Abstract

Faced with the impossibility of reaching any reductive analysis of the concept of lying, Tobies Grimaltos and Sergi Rosell have proposed a conception thereof that is based on its paradigmatic conditions. Among those conditions, the one of deceiving the listener is prominent. The relationship between lying and deceiving would be crucial in order to understand the paradigmatic cases of the concept, even if merely contingent — a thesis with important implications for its moral assessment. I present their proposal here and advance three objections to it. First: that any theory of lying should be built on a theory of assertion, which already delimits what is properly said in parasitic uses of language (such as metaphor or irony). Second: that we should distinguish the uses of lying from its constituent aspects, among which the intention to lie stands out. And third: that a paradigmatic model of lying should assume an epistemic condition, and not merely a doxastic one, according to which lying is, paradigmatically, saying something that one knows to be false.