Lies, damned lies, and statistics: An empirical investigation of the concept of lying

Arico, Adam; Fallis, Don

doi:10.1080/09515089.2012.725977

Cited by 33 publications

(35 citation statements)

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“…For more recent studies, see e.g. Arico & Fallis (2013), Turri & Turri (2015), Marsili (2016), Wiegmann, Samland, & Waldmann (2016), Meibauer (2016), Rutschmann & Wiegmann (2017) and Wiegmann & Willemsen (2017). 9 Marsili (2016) investigates whether speakers can lie with promises, and thus with non-assertive speech-acts.…”

Section: John's Mercedesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Can a question be a lie? An empirical investigation

Viebahn¹,

Wiegmann²,

Engelmann³

et al. 2018

Preprint

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Can a question be a lie? Theorists in the debate on how to define lying tend to answer this question negatively. They hold that questions can be misleading, but that they cannot be lies. The aim of this paper is to show that ordinary speakers disagree. With the help of three experiments, we show that ordinary speakers judge certain insincere questions to be lies. These judgements are robust and remain so when the participants are given the possibility of classifying the questions as misleading or deceiving without being a lie. Judgments about insincere questions pattern with judgements participants make about declarative lies. And they contrast with judgements participants give about prototypical cases of misleading or deceptive behaviour.

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Section: John's Mercedesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Can a question be a lie? An empirical investigation

Viebahn¹,

Wiegmann²,

Engelmann³

et al. 2018

Preprint

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“…In this example, Pinocchio lies to Prince Charming by uttering ‘He went east’ with the intention of deceiving the prince; thus, this is not a counterexample to L T . The traditional definition counts this as lying because Pinocchio asserts what he believes to be false and intends to deceive the prince (Arico and Fallis , p. 791); the non‐traditional definition counts his behaviour as lying principally because he asserts what he believes to be false, allowing for an additional intention to deceive the addressee; and I count it as lying because Pinocchio's nose grows as a result of his forming the intention to lie to the prince.…”

Section: The Pinocchio Casesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Can You Lie Without Intending to Deceive?

Krstic

2018

Pacific Philosophical Qtr

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This article defends the view that liars need not intend to deceive. I present common objections to this view in detail and then propose a case of a liar who can lie but who cannot deceive in any relevant sense. I then modify this case to get a situation in which this person lies intending to tell his hearer the truth and he does this by way of getting the hearer to recognize his intention to tell the truth by lying. This case, and further cases that I develop from it, demonstrate that lying without the intention to deceive is possible.

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“…Here, the aim of the analysis is to identify the necessary and sufficient conditions for an utterance to be a lie, rather than the prototypical features that make up the concept. Only three studies on lying have been conducted within this framework so far (Arico & Fallis 2013, Turri & Turri 2015, Wiegmann et al 2016, the first one attempting to test if the intention to deceive is necessary for lying, and the second two if actual falsity is. The present experimental study will instead try to establish which conditions are necessary for lying by promising.…”

Section: 1!testing Folk Intuitions About Lyingmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Furthermore, these results challenge the following necessary conditions for telling a lie with content p: that you have to assert p directly; that you have to believe that p be false; that p must be false; that you must aim to deceive the addressee into believing that p. In recent times, several philosophers have challenged this view, presenting some compelling counterexamples to the intention to deceive condition: lies under coercion (Siegler 1966:129, Carson 1988, lies to Ògo on the recordÓ, bald-faced lies (Carson 2 See Mannison (1969:132), Kupfer (1982:134), Simpson (1992), Williams (2002: 96), Faulkner (2007;, Meibauer (2005;. :17, Carson 2006:290, Sorensen 2007, Arico & Fallis 2013, and knowledge lies (Sorensen 2009). This has prompted many authors to drop (iii).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In recent times, several philosophers have challenged this view, presenting some compelling counterexamples to the intention to deceive condition: lies under coercion (Siegler 1966:129, Carson 1988, lies to Ògo on the recordÓ, bald-faced lies (Carson et al 1982:17, Carson 2006:290, Sorensen 2007, Arico & Fallis 2013, and knowledge lies (Sorensen 2009). This has prompted many authors to drop (iii).…”

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confidence: 99%

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Lying by Promising

Marsili

2016

Int Rev Pragmat

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This paper is divided into two parts. In the first part, I extend the traditional definition of lying to illocutionary acts executed by means of explicit performatives, focusing on promising. This is achieved in two steps. First, I discuss how the utterance of a sentence containing an explicit performative such as ÒI promise that ΦÓ can count as an assertion of its content Φ. Second, I develop a general account of insincerity meant to explain under which conditions a given illocutionary act can be insincere, and show how this applies to promises. I conclude that a promise to Φ is insincere (and consequently a lie) only if the speaker does not intend to Φ, or believes that he will not Φ, or both. In the second part, I test the proposed definition of lying by promising against the intuitions of ordinary language speakers. The results show that, unlike alternative accounts, the proposed definition makes the correct predictions in the cases tested. Furthermore, these results challenge the following necessary conditions for telling a lie with content p: that you have to assert p directly; that you have to believe that p be false; that p must be false; that you must aim to deceive the addressee into believing that p. In recent times, several philosophers have challenged this view, presenting some compelling counterexamples to the intention to deceive condition: lies under coercion (Siegler 1966:129, Carson 1988, lies to Ògo on the recordÓ, bald-faced lies (Carson 2 See Mannison (1969:132), Kupfer (1982:134), Simpson (1992), Williams (2002: 96), Faulkner (2007;, Meibauer (2005;. :17, Carson 2006:290, Sorensen 2007, Arico & Fallis 2013, and knowledge lies (Sorensen 2009). This has prompted many authors to drop (iii). 2However, rejecting (iii) comes at a price: a definition only featuring (i-ii) runs the risk of incorrectly ruling in fictional, ironical and metaphorical utterances. These are believed-false statements (i.e. they meet both condition (i) and (ii)), but are clearly not lies Condition (iii) correctly prevents the definition from counting these statements as lies. A putative alternative definition that rejects (iii) needs some alternative condition to play its role in ruling out these cases.A common way to respond to this challenge is to endorse an Ôassertion-basedÕ account of lying. The intuition behind this view is that the Ôstatement conditionÕ of the standard definition can be narrowed down, to require that the speaker genuinely assert the proposition that he believes to be false. Formally: An assertion-based definition can be further strengthened by requiring that also (iii) is satisfied, and some proponents of the intention to deceive condition endorse an assertion-based version of the standard view, in which both (iii) and (i*) 4 are required 3 Carson (2006; ), Sorensen (2007), Fallis (2009), Saul (2012), Stokke (2013. Except for Sorensen, all these authors spell out the assertion condition differently to (1*), specifying under which conditions a speakerÕs statement is a genuine assertion. 4 Chisholm a...

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Lies, damned lies, and statistics: An empirical investigation of the concept of lying

Cited by 33 publications

References 33 publications

Can a question be a lie? An empirical investigation

Can a question be a lie? An empirical investigation

Can You Lie Without Intending to Deceive?

Lying by Promising

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