The folk concept of lying

Wiegmann, Alex; Meibauer, Jörg

doi:10.1111/phc3.12620

Cited by 24 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 49 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…The notion of a communicative act is broader than the notions of saying and asserting, thereby potentially including forms of communication that those other notions would exclude. The third clause, on the other hand, is an established condition from the traditional definition of lying (e.g., Mahon, 2016; Stokke, 2018; see Wiegmann & Meibauer, 2019, for empirical evidence for this condition). Most important is obviously the second clause and how it is spelled out.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…To date, only a few studies have empirically investigated whether lay people’s intuitions on lying correspond to the definition of lying outlined above, and in particular whether people really deem it impossible to lie by means of deceptive implicatures (for an overview, see Wiegmann & Meibauer, 2019). This is rather surprising, since it is widely agreed that an adequate definition of lying should reflect lay people’s use and understanding of the concept (e.g., Arico & Fallis, 2013; Carson, 2006, 2010; Saul, 2012).…”

Section: Theoretical and Empirical Backgroundmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Is Lying Bound to Commitment? Empirically Investigating Deceptive Presuppositions, Implicatures, and Actions

Reins

Wiegmann

2021

Cognitive Science

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Lying is an important moral phenomenon that most people are affected by on a daily basis—be it in personal relationships, in political debates, or in the form of fake news. Nevertheless, surprisingly little is known about what actually constitutes a lie. According to the traditional definition of lying, a person lies if they explicitly express something they believe to be false. Consequently, it is often assumed that people cannot lie by more indirectly communicating believed‐false claims, for instance by merely conversationally implicating them. In this paper, we subject this claim to an empirical test. In a preregistered study of 300 participants, we investigate how people judge cases of implicit deceptions that would usually be excluded by the traditional definition of lying (i.e., conversational implicatures, presuppositions, and nonverbal actions). Our results show that people do in fact consider it possible to lie by indirect means, suggesting that people have a broader concept of lying than is usually assumed. Moreover, our findings indicate that lie judgments are closely tied to the extent to which agents are perceived as having committed themselves to the believed‐false claims they have communicated. We discuss the implications of our results for the traditional definition of lying and propose a new commitment‐based definition of lying that can account for the findings of our experiment.

show abstract

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Theoretical and Empirical Backgroundmentioning

confidence: 99%

Is Lying Bound to Commitment? Empirically Investigating Deceptive Presuppositions, Implicatures, and Actions

Reins

Wiegmann

2021

Cognitive Science

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…There is a large philosophical literature on the concept of lying (Bok, 1999; Broncano‐Berrocal, 2013; Carson, 2006, 2010; Fallis, 2009; Saul, 2012; Stokke, 2013, 2016; Viehbahn, 2017, 2020, Timmermann & Viehbahn, 2021, for a review, see Mahon, 2016), and the folk concept of lying has received considerable attention from empirically minded philosophers and linguists (for a review, see Wiegmann & Meibauer, 2019). The following three criteria are frequently considered central to the prototype concept of lying (Coleman & Kay, 1981): C1: The proposition uttered by the speakers is false [falsity]. C2: The speaker believes the proposition she utters to be false [untruthfulness]. C3: In uttering the proposition, the speaker intends to deceive the addressee [intention to deceive]. …”

Section: The Folk Concept Of Lyingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Can a Robot Lie? Exploring the Folk Concept of Lying as Applied to Artificial Agents

Kneer

2021

Cognitive Science

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The potential capacity for robots to deceive has received considerable attention recently. Many papers explore the technical possibility for a robot to engage in deception for beneficial purposes (e.g., in education or health). In this short experimental paper, I focus on a more paradigmatic case: robot lying (lying being the textbook example of deception) for nonbeneficial purposes as judged from the human point of view. More precisely, I present an empirical experiment that investigates the following three questions: (a) Are ordinary people willing to ascribe deceptive intentions to artificial agents? (b) Are they as willing to judge a robot lie as a lie as they would be when human agents engage in verbal deception? (c) Do people blame a lying artificial agent to the same extent as a lying human agent? The response to all three questions is a resounding yes. This, I argue, implies that robot deception and its normative consequences deserve considerably more attention than they presently receive.

show abstract

“…While there is a strong consensus in the theoretical literature that lying requires a believed-false proposition to be explicitly communicated, empirical findings have challenged this view (see Wiegmann and Meibauer 2019, for an overview of empirical studies on people's concept of lying). In particular, recent findings indicate that people judge certain deceptive conversational implicatures to be cases of lying (e.g., Antomo et al 2018;Or et al 2017;Reins and Wiegmann 2021;Wiegmann and Willemsen 2017; but see Weissman andTerkourafi 2019, andViebahn et al 2020, for examples of deceptive implicatures that are judged to be merely misleading).…”

Section: Empirical Investigations Of Lying With Indirect Deceptionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Lying Without Saying Something False? A Cross-Cultural Investigation of the Folk Concept of Lying in Russian and English Speakers

et al. 2021

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The present study examines cross-cultural differences in people’s concept of lying with regard to the question of whether lying requires an agent to say something they believe to be false. While prominent philosophical views maintain that lying entails that a person explicitly expresses a believed-false claim, recent research suggests that people’s concept of lying might also include certain kinds of deception that are communicated more indirectly. An important drawback of previous empirical work on this topic is that only few studies have investigated people’s concept of lying in non-Western samples. In the present study, we compare people’s intuitions about lying with indirect deceptions (i.e., presuppositions, conversational implicatures, and non-verbal actions) in a sample of N = 255 participants from Russia and N = 300 participants from the United Kingdom. Our findings show a strong degree of similarity between lie ratings of participants from Russia and the United Kingdom, with both samples holding it possible for agents to lie with deceptive statements and actions that do not involve the agent saying something they believe to be false.

show abstract

The folk concept of lying

Cited by 24 publications

References 49 publications

Is Lying Bound to Commitment? Empirically Investigating Deceptive Presuppositions, Implicatures, and Actions

Is Lying Bound to Commitment? Empirically Investigating Deceptive Presuppositions, Implicatures, and Actions

Can a Robot Lie? Exploring the Folk Concept of Lying as Applied to Artificial Agents

Lying Without Saying Something False? A Cross-Cultural Investigation of the Folk Concept of Lying in Russian and English Speakers

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About