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 (Krstić 2020), 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 confidently believes is true, and (4) sincerity, since it suggests that asserting a proposition you believe is true is neither sufficient nor necessary for sincerity. If I am right about (1) and (2), then (3) and (4) follow easily. Therefore, the paper is mainly devoted to an analysis of transparent delusion and defending (1) and (2). (shrink)

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 (...) with another; rather, they may just increase existing credence in a proposition they already believe is true. (shrink)

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 (...) analysis. (shrink)

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 (...) deceive are not genuine lies because they do not involve assertions and you need to assert in order to lie. In this paper, I reject this argument by arguing that the first premise is false: intending to give your hearer a reason to believe what you say is not necessary for asserting. (shrink)

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 (...) the protagonists from our examples lied without intending to deceive, and the results of our surveys confirmed this hypothesis: most of our participants rated tell-tale sign lies as lies not intended to deceive. Therefore, our analysis suggests that common folk think that some lies are not intended to deceive. (shrink)