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.

This paper provides a semantic analysis of Protagonist Projection, the phenomenon by which things are described from a point of view different from that of the speaker. Against what has been argued by some, the account vindicates the intuitive idea that Protagonist Projection does not give rise to counterexamples to factivity, and similar plausible principles. A pragmatics is sketched that explains the attitude attributions generated by Protagonist Projection. Further, the phenomenon is compared to Free Indirect Discourse, and the proposed account is seen to preserve the relation between them. IntroductionIn 1977 1 For example in (2a), things are described from the point of view of the voters who falsely believed that John was telling the truth, and it is this reorientation that licenses the wh-construction.Protagonist Projection, Holton observed, is quite widespread. Here are some of his further examples: 2 (3) a. He gave her a ring studded with diamonds, but they turned out to be glass. b. She knew that he would never let her down, but, like all the others, he did. c. I saw a shooting star last night. I wished on it, but it was just a satellite. d. She sold him a pig in a bag. When he got home he discovered it was really a cat.All of these sentences are perfectly acceptable, although they too have a 'literary' feel to them. According to Holton, they are just more examples of Protagonist Projection, and hence if one endorses Tsohatzidis's argument, then one should also endorse the analogous arguments with respect to all of these cases. For example, one should conclude from (3a) that some diamonds are made of glass, and from (3b) that know is not factive, etc. But since this is clearly an undesirable strategy, Holton's line looks more attractive. Many have thought that Holton's observation was a good one. But recently Hazlett (2010) has claimed that, although valid for cases like (3a), the argument does not work for examples involving factive verbs, such as (3b). This claim is a key premise in Hazlett's case for the controversial conclusion that there are no factive verbs.Neither Holton nor Hazlett is explicit about what is going on in the examples, however. So, to evaluate these arguments, we need an understanding of the relevant aspects of the style of discourse they involve. This paper tries to provide the basics of such an understanding.I begin in Section 2 by responding to Hazlett's arguments. I then go on in Sections 3 and 4 to present an analysis of Protagonist Projection, which maintains Holton's overall strategy.1 Note that by the label 'Protagonist Projection' we are not alluding to other phenomena also sometimes referred to with the term 'projection', e.g., the way presuppositions of compound sentences are computed from those of their parts. I choose to retain the label to indicate continuity with Holton's project. 2 See Holton (1997) for sources. An anonymous reviewer points out that Protagonist Projection can also arise from relative clauses, as in 'He gave her a ring studded with diamond...

This book is a comprehensive study of lying and insincere language use. Part I is dedicated to developing an account of insincerity qua linguistic phenomenon. It provides a detailed theory of the distinction between lying and ways of speaking insincerely without lying, as well as accounting for the relation between lying and deceiving. A novel theory of assertion in terms of a notion of what is said defined relative to questions under discussion is used to underpin the analysis of lying and insincerity throughout the book. The framework is applied to various kinds of insincere speech, including false implicature, bullshitting, and forms of misleading with presuppositions, prosodic focus, and different types of semantic incompleteness. Part II discusses the relation between what is communicated and the speaker’s attitudes involved in insincere language use. It develops a view on which insincerity is a shallow phenomenon in the sense that whether or not a speaker is being insincere depends on the speaker’s conscious attitudes, rather than on deeper, unconscious attitudes or motivations. An account of a range of ways of speaking while being indifferent toward what one communicates is developed, and the phenomenon of bullshitting is distinguished from lying and other forms of insincerity. This includes insincere uses of language beyond the realm of declarative sentences. The book gives an account of insincere uses of interrogative, imperative, and exclamative utterances.

This paper argues that the distinction between lying and misleading while not lying is sensitive to discourse structure. It is shown that whether an utterance is a lie or is merely misleading sometimes depends on the topic of conversation, represented by so-called questions under discussion. It is argued that to mislead is to disrupt the pursuit of the goal of inquiry, i.e., to discover how things are. Lying is seen as a special case requiring assertion of disbelieved information, where assertion is characterized as a mode of contributing information to a discourse that is sensitive to the state of the discourse itself. The resulting account is applied to a number of ways of exploiting the lying-misleading distinction, involving conversational implicature, incompleteness, presuppositions, and prosodic focus. It is shown that assertion, and hence lying, is preserved from subquestion to superquestion under a strict entailment relation between questions, and ways of lying and misleading in relation to multiple questions are discussed.

It is sometimes argued that certain sentences of natural language fail to express truth conditional contents. Standard examples include e.g. Tipper is ready and Steel is strong enough. In this paper, we provide a novel analysis of truth conditional meaning (what is said) using the notion of a question under discussion. This account (i) explains why these types of sentences are not, in fact, semantically underdetermined (yet seem truth conditionally incomplete), (ii) provides a principled analysis of the process by which natural language sentences (in general) can come to have enriched meanings in context, and (iii) shows why various alternative views, e.g. so-called Radical Contextualism, Moderate Contextualism, and Semantic Minimalism, are partially right in their respective analyses of the problem, but also all ultimately wrong. Our analysis achieves this result using a standard truth conditional and compositional semantics and without making any assumptions about enriched logical forms, i.e. logical forms containing phonologically null expressions.