What is the relationship between lying, belief, and knowledge? Prominent accounts of lying define it in terms of belief, namely telling someone something one believes to be false, often with the intent to deceive. This paper develops a novel account of lying by deriving evaluative dimensions of responsibility from the knowledge norm of assertion. Lies are best understood as special cases of vicious assertion; lying is the anti-paradigm of proper assertion. This enables an account of lying in terms of knowledge: (...) roughly, lying is telling someone something you know ain't so. (shrink)

1. Lying -- 2. The problem of what is said -- 3. What is said -- 4. Is lying worse than merely misleading? -- 5. Some interesting cases.

We have good reason to condemn lying more strongly than misleading and to condemn bullshit assertion less harshly than lying but more harshly than misleading. We each have good reason to mislead rather than make bullshit assertions, but to make bullshit assertions rather than lie. This is because these forms of deception damage credibility in different ways. We can trust the misleader to assert only what they believe to be true. We can trust the bullshitter not to assert what they (...) believe to be false. We cannot trust the liar at all. (shrink)

The paper argues that the correct definition of lying is that to lie is to assert something one believes to be false, where assertion is understood in terms of the notion of the common ground of a conversation. It is shown that this definition makes the right predictions for a number of cases involving irony, joking, and false implicature. In addition, the proposed account does not assume that intending to deceive is a necessary condition on lying, and hence counts so-called (...) bald-faced lies as lies. (shrink)

Sorensen offers the following definition of a ‘knowledge-lie’: ‘An assertion that p is a knowledge-lie exactly if intended to prevent the addressee from knowing that p is untrue but is not intended to deceive the addressee into believing p.’ According to Sorensen, knowledge-lies are not meant to deceive their addressee, and this fact is supposed to make them less bad than ordinary lies. I will argue that standard cases of knowledge-lies, including almost all the cases Sorensen considers, do in fact (...) involve deception, contrary to what Sorensen claims. And while there are cases of non-deceptive knowledge-lies, such cases are deviant, either because it is only incidental that the knowledge-preventing assertion is a lie, or because it is only incidental that the lie doesn't deceive. Here's an example of a knowledge-lie: Dr Head is considering firing Dr Appendix because of his weak research. But he doesn't want to fire Appendix unless he knows that Appendix's research isn't good, and so he consults Dr Heart. Head knows that if Appendix's research is good, then Heart will tell the truth and say so, whereas if Appendix's work isn't good, then Heart may or may not …. (shrink)

Surprisingly, the fact that the speaker is lying is sometimes common knowledge between everyone involved. Strangely, we condemn these bald-faced lies more severely than disguised lies. The wrongness of lying springs from the intent to deceive – just the feature missing in the case of bald-faced lies. These puzzling lies arise systematically when assertions are forced. Intellectual duress helps to explain another type of non-deceptive false assertion : lying to yourself. In the end, I conclude that the apparent intensity of (...) our disapproval of non-deceptive lies is a rhetorical illusion. (shrink)

This paper is about the connection between rationality and accuracy. I show that one natural picture about how rationality and accuracy are connected emerges if we assume that rational agents are rationally omniscient. I then develop an alternative picture that allows us to relax this assumption, in order to accommodate certain views about higher order evidence.

I argue that lying is generally morally better than mere deliberate misleading because the latter involves the exploitation of a greater trust and more seriously abuses our willingness to fulfil epistemic and moral obligations to others. Whereas the liar relies on our figuring out and accepting only what is asserted, the mere deliberate misleader depends on our actively inferring meaning beyond what is said in the form of conversational implicatures as well. When others’ epistemic and moral obligations are determined by (...) standard assumptions of communicative cooperation and no compelling moral reason justifies mere deliberate misleading instead, one had better lie. (shrink)

As an empirical inquiry into the nature of meaning, semantics must rely on data. Unfortunately, the primary data to which philosophers and linguists have traditionally appealed—judgments on the truth and falsity of sentences—have long been known to vary widely between competent speakers in a number of interesting cases. The present article constitutes an experiment in how to obtain some more consistent data for the enterprise of semantics. Specifically, it argues from some widely accepted Gricean premises to the conclusion that judgments (...) on lying are semantically relevant. It then endeavors to show how, assuming the relevance of such judgments, we can use them to generate a useful, widely acceptable test for semantic content. (shrink)

According to a traditional view, one lies if and only if one asserts what one believes is false and with the intent to deceive one’s audience. Recently, many theorists have challenged the requirement of intent to deceive. The principal reason offered appeals to so-called bald-faced lies wherein one asserts what one believes is false without intent to deceive. I argue that, assuming a reasonable model of assertion, two of the most prominent examples of bald-faced lies fail to be genuinely assertoric. (...) As such, they fail as counter-examples to the view that intent to deceive is a necessary condition on lying. (shrink)

The traditional view of lying holds that this phenomenon involves two central components: stating what one does not believe oneself and doing so with the intention to deceive. This view remained the generally accepted view of the nature of lying until very recently, with the intention-to-deceive requirement now coming under repeated attack. In this article, I argue that the tides have turned too quickly in the literature on lying. For while it is indeed true that there can be lies where (...) there is no intention on the part of the speaker to deceive the hearer, this does not warrant severing the connection between lying and deception altogether. Thus, I defend the following account of lying: A lies to B if and only if (1) A states that p to B, (2) A believes that p is false, and (3) A intends to be deceptive to B in stating that p. (shrink)

In this paper, I explore the relationship between epistemic rationality and instrumental rationality, and I attempt to delineate their respective roles in typical instances of theoretical reasoning. My primary concern is with the instrumentalist conception of epistemic rationality: the view that epistemic rationality is simply a species of instrumental rationality, viz. instrumental rationality in the service of one's cognitive or epistemic goals. After sketching the relevance of the instrumentalist conception to debates over naturalism and 'the ethics of belief', I argue (...) that, despite enjoying considerable popularity among both epistemologists and philosophers of science, it is ultimately indefensible. Having thus argued for the distinctness of epistemic and instrumental rationality, I attempt to clarify the role played by each in typical instances of theoretical reasoning. I suggest that being theoretically rational--that is, being proficient with respect to theoretical reasoning--is best construed as a hybrid virtue, inasmuch as it involves manifesting sensitivity to two very different kinds of reasons. (shrink)

According to the naïve, pre-theoretic conception, lying seems to be characterized by the intent to deceive. However, certain kinds of bald-faced lies appear to be counterexamples to this view, and many philosophers have abandoned it as a result. I argue that this criticism of the naïve view is misplaced; bald-faced lies are not genuine instances of lying because they are not genuine instances of assertion. I present an additional consideration in favor of the naïve view, which is that abandoning it (...) comes at an extremely high price; alternative accounts which eschew the intent-to-deceive condition on lying have difficulty distinguishing lies from non-literal speech. (shrink)

The pragmatic character of the Dutch book argument makes it unsuitable as an "epistemic" justification for the fundamental probabilist dogma that rational partial beliefs must conform to the axioms of probability. To secure an appropriately epistemic justification for this conclusion, one must explain what it means for a system of partial beliefs to accurately represent the state of the world, and then show that partial beliefs that violate the laws of probability are invariably less accurate than they could be otherwise. (...) The first task can be accomplished once we realize that the accuracy of systems of partial beliefs can be measured on a gradational scale that satisfies a small set of formal constraints, each of which has a sound epistemic motivation. When accuracy is measured in this way it can be shown that any system of degrees of belief that violates the axioms of probability can be replaced by an alternative system that obeys the axioms and yet is more accurate in every possible world. Since epistemically rational agents must strive to hold accurate beliefs, this establishes conformity with the axioms of probability as a norm of epistemic rationality whatever its prudential merits or defects might be. (shrink)

Believing rationally is epistemically valuable, or so we tend to think. It’s something we strive for in our own beliefs, and we criticize others for falling short of it. We theorize about rationality, in part, because we want to be rational. But why? I argue that how we answer this question depends on how permissive our theory of rationality is. Impermissive and extremely permissive views can give good answers; moderately permissive views cannot.

In order to lie, you have to say something that you believe to be false. But lying is not simply saying what you believe to be false. Philosophers have made several suggestions for what the additional condition might be. For example, it has been suggested that the liar has to intend to deceive (Augustine 395, Bok 1978, Mahon 2006), that she has to believe that she will deceive (Chisholm and Feehan 1977), or that she has to warrant the truth of (...) what she says (Carson 2006). In this paper, I argue that none of the existing definitions of lying identify a necessary condition on lying. I claim that lying is saying what you believe to be false when you believe that the following norm of conversation is in effect: "Do not say what you believe to be false" (Grice 1989, 27). And I argue that this definition handles all of the counter-examples to the existing definitions. (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)

Through the use of such "folk" concepts as belief, desire, intention, and expectation, Daniel Dennett asserts in this first full scale presentation of...

What role, if any, does formal logic play in characterizing epistemically rational belief? Traditionally, belief is seen in a binary way - either one believes a proposition, or one doesn't. Given this picture, it is attractive to impose certain deductive constraints on rational belief: that one's beliefs be logically consistent, and that one believe the logical consequences of one's beliefs. A less popular picture sees belief as a graded phenomenon.

Few moral questions have greater bearing on the conduct of our everyday lives than questions about the morality of lying. These questions are also important for ethical theory. An important test of any theory of right and wrong is whether it gives an adequate account of the morality of lying. Conceptual questions about the nature of lying are prior to questions about the moral status of lying. Any theory about the moral status of lying presupposes an account of what lying (...) is. (shrink)

A thoughtful addition to the growing debate over public and private morality. Looks at lying and deception in law, family, medicine, government.

In the philosophical debate on lying, there has generally been agreement that either the speaker believes that his statement is false, or he believes that his statement is true. This article challenges this assumption, and argues that lying is a scalar phenomenon that allows for a number of intermediate cases – the most obvious being cases of uncertainty. The first section shows that lying can involve beliefs about graded truth values (fuzzy lies) and graded beliefs (graded-belief lies). It puts forward (...) a new definition to deal with these scalar parameters, that requires that the speaker asserts what he believes more likely to be false than true. The second section shows that statements are scalar in the same way beliefs are, and accounts for a further element of scalarity, illocutionary force. (shrink)

According to accuracy-first epistemology, accuracy is the fundamental epistemic good. Epistemic norms — Probabilism, Conditionalization, the Principal Principle, etc. — have their binding force in virtue of helping to secure this good. To make this idea precise, accuracy-firsters invoke Epistemic Decision Theory (EpDT) to determine which epistemic policies are the best means toward the end of accuracy. Hilary Greaves and others have recently challenged the tenability of this programme. Their arguments purport to show that EpDT encourages obviously epistemically irrational behavior. (...) We develop firmer conceptual foundations for EpDT. First, we detail a theory of praxic and epistemic good. Then we show that, in light of their very different good-making features, EpDT will evaluate epistemic states and epistemic acts according to different criteria. So, in general, rational preference over states and acts won’t agree. Finally, we argue that based on direction-of-fit considerations, it’s preferences over the former that matter for normative epistemology, and that EpDT, properly spelt out, arrives at the correct verdicts in a range of putative problem cases. (shrink)