Lying, Deceptive Implicatures, and Commitment

Abstract

Deceptive implicatures are a subtle communicative device for leading someone into a false belief. However, it is widely accepted that deceiving by means of deceptive implicature does not amount to lying. In this paper, we put this claim to the empirical test and present evidence that the traditional definition of lying might be too narrow to capture the folk concept of lying. Four hundred participants were presented with fourteen vignettes containing utterances that communicate conversational implicatures which the speaker believes to be false. We further collected several potential proxy measures of lying, to get a better understanding of when a deceptive implicature is considered a case of lying. The results indicate that most implicatures (ten out of fourteen) were evaluated as lies and that lie ratings were closely tracked by the degree to which speakers were considered to have committed themselves to the truth of the content conveyed by their deceptive implicatures.

Communication and deniability: Moral and epistemic reactions to denials

“… 2 There is a sizeable literature on whether conveying indirectly false content should qualify as lying rather than merely misleading, both theoretical (e.g., Carson, 2006 ; Meibauer, 2014 , 2018 ; Viebahn, 2017 ; Saul, 2018 ; Marsili, 2021 ), and experimental (e.g., Danziger, 2010 ; Wiegmann et al, 2016 , 2021 ; Willemsen and Wiegmann, 2017 ; Antomo et al, 2018 ; Reins and Wiegmann, 2021 ; Viebahn et al, 2021 ). For this study we do not take any particular theoretical stance on what counts as lie; although people may entertain the belief that lying is morally worse than misleading (see Chisholm and Feehan, 1977 ; Adler, 1997 ), if only for argumentative reasons (see § 4).…”

Lying, Tell-Tale Signs, and Intending to Deceive

“…Keiser 3 Not all scholars believe that the only way to lie is by asserting what you saysome think that one may lie by implicating false information (e.g. Meibauer 2014b; Reins and Wiegmann 2021;Wiegmann, Willemsen, and Meibauer forthcoming), or by adding false presuppositions (Viebahn 2019a) or by making false promises (Marsili 2016(Marsili , 2020 but this is the predominant view. 2016 ;Maitra 2018;Harris 2020;Meibauer 2014a;against, e.g.…”