Lying and Deception

Fallis, Don

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Lying and Deception

Don Fallis

November 2010, Volume 10, No. 11, pp. 1-22

Permalink: http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.3521354.0010.011

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Abstract

According to the standard philosophical definition of lying, you lie if you say something that you believe to be false with the intent to deceive. Recently, several philosophers have argued that an intention to deceive is not a necessary condition on lying. But even if they are correct, it might still be suggested that the standard philosophical definition captures the type of lie that philosophers are primarily interested in (viz., lies that are intended to deceive). In this paper, I argue that the standard philosophical definition is not adequate as a definition of deceptive lying either. I then suggest two plausible alternative definitions of this concept.

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Second, this definition does not explicitly require that a liar intend to deceive. As noted in section 2 above, intending to deceive requires that you intend your audience to form (or continue to hold) a false belief (cf. Mahon 2007, 187–88). Admittedly, hiding an intention that you actually have might cause your audience to acquire a false belief. It is possible to deceive by “hiding the truth” as well as by “showing the false” (cf. Ekman 1985, 28; Bell and Whaley 1991, 48–49). However, intending to hide an intention does not necessarily imply that you intend your audience to form the false belief that you do not have this intention. For example, you might just want them to remain ignorant on the matter. So, in order for dl6 to be a viable definition of deceptive lying, we would have to add the requirement that you intend your audience to form this false belief. Alternatively, we could reject id and say that simply intending your audience not to acquire a true belief counts as intending to deceive (cf. Chisholm and Feehan 1977, 144).

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