Lying: Knowledge or belief?

Abstract

A new definition of lying is gaining traction, according to which you lie only if you say what you know to be false. Drawing inspiration from "New Evil Demon" scenarios, I present a battery of counterexamples against this "Knowledge Account" of lying. Along the way, I comment upon the methodology of conceptual analysis, the moral implications of the Knowledge Account, and its ties with knowledge-first epistemology.

Group Assertions and Group Lies

“…However, I have not been honest to my fiancée: I fully 35 Two caveats are in order here. First, as already noted in Marsili (2014;2021a;2022a), criteria like G-InsIncere-GrADeD should not be understood as positing sharp boundaries. "Sincere" is a gradable adjective, whose strength depends (among other factors) on how confident the speaker is in the falsity of a proposition.…”

“…To illustrate: suppose that you're somewhat confident that Carolina went to the gym today, but (given your uncertainty) you don't quite believe that she did. You would be lying if you told someone that Carolina didn't go to the gym, even if you don't outright believe that what you said is false (there is consensus on this; see Isenberg 1964;Carson 2006;Whyte 2013, Marsili 2014, 2021a, Marsili and Löhr forthcoming, Krauss 2017, Benton 2018, Trpin et al 2021. I call this kind of lie a "graded-belief" lie.…”

“…Lackey 2018a, p. 278;, G-InsIncere-WeAk will not do, because it conflates group bullshit with group lying. 34 In earlier work (Marsili 2014(Marsili , 2018b(Marsili , 2021a(Marsili , 2022a, I proposed an alternative way to characterise graded insincerity: an assertion is insincere if the speaker finds it is more likely to be false than true. Applied to groups:…”

“…For an overview,Schmid, Sirtes, and Weber (2013),Lackey (2014),Brady and Fricker (2016),Lackey (2020b).3 However, there is some discussion concerning whether the sincerity condition (2) is too strong(Carson 2006;Marsili 2014;2022a;Krauss 2017;Benton 2018) or too weak(Benton 2017;Holguín 2019;Marsili 2021a;Betz-Richman 2022). We'll come back to this in Sect.…”

The myth of true lies

“…While our arguments are compatible with understanding lying in such terms, we will continue to use assertion, assuming henceforth that S is conceptually competent, while pretending to be sincere in making that speech act. Others maintain that outright dis/belief is too strong as it rules out graded-belief lies, in which case one could either adopt Carson's (2006) ;Carson, (2010) condition of not believing p, or Marsili's (2018) ;Marsili, (2019) ;Marsili, (2021b) condition of being more confident in the falsity of p than in its truth, but for ease of exposition we shall stick with full dis/belief. Everything we say is compatible mutatis mutandis with such more fine-grained accounts.…”