Can a Question Be a Lie? An Empirical Investigation

Abstract

In several recent papers and a monograph, Andreas Stokke argues that questions can be misleading, but that they cannot be lies. The aim of this paper is to show that ordinary speakers disagree. We show that ordinary speakers judge certain kinds of insincere questions to be lies, namely questions carrying a believed false presupposition the speaker intends to convey. These judgements are robust and remain so when the participants are given the possibility of classifying the utterances as misleading or as deceiving. The judgements contrast with judgements participants give about cases of misleading or deceptive behaviour, and they pattern with judgements participants make about declarative lies. Finally, the possibility of lying with non-declaratives is not confined to questions: ordinary speakers also judge utterances of imperative, exclamative and optative sentences carrying believed-false presuppositions to be lies.

Cross-cultural studies on concepts of lying: methodological approaches and their findings. Forthcoming in: A. Wiegmann (ed): Lying, Fake News, and Bullshit. Bloomsbury: Advances in Experimental Philosophy.

“…Although some authors considered this possible (Meibauer 2005(Meibauer , 2011(Meibauer , 2014Viebahn 2017), others described different intuitions and explanations (Dynel 2011;Fallis 2009;Saul 2012;Stokke 2013;Vincent and Castelfranchi 1981). Many studies reported evidence that English speakers conceptualize non-literal falsehoods as lies (Reins and Wiegmann 2021;Viebahn et al 2021;Weissman and Terkourafi 2019;Wiegmann and Willemsen 2017), but just a few expanded the research to other cultural and linguistic communities.…”

Truth Evaluators: A different point of view on the lying/misleading distinction

“…To measure the lie ratings, I used a continuous measurement tool rather than a binary response format. While, according to Viebahn et al, 2021, this choice appears to be inconsequential, methodologically it seems more appropriate as a continuous measurement tool allows us to examine to what extent the speaker is perceived as lying. That is, given that truth evaluations/lie ratings are gradient in naturei.e., something can be more or less of a (full-fledged) liethe continuous tool seems ideal for reflecting this property.…”

“…Since the seminal work on prototypical lies by Coleman & Kay (1981), researchers have explored whether speakers are perceived as lying when communicating a literally true statement which indirectly, yet intentionally, conveys a believed-false content, by means of Particularized Conversational Implicatures (PCIs) (Orr et al, 2017), Generalized Conversational Implicatures (GCIs) (Weissman & Terkourafi, 2019), questions (Viebahn et al, 2021), presuppositions (Reins & Wiegmann, 2021) and so forth. 1 These studies were, to varying degrees, a reaction to the alignment of lying with false explicit content, and misleading claims with false implicated content (an alignment advocated by Adler, 1997;Saul, 2012;Horn, 2017;Stokke, 2016Stokke, , 2018; But see Meibauer 2005Meibauer , 2011Meibauer , 2014aMeibauer , 2014bMeibauer , 2018Meibauer , 2019 for an alternative view).…”

“…et al did not explore whether 'a literally true statement with a false implicature' also differs significantly from 'a literally false statement'. In other studies, a lie is defined as any content that significantly exceeds the midpoint on the relevant scale (see for example Reins & Wiegmann, 2021;Viebahn et al, 2021). However, exceeding the midpoint does not ensure a homogeneous category.…”

Lying with Uninformative Speech Acts

“…Such a process is called presupposition accommodation. 12 Crucially, all cases of presuppositional lies discussed in literature are based on this process (see Meibauer 2014;Viebahn 2020;Viebahn et al 2021). Take the following example (Viebahn 2020, 735):…”