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Non-literal Lies

Erkenntnis 82 (6):1367-1380 (2017)

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  1. Fictions that don’t tell the truth.Neri Marsili - 2024 - Philosophical Studies 181 (5):1025-1046.
    Can fictions lie? According to a classic conception, works of fiction can never contain lies, since their content is not presented as true, nor is it meant to deceive us. But this classic view can be challenged. Sometimes fictions appear to make claims about the actual world, and these claims can be designed to convey falsehoods, historical misconceptions, and even pernicious stereotypes. Should we conclude that some fictional statements are lies? This article introduces two views that support a positive answer, (...)
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  • What does it take to tell a lie?Emanuel Viebahn - forthcoming - In Alex Wiegmann (ed.), Lying, Fake News, and Bullshit. Bloomsbury. pp. 1-24.
    Lying requires asserting a disbelieved proposition, that much is widely accepted in the debate on how to define lying. But what else is required? Does lying require a particular linguistic manner of expression, such as saying? Does the proposition asserted have to be false (and not merely disbelieved)? And does lying require an intention to deceive? The aim of this chapter is to provide an opinionated introduction to the debates on these questions that takes into account both theoretical considerations and (...)
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  • No norm for (off the record) implicatures.Javier González de Prado - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    It is widely held that there is a distinctive norm of assertion. A plausible idea is that there is an analogous, perhaps weaker, norm for indirect communication via implicatures. I argue against this type of proposal. My claim is that the norm of assertion is a social norm governing public updates to the conversational record. Off the record implicatures are not subject to social norms of this type. I grant that, as happens in general with intentional actions, off the record (...)
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  • Truth and directness in pictorial assertion.Lukas Lewerentz & Emanuel Viebahn - 2023 - Linguistics and Philosophy 46 (6):1441–1465.
    This paper develops an account of accuracy and truth in pictorial assertion. It argues that there are two ways in which pictorial assertions can be indirect: with respect to their content and with respect to their target. This twofold indirectness explains how accurate, unedited pictures can be used to make false pictorial assertions. It captures the fishiness of true pictorial assertions involving target-indirectness, such as true pictorial assertions involving outdated pictures. And it raises the question whether target-indirectness may also arise (...)
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  • The Wrong of Lying and the Good of Language: A Reply to “What’s the Good of Language?”.Brian Haas - 2023 - Ethics 133 (4):558-572.
    Sam Berstler has recently argued for a fairness-based moral difference between lying and misleading. According to Berstler, the liar, but not the misleader, unfairly free rides on the Lewisian conventions which ground public-language meaning. Although compelling, the pragmatic and metasemantic backdrop within which this moral reason is located allows for the generation of a vicious explanatory circle. Simply, this backdrop entails that no speaker has ever performed an assertion. As I argue, escaping the circle requires rejecting Berstler’s fairness-based reason against (...)
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  • Lying versus misleading, with language and pictures: the adverbial account.Manuel García-Carpintero - 2023 - Linguistics and Philosophy 46 (3):509-532.
    We intuitively make a distinction between _lying_ and _misleading_. On the explanation of this phenomenon favored here—the _adverbial_ account—the distinction tracks whether the content and its truth-committing force are literally conveyed. On an alternative _commitment_ account, the difference between lying and misleading is predicated instead on the strength of assertoric commitment. One lies when one presents with full assertoric commitment what one believes to be false; one merely misleads when one presents it without full assertoric commitment, by merely hinting or (...)
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  • Group Assertions and Group Lies.Neri Marsili - 2023 - Topoi 42 (2):369-384.
    Groups, like individuals, can communicate. They can issue statements, make promises, give advice. Sometimes, in doing so, they lie and deceive. The goal of this paper is to offer a precise characterisation of what it means for a group to make an assertion and to lie. I begin by showing that Lackey’s influential account of group assertion is unable to distinguish assertions from other speech acts, explicit statements from implicatures, and lying from misleading. I propose an alternative view, according to (...)
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  • Minimal contents, lying, and conventions of language.Massimiliano Vignolo - 2022 - Synthese 200 (2):1-25.
    One recurrent objection against minimalism is that minimal contents have no theoretical role. It has recently been argued that minimal contents serve to draw the distinction between lying and misleading. In Sect. 1 and Sect. 2 I summarise the main argument in support of that claim and contend that it is inconclusive. In Sect. 3 I discuss some cases of lying and some of misleading that raise difficulties for minimalism. In Sect. 4 I make a diagnosis of the failure of (...)
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  • Lying, Misleading, and Fairness.Emanuel Viebahn - 2022 - Ethics 132 (3):736-751.
    Sam Berstler defends a general moral advantage for misleading over lying by arguing that liars, but not misleaders, act unfairly toward the other members of their linguistic community. This article spells out three difficulties for Berstler’s account. First, though Berstler aims to avoid an error theory, it is dubitable that her account fits with intuitions on the matter. Second, there are some lies that do not exhibit the unfairness Berstler identifies. Third, fairness is not the only morally relevant difference between (...)
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  • Assertoric content, responsibility, and metasemantics.Andrew Peet - 2021 - Mind and Language 37 (5):914-932.
    I argue that assertoric content functions as a means for us to track the responsibilities undertaken by communicators, and that distinctively assertoric commitments are distinguished by being generated directly in virtue of the words the speaker uses. This raises two questions: (a) Why are speakers responsible for the content thus generated? (b) Why is it important for us to distinguish between commitments in terms of their manner of generation? I answer the first question by developing a novel responsibility based metasemantics. (...)
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  • 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.
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  • Is Lying Bound to Commitment? Empirically Investigating Deceptive Presuppositions, Implicatures, and Actions.Louisa M. Reins & Alex Wiegmann - 2021 - Cognitive Science 45 (2):e12936.
    Lying is an important moral phenomenon that most people are affected by on a daily basis—be it in personal relationships, in political debates, or in the form of fake news. Nevertheless, surprisingly little is known about what actually constitutes a lie. According to the traditional definition of lying, a person lies if they explicitly express something they believe to be false. Consequently, it is often assumed that people cannot lie by more indirectly communicating believed‐false claims, for instance by merely conversationally (...)
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  • 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 (...)
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  • 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. (...)
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  • Sneaky Assertions.Manuel García-Carpintero - 2018 - Philosophical Perspectives 32 (1):188-218.
    Some speech acts are made indirectly. It is thus natural to think that assertions could also be made indirectly. Grice’s conversational implicatures appear to be just a case of this, in which one indirectly makes an assertion or a related constative act by means of a declarative sentence. Several arguments, however, have been given against indirect assertions, by Davis (1999), Fricker (2012), Green (2007, 2015), Lepore & Stone (2010, 2015) and others. This paper confronts and rejects three considerations that have (...)
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  • Lying with Pictures.Emanuel Viebahn - 2019 - British Journal of Aesthetics 59 (3):243-257.
    Pictures are notably absent from the current debate about how to define lying. Theorists in this debate tend to focus on linguistic means of communication and do not consider the possibility of lying with photographs, drawings and other kinds of pictures. The aim of this paper is to show that such a narrow focus is misguided: there is a strong case to be made for the possibility of lying with pictures and this possibility allows for insights concerning the question of (...)
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  • Lying with Presuppositions.Emanuel Viebahn - 2020 - Noûs 54 (3):731-751.
    It is widely held that all lies are assertions: the traditional definition of lying entails that, in order to lie, speakers have to assert something they believe to be false. It is also widely held that assertion contrasts with presupposition and, in particular, that one cannot assert something by presupposing it. Together, these views imply that speakers cannot lie with presuppositions—a view that Andreas Stokke has recently explicitly defended. The aim of this paper is to argue that speakers can lie (...)
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  • You don't say! Lying, asserting and insincerity.Neri Marsili - 2017 - Dissertation, University of Sheffield
    This 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 (...)
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  • Lying with Uninformative Speech Acts.Grzegorz Gaszczyk - 2022 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 52 (7):746-760.
    I propose an analysis of lying with uninformative speech acts. The orthodox view states that lying is restricted to assertions. However, the growing case for non-assertoric lies made by presuppositions or conventional implicatures challenges this orthodoxy. So far, the only presuppositions to have been considered as lies were informative presuppositions. In fact, uninformative lies were not discussed in the philosophical literature. However, limiting the possibility of lying to informative speech acts is too restrictive. Firstly, I show that standard, uninformative presuppositions (...)
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  • Lying and What is Said.Massimiliano Vignolo - 2024 - Erkenntnis 89 (7):2703-2732.
    Says-based definitions of lying require a notion of what is said. I argue that a conventions-based notion of utterance content inspired by Korta and Perry’s (in: Tsohatzidis (ed), John Searle's philosophy of language: Force, meaning, and thought, Cambridge University Press, 2007a) _locutionary content_ and Devitt’s (Overlooking conventions. The trouble with linguistic pragmatism, Springer, 2021) _what is said_ meets the desiderata for that theoretical role. In Sect. 1 I recall two received says-based definitions of lying and the notions of what is (...)
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  • Lying, hedging, and the norms of assertion.Noah Betz-Richman - 2022 - Synthese 200 (2).
    The concept of lying is generally assumed to be closely related to the concept of assertion. However, the literature on lying has focused almost exclusively on lies expressed by unqualified assertions. Sometimes a speaker chooses to qualify her assertion by hedging, making her utterance a hedged declarative. This paper defends the thesis that lies can be expressed by untruthful hedged declaratives, and explores the implications of this thesis for the definition of lying. Many standard approaches to the definition of lying (...)
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  • True lies and Moorean redundancy.Alex Wiegmann & Emanuel Viebahn - 2021 - Synthese 199 (5-6):13053-13066.
    According to the subjective view of lying, speakers can lie by asserting a true proposition, as long as they believe this proposition to be false. This view contrasts with the objective view, according to which lying requires the actual falsity of the proposition asserted. The aim of this paper is to draw attention to pairs of assertions that differ only in intuitively redundant content and to show that such pairs of assertions are a reason to favour the subjective view of (...)
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  • To lie or to mislead?Felix Https://Orcidorg Timmermann & Emanuel Https://Orcidorg Viebahn - 2020 - Philosophical Studies 178 (5):1481-1501.
    The aim of this paper is to argue that lying differs from mere misleading in a way that can be morally relevant: liars commit themselves to something they believe to be false, while misleaders avoid such commitment, and this difference can make a moral difference. Even holding all else fixed, a lie can therefore be morally worse than a corresponding misleading utterance. But, we argue, there are also cases in which the difference in commitment makes lying morally better than misleading, (...)
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  • Empirically Investigating the Concept of Lying.Alex Wiegmann, Ronja Rutschmann & Pascale Https://Orcidorg Willemsen - 2017 - Journal of the Indian Council of Philosophical Research 34 (3):591-609.
    Lying is an everyday moral phenomenon about which philosophers have written a lot. Not only the moral status of lying has been intensively discussed but also what it means to lie in the first place. Perhaps the most important criterion for an adequate definition of lying is that it fits with people’s understanding and use of this concept. In this light, it comes as a surprise that researchers only recently started to empirically investigate the folk concept of lying. In this (...)
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  • Can a Robot Lie? Exploring the Folk Concept of Lying as Applied to Artificial Agents.Markus Https://Orcidorg Kneer - 2021 - Cognitive Science 45 (10):e13032.
    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 (...)
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  • The Lying/Misleading Distinction Belied.Palle Leth - unknown
    The Lying/Misleading Distinction Belied.
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