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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Roughly speaking, a statement is a bald-faced lie if it is intended to be taken seriously even though it is common belief between the speaker and his audience that this statement is false (i. e., both parties believe that the statement is false, each party believes that the other party believes that the statement is false, and so on ad infinitum). These are cases where someone goes “on the record” with something that she believes to be false, but does not intend, or even expect, that anyone will be deceived. The standard case is where a person testifies to something that everybody knows to be false in order to avoid some adverse legal consequence (cf. Carson 2006, 289–90; Sorensen 2007, 260–61). For example, there might not be enough evidence to convict you of a particular crime as long as you continue to assert your innocence. In such cases, the liar does not have to deceive anyone in order to achieve his goal.

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