The potential capacity for robots to deceive has received considerable attention recently. Many papers explore the technical possibility for a robot to engage in deception for beneficial purposes (e.g., in education or health). In this short experimental paper, I focus on a more paradigmatic case: robot lying (lying being the textbook example of deception) for nonbeneficial purposes as judged from the human point of view. More precisely, I present an empirical experiment that investigates the following three questions: (a) Are ordinary (...) people willing to ascribe deceptive intentions to artificial agents? (b) Are they as willing to judge a robot lie as a lie as they would be when human agents engage in verbal deception? (c) Do people blame a lying artificial agent to the same extent as a lying human agent? The response to all three questions is a resounding yes. This, I argue, implies that robot deception and its normative consequences deserve considerably more attention than they presently receive. (shrink)

I discuss the issue whether the kind of nonobservational knowledge about our intentional actions that can be detected in ideal, paradigmatic cases can also be present when the agent is not confident enough to believe she will succeed in fulfilling her intention. It might be tempting to assume that if the agent’s confidence about what she is doing is relevantly increased after some observation, then the acquired practical knowledge has to be observational. I argue that this is a wrong reaction. (...) On the one hand, I defend that practical knowledge is non-perceptual even in those cases. On the other hand, I insist that the rejection of certain common assumptions about the difference between those cases and the more ideal ones gives us a better understanding of what is going on in the latter. (shrink)