Lying by Promising

Abstract

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...

Empirically Investigating the Concept of Lying

“…However, it is rather hard to imagine how a lie can fail according to the subjective view-here, the agent has already lied the moment he has uttered something he believes to be false. As Marsili (2016) puts it "If you think you lied, you lied". No further checks are necessary.…”

Lying, speech acts, and commitment

“…But Footnote 5 continued and expressives, because I do not take our intuitions about them to be straightforward enough to establish whether a given definition should count them as lies or not. 6 For experimental evidence that ordinary speakers overwhelmingly classify insincere promises like (2) as lies, and a more general defence of the view that you can lie by promising, see Marsili (2016). Relatedly, authors like Ross (1930), Fried (1978) and Carson (2006Carson ( , 2010 take all lying to involve the breach of an implicit promise to tell the truth; on this view, "every lie is a broken promise" (Fried 1978, p. 67).…”

“…In Marsili (2016) I argued (on both theoretical and empirical grounds) that a promisor can be insincere (and lie) if she intends not to fulfil her promise, even if she believes that she will end up fulfilling it against her will (for instance: S promises not to ƒ, intends to ƒ at all costs, but believes that she will almost surely fail to ƒ). We need not dwell on these complications here, but the interested reader can find a definition of insincerity that makes justice to both standard and non-standard cases in Marsili (2016Marsili ( , 2017. 25 A final and perhaps less urgent qualification is that in this paper I will leave aside the issue of whether (a) needs to be expanded.…”

Can a question be a lie? An empirical investigation

“…For more recent studies, see e.g. Arico & Fallis (2013), Turri & Turri (2015), Marsili (2016), Wiegmann, Samland, & Waldmann (2016), Meibauer (2016), Rutschmann & Wiegmann (2017) and Wiegmann & Willemsen (2017). 9 Marsili (2016) investigates whether speakers can lie with promises, and thus with non-assertive speech-acts.…”