Intention to deceive, bald-faced lies, and deceptive implicature: Insights into Lying at the semantics-pragmatics interface

Abstract

This paper gives a critical overview of Jörg Meibauer's (2014) monograph entitled Lying at the Semantics-Pragmatics Interface and addresses a selection of theoretical issues pertinent to lying and deception. Thus, following a brief summary of the volume's contents, more attention is paid to the speaker's intention to deceive as a potentially necessary condition for lying, which invites a question concerning the status of bald-faced lies. Further, this article focuses on deception performed by dint of implicature. Meibauer's (2014) postulates in reference to these issues are critically revisited, and the focal phenomena are examined from a broader perspective.Keywords: bald-faced lie, deception, figure of speech, first maxim of Quality, Grice, implicature, lie, what is said General overviewIn his recent monograph, wittily entitled Lying at the Semantics-Pragmatics Interface, Jörg Meibauer (2014) brings together diversified academic traditions to tease out the mechanics of lying. He collates insights from the philosophy of language, semantics, and pragmatics (focusing on Speech Act Theory, as well as neo-Gricean and post-Gricean frameworks) in order to give a broad but, at the same time, detailed description of lying. The panoply of theories and proposals that feed into Meibauer's (2014) account and the number of references he makes in the course of the volume testify to his broad linguistic knowledge of the scholarship on not only lying and deception but also notions and approaches not immediately related to this topic. By transposing those concepts and conceptualizations onto lying, the author develops an internally heterogeneous analysis of the focal phenomenon. The succinct summary below cannot possibly do justice to the plethora of the postulates put forward in the monograph.

Are false implicatures lies? An empirical investigation

“…To address these questions, we designed an experiment that asked participants to provide lie judgments of utterances that reliably induce false implicatures. In answer to the first question, our results provide evidence for Dynel's (2015) claim that implicatures are too diverse a class to be treated with a blanket statement, such as "false implicatures are lies." Although the same diversity prevents us from unequivocally claiming that "false implicatures are not lies," our results trend towards supporting that hypothesis rather than its opposite.…”

“…In her review of Meibauer (), Dynel () hypothesizes that floutings of Quality (such as irony, metaphor, hyperbole, and meiosis/litotes) might be more likely to count as lies (Dynel, , p. 328), because in these cases, the speaker's utterance is overtly untrue and therefore a literal WIS is not available for the speaker to fall back on. However, she makes no such claim about other types of false implicature.…”

“…However, she makes no such claim about other types of false implicature. Instead, she mentions that the diversity of implicatures means that treating all of them as either lies or not lies would be “a sweeping generalization” and concludes that this issue deserves a more fine‐grained analysis (Dynel, , p. 327). In his response to her review, Meibauer echoes this sentiment: “it seems important that more empirical data [regarding lying] be consulted on the basis of, for instance, experimental pragmatics/semantics” (Meibauer, , p. 120).…”

The ironist’s intentions

“…The analysis so far would have to lead us to tentatively accept the existence of ironic lies on the basis of the following syllogism: as shown above, one of the ironic implicatures always functions as the speaker's primary intended meaning (and bearer of truth-conditions according to the radical contextualist approach -see Jaszczolt 2009) -the speaker can then reasonably be taken to be committed to the truth of their main intended meaning (which, as shown in Kapogianni 2016, is always in the form of a declarative sentence), allowing for this to be considered a lie if the speaker simultaneously knows (and hides) that the main intended meaning is false (this syllogism then concurs with Dynel's commentary in her review of Meibauer 2014-Dynel 2015. However, it is the very fact that irony can be used to deceive (regardless of whether this is just a "deceit" and not a lie -or a deceptive implicature which is also a lie) that matters for the discussion of the ironist's covert intentions.…”

Can You Lie Without Intending to Deceive?

“…Nonetheless, rather than abandoning their position, traditionalists about lyingthe so-called deceptionists (Mahon 2008)have come up with many innovative arguments that make the interpretation according to which Artie and other liars of his kind lie without intending to deceive much less convincing: e.g. 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.…”