledge. Because they are not intended to provide evidence that bears on the truth of p, they are not intended to make you more confident in a falsehood; therefore, knowledge-lies are not intended to deceive. This makes them a problem for the traditional account, which takes the intention to deceive as necessary for lying, and an interesting example of Kant's idea that allowing lies whenever one feels like it would bring it about that statements in general are not believed. (shrink)

Deception has recently received a significant amount of attention. One of main reasons is that it lies at the intersection of various areas of research, such as the evolution of cooperation, animal communication, ethics or epistemology. This essay focuses on the biological approach to deception and argues that standard definitions put forward by most biologists and philosophers are inadequate. We provide a functional account of deception which solves the problems of extant accounts in virtue of two characteristics: deceptive states have (...) the function of causing a misinformative states and they do not necessarily provide direct benefits to the deceivers and losses to the targets. (shrink)

A satisfactory analysis of human deception must rule out cases where it is a mistake or an accident that person B was misled by person A's behavior. Therefore, most scholars think that deceivers must intend to deceive. This article argues that there is a better solution: rather than appealing to the deceiver's intentions, we should appeal to the function of their behavior. After all, animals and plants engage in deception, and most of them are not capable of forming intentions. Accordingly, (...) certain human behavior is deceptive if and only if its function is to mislead. This solves our problem because if the function of A's behavior was to mislead, B's ending up misled was not an accident or a mere mistake even if A did not intend to deceive B. (shrink)

This paper argues that extant signalling-based analyses cannot explain a range of cases of biological (and psychological) deception, such as those in which the deceiver does not send a signal at all, but that Artiga and Paternotte’s (Philos Stud 175:579–600, 2018) functional and my (Krstić in The analysis of self-deception: rehabilitating the traditionalist account. PhD Dissertation, University of Auckland, 2018: §3; Krstić and Saville in Australas J Philos 97:830–835, 2019) manipulativist analyses can. Therefore, the latter views should be given preference. (...) And because we still do not have a satisfactory definition of manipulation, the functional analysis, according to which a state is deceptive iff its function is to mislead and it misleads, is currently our best theory of deception. This is not to argue that the signalling-based analyses have no value but only that they should not be used in general analyses of biological deception. We need to move on to some other interesting issues. (shrink)

The standard conception of misleading evidence has it that e is misleading evidence that p iff e is evidence that p and p is false. I argue that this conception yields incorrect verdicts when we consider what it is for evidence to be misleading with respect to questions like whether p. Instead, we should adopt a conception of misleading evidence according to which e is misleading with respect to a question only if e is in-fact irrelevant to that question – (...) a relation that requires that e fail to be both explanatorily connected to and evidence for any truth that answers the question. This modified conception allows e to be non-misleading evidence with respect to a question even if e is evidence for the false answer to that question. It also points toward a new argument for and explanation of the truth of a central premise – what Maria Lasonen-Aarnio dubs “Entitlement” – that generates the infamous dogmatism puzzle. (shrink)

Deception has long been an important topic in philosophy. However, the traditional analysis of the concept, which requires that a deceiver intentionally cause her victim to have a false belief, rules out the possibility of much deception in the animal kingdom. Cognitively unsophisticated species, such as fireflies and butterflies, have simply evolved to mislead potential predators and/or prey. To capture such cases of “functional deception,” several researchers Machiavellian intelligence II, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp 112–143, 1997; Searcy and Nowicki, The (...) evolution of animal communication, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2005; Skyrms, Signals, Oxford University Press, Oxford 2010) have endorsed the broader view that deception only requires that a deceiver benefit from sending a misleading signal. Moreover, in order to facilitate game-theoretic study of deception in the context of Lewisian sender-receiver games, Brian Skyrms has proposed an influential formal analysis of this view. Such formal analyses have the potential to enhance our philosophical understanding of deception in humans as well as animals. However, as we argue in this paper, Skyrms’s analysis, as well as two recently proposed alternative analyses, are seriously flawed and can lead us to draw unwarranted conclusions about deception. (shrink)

In cases of animal mimicry, the receiver of the signal learns the truth that he is either dealing with the real thing or with a mimic. Thus, despite being a prototypical example of animal deception, mimicry does not seem to qualify as deception on the traditional definition, since the receiver is not actually misled. We offer a new account of propositional content in sender-receiver games that explains how the receiver is misled by mimicry. We show that previous accounts of deception, (...) and of propositional content, give incorrect results about whether certain signals are deceptive. (shrink)

Measures of epistemic utility are used by formal epistemologists to make determinations of epistemic betterness among cognitive states. The Brier rule is the most popular choice among formal epistemologists for such a measure. In this paper, however, we show that the Brier rule is sometimes seriously wrong about whether one cognitive state is epistemically better than another. In particular, there are cases where an agent gets evidence that definitively eliminates a false hypothesis, but where the Brier rule says that things (...) have become epistemically worse. Along the way to this ‘elimination experiment’ counter-example to the Brier rule as a measure of epistemic utility, we identify several useful monotonicity principles for epistemic betterness. We also reply to several potential objections to this counter-example. (shrink)

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. (shrink)