Deceiving without answering

Abstract

Penultimate draft • Forthcoming in Philosophical StudiesLying is standardly distinguished from misleading according to how a disbelieved proposition is conveyed. To lie, a speaker uses a sentence to say a proposition she does not believe. A speaker merely misleads by using a sentence to somehow convey but not say a disbelieved proposition. Frontand-center to the lying/misleading distinction is a conception of what-issaid by a sentence in a context. Stokke (2016Stokke ( , 2018 has recently argued that the standard account of lying/misleading is explanatorily inadequate unless paired with a theory where what-is-said by a sentence is determined by the question under discussion or . I present two objections to his theory, and conclude that no extant theory of what-is-said enables the standard account of the lying/misleading distinction to be explanatorily adequate.

Lying with Uninformative Speech Acts

“…One way to theorise about guaranteeing is to treat it as a speech act that reinforces an assertion (e.g., Turri 2013). Thus, I can firstly assert that p, and later on, guarantee that p. Guaranteeing in this sense does not deliver new information, rather it repeats and reinforces the content that was already stated.…”

Speaker's reference, semantic reference, sneaky reference

“…What is more, the two extant cloud‐tolerant accounts of lying—those of Saul (2012) and Stokke (2016, 2018)—both suffer from serious drawbacks unrelated to anything presently under discussion. See Stokke (2016, 2018) for criticism of Saul's proposal and van Elswyk (2020) for criticism of Stokke's.…”