Are Bald‐Faced Lies Deceptive after All?

Abstract

According to the traditional philosophical definition, you lie if and only if you say something that you believe to be false and you intend to deceive someone into believing what you say. However, philosophers have recently noted the existence of bald-faced lies, lies which are not intended to deceive anyone into believing what is said. As a result, many philosophers have removed deception from their definitions of lying. According to Jennifer Lackey, this is 'an unhappy divorce' because it precludes an obvious explanation of the prima facie wrongness of lying. Moreover, Lackey claims that there is a sense of deception in which all lies are deceptive. In this paper, I argue that bald-faced lies are not deceptive on any plausible notion of deception. In addition, I argue that divorcing deception from lying may not be as unhappy a result as Lackey suggests.

Knowledge‐lies re‐examined

“…However, they are in an important way different from other proposed counterexamples – bald‐faced lies, for example. Bald‐faced liars supposedly do not intend to deceive their audience because they think that the audience knows that they are lying (e.g., Sorensen, ; Carson, ; Fallis, ; against, Lackey, ; Keiser, ). This is why we say that bald‐faced lies are knowingly undisguised lies but this cannot be said about knowledge‐lies.…”

“…242–243) argued that each slave is deceptively lying because their lies conceal from the general the true identity of Spartacus. Being deceptive, according to Lackey, requires only concealing information; the victim need not end up believing a falsehood or becoming more confident in a falsehood (against, see Fallis, ). More importantly, information is being concealed from one's ‘eyes,’ not one's ‘mind’ – ‘one can be deceptive in the relevant sense, even if the information that one is aiming to conceal is common knowledge,’ writes Lackey (, p. 242).…”

Can You Lie Without Intending to Deceive?

“…In other words, I will defend the non-traditional account of lying, L N-T , which does not include the intention to deceive (e.g. Aquinas 1485, article 1;Johnson 1755;Carson 2006Carson , 2010Sorensen 2007Sorensen , 2010Fallis 2009Fallis , 2012Fallis , 2013Fallis , 2015Saul 2012;Stokke 2013Stokke , 2016Stokke , 2017. According to L N-T , I lie to you if and only if I assert what I believe is false.…”

“…Kenyon (2003Kenyon ( , 2010, Staffel (2011, forthcoming), Meibauer (2011Meibauer ( , 2014aMeibauer ( , 2014bMeibauer ( , 2016aMeibauer ( , 2016b, Lackey (2013), Tollefsen (2014), Dynel (2015), Leland (2015), and Keiser (2016). And with some replies from Fallis (2015), Stokke (2017), and Krstić (2017), this debate has become very interesting.…”

Konzepte des Lügens

“…Um Fälle wie (11) erfassen zu können, schlägt Sorensen (2007) einen Ersatz für das Konzept der Täuschungsabsicht vor, nämlich die Unterscheidung zwischen enger und weiter Plausibilität. Unter der Annahme, dass "lying is just asserting what one does not believe" (Sorensen 2007: 266), unterscheidet er 13 Fallis (2015) bezieht sich auf die Klassifikation der Täuschungen nach Chisholm und Feehan (1977), um den Nachweis zu führen, dass der Fall des schummelnden Studenten, auf den sich Lackey (2013) Kenyon 2003). 15 In Bezug auf die zynische Assertion wird gesagt, dass der Sprecher hier "manifest unaufrichtig" (manifestly insincere) sei.…”