This paper analyses the communicative and epistemic value of retweeting (and more generally of reposting content on social media). Against a naïve view, it argues that retweets are not acts of endorsement, motivating this diagnosis with linguistic data. Retweeting is instead modelled as a peculiar form of quotation, in which the reported content is indicated rather than reproduced. A relevance-theoretic account of the communicative import of retweeting is then developed, to spell out the complex mechanisms by which retweets achieve their communicative goals. The last section outlines the epistemic threats posed by the increasing prevalence of retweeting on social media, linking them to the low reputational, cognitive and practical costs linked to this emerging form of communication.

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Not every speech act can be a lie. A good definition of lying should be able to draw the right distinctions between speech acts (like promises, assertions, and oaths) that can be lies and speech acts (like commands, suggestions, or assumptions) 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 two normative components: ‘accountability’ and ‘discursive responsibility’. The resulting definition of lying draws all the desired distinctions, providing an intensionally adequate analysis of the concept of lying.

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...

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 lying), vindicating the primacy of the former desideratum. Regarding (ii), it shows that Krauss' proposed 'worse-off requirement' meets neither of these desiderata, whereas the 'comparative insincerity condition' (Marsili 2014) can meet both. The conclusion is that lies are assertions that the speaker takes to be more likely to be false than true, and their distinctive blameworthiness is a function of the extent to which they violate a sincerity norm.