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Group Assertions and Group Lies

Topoi 42 (2):369-384 (2023)

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  1. Lying, Belief, and Knowledge.Matthew A. Benton - 2018 - In Jörg Meibauer (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Lying. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford Handbooks. pp. 120-133.
    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: (...)
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  • The Foundations of Illocutionary Logic.J. R. Searle & Daniel Vanderveken - 1989 - Linguistics and Philosophy 12 (6):745-748.
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  • Collective Agents and Cognitive Attitudes.Anthonie Meijers - 2002 - ProtoSociology 16:70-85.
    Propositional attitudes, such as beliefs, desires, and intentions, can be attributed to collective agents. In my paper I focus on cognitive attitudes, and I explore the various types of collective beliefs. I argue that there is a whole spectrum of collective beliefs, and I distinguish between two extremes: the weak opinion poll conception and the strong agreement-based conception. Strong collective beliefs should be understood in terms of the acceptance of a proposition rather than of belief proper. They are not purely (...)
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  • Rejecting Rejectionism.Deborah Perron Tollefsen - 2003 - ProtoSociology 18:389-405.
    There is a small, but growing, number of philosophers who acknowledge the existence of plural subjects – collective agents that act in the world and are the appropriate subject of intentional state ascriptions. Among those who believe in collective agency, there are some who wish to limit the types of intentional state ascriptions that can be made to collectives. According to rejectionists, although groups can accept propositions, they cannot believe them. In this paper I argue that, given the centrality of (...)
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  • What Really Divides Gilbert and the Rejectionists?K. Brad Wray - 2003 - ProtoSociology 18:363-376.
    Rejectionists argue that collective belief ascriptions are best understood as instances of collective acceptance rather than belief. Margaret Gilbert objects to rejectionist accounts of collective belief statements. She argues that rejectionists rely on a questionable methodology when they inquire into the nature of collective belief ascriptions, and make an erroneous inference when they are led to believe that collectives do not really have beliefs. Consequently, Gilbert claims that collective belief statements are best understood as instances of belief. I critically examine (...)
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  • Belief, Acceptance, and What Happens in Groups: Some Methodological Considerations.Margaret Gilbert & Daniel Pilchman - 2014 - In Jennifer Lackey (ed.), Essays in Collective Epistemology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    This paper argues for a methodological point that bears on a relatively long-standing debate concerning collective beliefs in the sense elaborated by Margaret Gilbert: are they cases of belief or rather of acceptance? It is argued that epistemological accounts and distinctions developed in individual epistemology on the basis of considering the individual case are not necessarily applicable to the collective case or, more generally, uncritically to be adopted in collective epistemology.
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  • Selfless assertions: some empirical evidence.John Turri - 2015 - Synthese 192 (4):1221-1233.
    It is increasingly recognized that knowledge is the norm of assertion. As this view has gained popularity, it has also garnered criticism. One widely discussed criticism involves thought experiments about “selfless assertion.” Selfless assertions are said to be intuitively compelling examples where agents should assert propositions that they don’t even believe and, hence, don’t know. This result is then taken to show that knowledge is not the norm of assertion. This paper reports four experiments demonstrating that “selfless assertors” are viewed (...)
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  • Truth Serum, Liar Serum, and Some Problems About Saying What You Think is False.Jessica Pepp - 2018 - In Eliot Michaelson & Andreas Stokke (eds.), Lying: Language, Knowledge, Ethics, and Politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    This chapter investigates the conflict between thought and speech that is inherent in lying. This is the conflict of saying what you think is false. The chapter shows how stubbornly saying what you think is false resists analysis. In traditional analyses of lying, saying what you think is false is analyzed in terms of saying something and believing that it is false. But standard cases of unconscious or divided belief challenge these analyses. Classic puzzles about belief from Gottlob Frege and (...)
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  • On telling patients the truth.Roger Higgs - 1985 - In Michael Lockwood (ed.), Moral dilemmas in modern medicine. New York: Oxford University Press.
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  • Pascal Engel is professor of philosophy at the Universite de Paris IV-Sorbonne (Paris). He is a member of the Institut Universitaire de France, and former Presi-dent of the Societe de Philosophic Analytique, the French branch of ESAP. He teaches philosophy of logic, of language, and of mind and has written a number of articles and books in these areas, including The Norm of Truth (1991), David. [REVIEW]Anthonie Meijers - 1999 - In Belief, Cognition, and the Will. Tilburg [The Netherlands]: Tilburg University Press. pp. 6--113.
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  • Lies and deception: an unhappy divorce.Jennifer Lackey - 2013 - Analysis 73 (2):236-248.
    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 (...)
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  • Lying as a Violation of Grice’s First Maxim of Quality.Don Fallis - 2012 - Dialectica 66 (4):563-581.
    According to the traditional philosophical definition, you lie if and only if you assert what you believe to be false with the intent to deceive. However, several philosophers (e.g., Carson 2006, Sorensen 2007, Fallis 2009) have pointed out that there are lies that are not intended to deceive and, thus, that the traditional definition fails. In 2009, I suggested an alternative definition: you lie if and only if you say what you believe to be false when you believe that one (...)
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  • Group Testimony? The Making of A Collective Good Informant.Miranda Fricker - 2012 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 84 (2):249-276.
    We gain information from collective, often institutional bodies all the time—from the publications of committees, news teams, or research groups, from web sites such as Wikipedia, and so on—but do these bodies ever function as genuine group testifiers as opposed to mere group sources of information? In putting the question this way I invoke a distinction made, if briefly, by Edward Craig, which I believe to be of deep significance in thinking about the distinctiveness of the speech act of testimony. (...)
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  • Lying and Asserting.Andreas Stokke - 2013 - Journal of Philosophy 110 (1):33-60.
    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 (...)
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  • The Presidential Address: Social Objects.Anthony Quinton - 1976 - Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 76:1 - viii.
    Anthony Quinton; I*—The Presidential Address: Social Objects, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 76, Issue 1, 1 June 1976, Pages 1–28, https://doi.
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  • Group agency: the possibility, design, and status of corporate agents.Christian List & Philip Pettit - 2011 - New York: Oxford University Press. Edited by Philip Pettit.
    Are companies, churches, and states genuine agents? Or are they just collections of individuals that give a misleading impression of unity? This question is important, since the answer dictates how we should explain the behaviour of these entities and whether we should treat them as responsible and accountable on the model of individual agents. Group Agency offers a new approach to that question and is relevant, therefore, to a range of fields from philosophy to law, politics, and the social sciences. (...)
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  • Literal force : a defence of conventional assertion.Max Kölbel - 2009 - In Sarah Sawyer (ed.), New waves in philosophy of language. New York: Palgrave-Macmillan.
    The aim of this paper is to motivate and defend a conventional approach to assertion and other illocutionary acts. Such an approach takes assertions, questions and orders to be moves within an essentially rule-governed activity similar to a game. The most controversial aspect of a conventional account of assertion is that according to it, for classifying an utterance as an assertion, question or command, “it is irrelevant what intentions the person speaking may have had” (Dummett 1973, p. 302). I understand (...)
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  • (1 other version)Group Knowledge and Group Rationality: A Judgment Aggregation Perspective.Christian List - 2005 - Episteme 2 (1):25-38.
    In this paper, I introduce the emerging theory of judgment aggregation as a framework for studying institutional design in social epistemology. When a group or collective organization is given an epistemic task, its performance may depend on its ‘aggregation procedure’, i.e. its mechanism for aggregating the group members’ individual beliefs or judgments into corresponding collective beliefs or judgments endorsed by the group as a whole. I argue that a group’s aggregation procedure plays an important role in determining whether the group (...)
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  • What Is Assertion.John MacFarlane - 2011 - In Jessica Brown & Herman Cappelen (eds.), Assertion: New Philosophical Essays. Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press.
    To assert something is to perform a certain kind of act. This act is different in kind both from other speech acts, like questions, requests, commands, promises, and apologies, and from acts that are not speech acts, like toast buttering and inarticulate yodeling. My question, then is this: what features of an act qualify it as an assertion, and not one of these other kinds of act? To focus on a particular example: in uttering “Bill will close the window,” one (...)
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  • Social objects.Anthony Quinton - 1976 - Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 76 (1):1-27.
    Anthony Quinton; I*—The Presidential Address: Social Objects, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 76, Issue 1, 1 June 1976, Pages 1–28, https://doi.
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  • Assertion and its constitutive norms.Michael Rescorla - 2009 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 79 (1):98-130.
    Alston, Searle, and Williamson advocate the restrictive model of assertion , according to which certain constitutive assertoric norms restrict which propositions one may assert. Sellars and Brandom advocate the dialectical model of assertion , which treats assertion as constituted by its role in the game of giving and asking for reasons. Sellars and Brandom develop a restrictive version of the dialectical model. I explore a non-restrictive version of the dialectical model. On such a view, constitutive assertoric norms constrain how one (...)
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  • Self-expression.Mitchell S. Green - 2007 - New York: Oxford University Press.
    Mitchell S. Green presents a systematic philosophical study of self-expression - a pervasive phenomenon of the everyday life of humans and other species, which has received scant attention in its own right. He explores the ways in which self-expression reveals our states of thought, feeling, and experience, and he defends striking new theses concerning a wide range of fascinating topics: our ability to perceive emotion in others, artistic expression, empathy, expressive language, meaning, facial expression, and speech acts. He draws on (...)
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  • Truth and objectivity.Crispin Wright - 1992 - Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
    Recasting important questions about truth and objectivity in new and helpful terms, his book will become a focus in the contemporary debates over realism, and ...
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  • Sense and reference.Gottlob Frege - 1948 - Philosophical Review 57 (3):209-230.
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  • Bald-faced lies! Lying without the intent to deceive.Roy Sorensen - 2007 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 88 (2):251-264.
    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 (...)
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  • Is assertion social?Peter Pagin - 2004
    In 1956 J. L. Austin presented his famous distinction between performative and constative.1 Roughly, whereas in a constative utterance you report an already obtaining state of affairs—you say something—in a performative utterance you create something new: you do something.2 Paradigm examples of performatives were utterances by means of which actions such as baptizing, congratulating and greeting are performed.
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  • Testimony and lies.Dan O'Brien - 2007 - Philosophical Quarterly 57 (227):225–238.
    In certain situations, lies can be used to pass on knowledge. The kinds of cases I focus on are those involving a speaker's devious manipulation of the hearer's irrational or prejudiced thought. These cases show that sometimes a speaker's knowledge of a hearer's mind is necessary for the testimonial transmission of knowledge. They also support a 'seeding' model of knowledge transmission, rather than one that is akin to the postal delivery of complete parcels of information.
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  • Modelling collective belief.Margaret Gilbert - 1987 - Synthese 73 (1):185-204.
    What is it for a group to believe something? A summative account assumes that for a group to believe that p most members of the group must believe that p. Accounts of this type are commonly proposed in interpretation of everyday ascriptions of beliefs to groups. I argue that a nonsummative account corresponds better to our unexamined understanding of such ascriptions. In particular I propose what I refer to as the joint acceptance model of group belief. I argue that group (...)
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  • The definition of lying.Thomas L. Carson - 2006 - Noûs 40 (2):284–306.
    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 (...)
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  • Norms of assertion.Matthew Weiner - 2007 - Philosophy Compass 2 (2):187–195.
    Recently attention has been paid to the epistemic requirements for proper assertion. The most popular account has been the knowledge account, that we can only properly assert what we know. Others have criticized the knowledge account and argued that the norm of assertion is truth, belief, or assertion of what it is reasonable to believe.
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  • The nature of testimony.Jennifer Lackey - 2006 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 87 (2):177–197.
    I discuss several views of the nature of testimony and show how each proposal has importantly different problems. I then offer a diagnosis of the widespread disagreement regarding this topic; specifically, I argue that our concept of testimony has two different aspects to it. Inadequate views of testimony, I claim, result either from collapsing these two aspects into a single account or from a failure to recognize one of them. Finally, I develop an alternative view of testimony that captures both (...)
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  • On the definition of lying: A reply to Jones and revisions.Thomas L. Carson - 1988 - Journal of Business Ethics 7 (7):509-514.
    Standard definitions of lying imply that intending to deceive others is a necessary condition of one's telling a lie. In an earlier paper, which appeared in this journal, Wokutch, Murrmann and I argued that intending to deceive others is not a necessary condition of one's telling a lie and proposed an alternative definition. In a reply which also appeared in this journal, Gary Jones argues that our arguments fail to establish the claim that it is possible to lie without intending (...)
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  • (2 other versions)Asserting.Robert Brandom - 1983 - Noûs 17 (4):637-650.
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  • Are Selfless Assertions Hedged?Grzegorz Gaszczyk - 2019 - Rivista Italiana di Filosofia del Linguaggio 13 (1):47-54.
    I argue against Milić's (2017) proposal of analyzing “selfless assertions” (Lackey 2007) as proper, i.e., as assertions which satisfy the norm of assertion. In his view, selfless assertions are hedged assertions governed by the knowledge norm. In my critique, I show that Milić does not make a case that selfless assertions constitute such a special class of assertions. Moreover, he does not deliver a clear criterion for differentiating between flat-out assertions and hedged ones. What is more, his proposal leaves some (...)
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  • On the Connection between Lying, Asserting, and Intending to Cause Beliefs.Vladimir Krstic - 2022 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    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 (...)
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  • Bald-Faced Lies, Blushing, and Noses that Grow: An Experimental Analysis.Vladimir Krstić & Alexander Wiegmann - 2022 - Erkenntnis 89 (2):479-502.
    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 (...)
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  • Fictions that Purport to Tell the Truth.Neri Marsili - 2022 - Philosophical Quarterly 73 (2):509-531.
    Can fictions make genuine assertions about the actual world? Proponents of the ‘Assertion View’ answer the question affirmatively: they hold that authors can assert, by means of explicit statements that are part of the work of fiction, that something is actually the case in the real world. The ‘Nonassertion’ View firmly denies this possibility. In this paper, I defend a nuanced version of the Nonassertion View. I argue that even if fictions cannot assert, they can indirectly communicate that what is (...)
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  • (1 other version)Group Lies and the Narrative Constraint.Säde Hormio - 2024 - Episteme 21 (2):478-497.
    A group is lying when it makes a statement that it believes to be untrue but wants the addressee(s) to believe. But how can we distinguish statements that the group believes to be untrue from honest group statements based on mistaken beliefs or confusion within the group? I will suggest a narrative constraint for honest group statements, made up of two components. Narrative coherence requires that a new group statement should not conflict with group knowledge on the matter, or beliefs (...)
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  • Saying, commitment, and the lying – misleading distinction.Neri Marsili & Guido Löhr - 2022 - Journal of Philosophy 119 (12):687-698.
    How can we capture the intuitive distinction between lying and misleading? According to a traditional view, the difference boils down to whether the speaker is saying (as opposed to implying) something that they believe to be false. This view is subject to known objections; to overcome them, an alternative view has emerged. For the alternative view, what matters is whether the speaker can consistently deny that they are committed to knowing the relevant proposition. We point out serious flaws for this (...)
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  • Lying: Knowledge or belief?Neri Marsili - 2021 - Philosophical Studies 179 (5):1445-1460.
    A new definition of lying is gaining traction, according to which you lie only if you say what you know to be false. Drawing inspiration from “New Evil Demon” scenarios, I present a battery of counterexamples against this “Knowledge Account” of lying. Along the way, I comment upon the methodology of conceptual analysis, the moral implications of the Knowledge Account, and its ties with knowledge-first epistemology.
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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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  • The Epistemology of Collective Testimony.Leo Townsend - 2021 - Journal of Social Ontology.
    In this paper, I explore what gives collective testimony its epistemic credentials, through a critical discussion of three competing accounts of the epistemology of collective testimony. According to the first view, collective testimony inherits its epistemic credentials from the beliefs the testimony expresses— where this can be seen either as the beliefs of all or some of the group’s members, or as the beliefs of group itself. The second view denies any necessary connection to belief, claiming instead that the epistemic (...)
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  • The Lying-Misleading Distinction: A Commitment-Based Approach.Emanuel Viebahn - 2021 - Journal of Philosophy 118 (6):289-319.
    The distinction between lying and mere misleading is commonly tied to the distinction between saying and conversationally implicating. Many definitions of lying are based on the idea that liars say something they believe to be false, while misleaders put forward a believed-false conversational implicature. The aim of this paper is to motivate, spell out, and defend an alternative approach, on which lying and misleading differ in terms of commitment: liars, but not misleaders, commit themselves to something they believe to be (...)
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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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  • Group Belief: Lessons from Lies and Bullshit.I.—Jennifer Lackey - 2020 - Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 94 (1):185-208.
    Groups and other sorts of collective entities are frequently said to believe things. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, for instance, was asked by reporters at White House press conferences whether the Trump administration ‘believes in climate change’ or ‘believes that slavery is wrong’. Similarly, it is said on the website of the Aclu of Illinois that the organization ‘firmly believes that rights should not be limited based on a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity’. A widespread philosophical view is that belief on (...)
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  • Proxy Assertion.Kirk Ludwig - 2018 - In Sanford C. Goldberg (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Assertion. Oxford University Press.
    In proxy assertion an individual or group asserts something through a spokesperson. The chapter explains proxy assertion as resting on the assignment of a status role to a person (that of spokesperson) whose utterances acts in virtue of that role have the status function of signaling that the principal is committed in a way analogous to an individual asserting that in his own voice. The chapter briefly explains how status functions and status roles are grounded and then treats, in turn, (...)
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  • What Are Group Speech Acts?Kirk Ludwig - 2020 - Language & Communication 70:46-58.
    The paper provides a taxonomy of group speech acts whose main division is that between collective speech acts (singing Happy Birthday, agreeing to meet) and group proxy speech acts in which a group, such as a corporation, employs a proxy, such as a spokesperson, to convey its official position. The paper provides an analysis of group proxy speech acts using tools developed more generally for analyzing institutional agency, particularly the concepts of shared intention, proxy agent, status role, status function, convention (...)
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  • On Bullshit.Harry G. Frankfurt - 1986 - Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
    Presents a theory of bullshit, how it differs from lying, how those who engage in it change the rules of conversation, and how indulgence in bullshit can alter a person's ability to tell the truth.
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  • Immoral lies and partial beliefs.Neri Marsili - 2022 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 65 (1):117-127.
    In a recent article, Krauss (2017) raises some fundamental questions concerning (i) what the desiderata of a definition of lying are, and (ii) how definitions of lying can account for partial beliefs. This paper aims to provide an adequate answer to both questions. Regarding (i), it shows that there can be a tension between two desiderata for a definition of lying: 'descriptive accuracy' (meeting intuitions about our ordinary concept of lying), and 'moral import' (meeting intuitions about what is wrong with (...)
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  • Group assertion and group silencing.Leo Townsend - 2020 - Language & Communication 1 (70):28-37.
    Jennifer Lackey (2018) has developed an account of the primary form of group assertion, according to which groups assert when a suitably authorized spokesperson speaks for the group. In this paper I pose a challenge for Lackey's account, arguing that her account obscures the phenomenon of group silencing. This is because, in contrast to alternative approaches that view assertions (and speech acts generally) as social acts, Lackey's account implies that speakers can successfully assert regardless of how their utterances are taken (...)
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