Deception

Award-winning poet and critic Kevin Young traces the history of the hoax as a peculiarly American phenomenon--the legacy of P.T. Barnum's 'humbug' culminating with the currency of Donald J. Trump's 'fake news'. Disturbingly, Young finds that fakery is woven from stereotype and suspicion, with race being the most insidious American hoax of all. He chronicles how Barnum came to fame by displaying figures like Joice Heth, a black woman whom he pretended was the 161-year-old nursemaid to George Washington, and 'What (...) Is It?', an African American man Barnum professed was a newly discovered missing link in evolution. Bunk then turns to the hoaxing of history and the ways that forgers, plagiarists, and journalistic fakers invent backstories and falsehoods to sell us lies about themselves and about the world in our own time, from pretend Native Americans like Nasdijj to the deadly imposture of Clark Rockefeller, from the made-up memoirs of James Frey to the identity theft of Rachel Dolezal. This brilliant and timely work asks what it means to live in a post-factual world of 'truthiness' where everything is up for interpretation and everyone is subject to a pervasive cynicism that damages our ideas of reality, fact, and art."--Dust jacket flap. (shrink)

How is it that a speaker S can at once make it obvious to an audience A that she intends to communicate some proposition p, and yet at the same time retain plausible deniability with respect to this intention? The answer is that S can bring it about that A has a high justified credence that ‘S intended p’ without putting A in a position to know that ‘S intended p’. In order to achieve this S has to exploit a (...) sense in which communication can be lottery-like. After defending this view of deniability I argue that it compares favorably to a rival account recently developed by Dinges and Zakkou (2023). (shrink)

L'auteur de cet essai tente de circonscrire l'aventure philosophique de la "quête de la vérité", en s'inspirant des recherches les plus récentes de l'épistémologie et de la logique, essayant de trouver dans la praxis des pierres d'achoppement pour un discours au moins tendanciellement vrai. Dans la confusion politique et culturelle de ce siècle, des vérités multiples prétendent avoir droit à l'expression. On parle d'intelligence digitalisée et artificielle, de désinformation, d'infox, d'intox, de propagande, de mensonges, de vérités alternatives. Ça caquète et (...) ça rugit de toutes parts, voulant soutenir la véracité par la force ou la répétition. Surtout dans ce qui se vante comme l'extrême conquête de notre civilisation occidentale, la démocratie, les harangues et les verbiages sont souvent vides de contenus, des baudruches regorgeant de promesses vaines et de captations factices. De gros intérêts financiers ou des déformations idéologiques se cachent derrière un discours qui se prétend précis et neutre. Il n'est pas étonnant de voir maint citoyen perdu dans cette cacophonie ambiante, de le voir découragé devant son manque d'information fiable et d'action cohérente. Pourtant les choses qu'il vit et qu'il sent sont dures et réelles. Elles ont des angles qui parfois font mal. La vérité existe... quelque part et de quelque façon."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

This paper rejects an argument defending the view that the boundary between deception and manipulation is such that some manipulations intended to cause false beliefs count as non-deceptive. On the strongest version of this argument, if a specific behaviour involves compromising the victim’s reasoning, then the behaviour is manipulative but not deceptive, and if it involves exposing the victim to misleading evidence that justifies her false belief, then it is deceptive but not manipulative. This argument has been consistently used as (...) a reason to reject the traditional analysis of human deception, according to which intentionally causing someone to acquire a false belief is sufficient for deception. And because the traditional analysis is also consistent with our most basic intuitions about deception, it does matter whether this argument succeeds. (shrink)

The Honest Life of a Liar By: Natalie Schweiger In the chapters of The Honest Life of a Liar, you will find humor, heartbreak, healing and adventure. It is one girl’s story of growing up, moving out, and learning about honesty in the real world. From parental arguments and hard lessons on love, to wacky landlords and Rocky Mountain highs, these pages hold something relatable for everybody. That girl, the author of this book, wants to share her story not because (...) it's monumental, will spark life change, or tell how she found the Atlantis, but because it involves experiences everyone has gone through, or is going through, in one way or another. She wants readers to close the back cover and feel like they've gained a friend; someone to ask advice on what to get their mom for Christmas or trust to be an escape call on a bad first date. Indeed, she wants readers to sit back and think "now that was a good story.". (shrink)

It's a truism to say that politicians lie. They twist the truth, exaggerate and spin. But blatant lying has now become the norm, led by Donald Trump and carried on by Boris Johnson and Scott Morrison. Combine this with an all-out assault on the truth in public debate along with the biggest communications revolution since the printing press, and you have a disaster in real time: a sea of fake news, hyper-partisanship and polarisation. No society or democracy can function without (...) trust, and the consequences of this profound shift are clear. The first step to a remedy is in understanding both the liars and the environments in which they lie. Lies and Falsehoods does exactly that, in this account of how we found ourselves in this fractured post-truth world, and how we might get out. (shrink)

In an era of fake news, alternative truths and leaked secrets making constant headlines, we are telling stories about ourselves all the time, and we are telling them in so many different ways. From vlogs and blogs to tweets and posts, from photos and gifs to live streams. From instant updates that disappear to rash words that last for ever and data trails that chart every step we take. While people around her shake their heads and mutter bad things about (...) the new levels of day-to-day deceit, Kathleen Wyatt is busy marvelling at how society manages it. How do we do this extraordinary thing - often under the most ordinary of circumstances? How do we convince each other to suspend disbelief? And why do we do it? In this brilliant, wide-ranging study of lies and lying, Wyatt introduces us to a cast of professionals and professional liars - from scientists to investigators, from double agents to journalists, from toddler specialists to a fallen titan of industry - all to help her prove a remarkable thesis: lies hold us together as much as they push us apart and may be vital in a healthy society"--Publisher's description. (shrink)

Who Gets Believed? is a groundbreaking book about persuasion and performance that asks unsettling questions about lies, truths, and the difference between being believed and being dismissed in situations spanning asylum interviews, emergency rooms, consulting jobs, and family life.

Happy cow messages are instances of commercial speech by the animal industry which, by action or by omission, mislead consumers about the harmful effects that the industry has for nonhuman animals, the environment, or human health. Despite their ubiquity, happy cow messages have received little philosophical scrutiny. This paper aims to call attention to this form of speech, and to make the case for its restriction. To do so we first conceptualize happy cow messages. Second, we argue that they encroach (...) upon individual autonomy in two particularly objectionable ways: by impairing our ability to behave according to our moral convictions, and by thwarting our capacity to identify and reason about our moral duties. This, we hold, grounds a pro tanto case for stricter and more comprehensive regulations of commercial speech by the animal industry. Third, and against the objection that restricting happy cow messages would violate freedom of speech, we contend that none of the most influential arguments for free speech grants them protection. Indeed, we suggest, those rationales seem to call for their restriction. Fourth, and finally, we review some possible ways to defuse the misleading potential of happy cow messages through commercial speech regulations. (shrink)

A satisfactory analysis of human deception must rule out cases where it is a mistake or an accident that person B was misled by person A's behavior. Therefore, most scholars think that deceivers must intend to deceive. This article argues that there is a better solution: rather than appealing to the deceiver's intentions, we should appeal to the function of their behavior. After all, animals and plants engage in deception, and most of them are not capable of forming intentions. Accordingly, (...) certain human behavior is deceptive if and only if its function is to mislead. This solves our problem because if the function of A's behavior was to mislead, B's ending up misled was not an accident or a mere mistake even if A did not intend to deceive B. (shrink)

A funny, sharp and smart picture book to help mommy and daddy through difficult moments.

This paper argues that extant signalling-based analyses cannot explain a range of cases of biological (and psychological) deception, such as those in which the deceiver does not send a signal at all, but that Artiga and Paternotte’s (Philos Stud 175:579–600, 2018) functional and my (Krstić in The analysis of self-deception: rehabilitating the traditionalist account. PhD Dissertation, University of Auckland, 2018: §3; Krstić and Saville in Australas J Philos 97:830–835, 2019) manipulativist analyses can. Therefore, the latter views should be given preference. (...) And because we still do not have a satisfactory definition of manipulation, the functional analysis, according to which a state is deceptive iff its function is to mislead and it misleads, is currently our best theory of deception. This is not to argue that the signalling-based analyses have no value but only that they should not be used in general analyses of biological deception. We need to move on to some other interesting issues. (shrink)

The use of deception and dishonesty is widely accepted as a fact of life in policing. This paper thus defends a counterintuitive claim: Good faith is a normative foundation for the police as a political institution. Good faith is a core value of contracts, and policing is contractual in nature both broadly (as a matter of social contract theory) and narrowly (in regard to concrete encounters between law enforcement officers and the public). Given the centrality of good faith to policing, (...) dishonesty and deception on par with fraud are justified only as a narrowly circumscribed investigative tool that is constrained by institutional commitments to the fair distribution of security and the rule of law. The practical upshot is the preclusion of most dishonest and deceptive police tactics on par with fraud, leading to an institution that is less proactive and more reactive. (shrink)

The aim of this chapter is to explore various ways of thinking about the concept of manipulation in order to capture both current and potentially future instances of machine manipulation, manipulation on the part of everything from the Facebook advertising algorithm to super-intelligent AGI. Three views are considered: a conservative one, which slightly tweaks extant influence-based theories of manipulation; a dismissive view according to which it doesn't matter much if machines are literally manipulative, provided we can classify them as so (...) doing to make sense of our interactions with them; and an ameliorative analysis, according to which we should change our concept of manipulation better to make sense of machine manipulation. We tentatively favor the latter. (shrink)

Looks at the role lies and self-deception play in our daily lives and argues that humans have evolved in part because of our ability to deceive.

Regarding the appropriateness of deception in clinical practice, two (apparently conflicting) claims are often emphasised. First, that ‘clinicians should not deceive their patients.’ Second, that deception is sometimes ‘in a patient’s best interest.’ Recently, Hardman has worked towards resolving this conflict by exploring ways in which deceptive and non-deceptive practices extend beyond consideration of patients’ beliefs. In short, some practices only seem deceptive because of the (common) assumption that non-deceptive care is solely aimed at fostering true beliefs. Non-deceptive care, however, (...) relates to patients’ non-doxastic attitudes in important ways as well. As such, Hardman suggests that by focusing on belief alone, we sometimes misidentify non-deceptive care as ‘deceptive’. Further, once we consider patients’ beliefs and non-doxastic attitudes, identifying cases of deception becomes more difficult than it may seem. In this essay, I argue that Hardman’s reasoning contains at least three serious flaws. First, his account of deception is underdeveloped, as it does not state whether deception must be intentional. The problem is that if intention is not required, absurd results follow. Alternatively, if intention is required, then identifying cases of deception will be much easier (in principle) than Hardman suggests. Second, Hardman mischaracterises the ‘inverse’ of deceptive care. Doing so leads to the mistaken conclusion that common conceptions of non-deceptive care are unjustifiably narrow. Third, Hardman fails to adequately separate questions about deception from questions about normativity. By addressing these issues, however, we can preserve some of Hardman’s most important insights, although in a much simpler, more principled way. (shrink)

Le nouveau livre de Marie-Lise Labonté traite d'une nouvelle quête que constitue la recherche de l'authenticité. L'auteur y aborde les concepts trop souvent galvaudés de mensonge et de vérité. Avec lucidité, elle répond à des questions fondamentales. Que cache le mensonge? Pourquoi commence-t-on à mentir? De quelle façon distinguer le mensonge inoffensif du mensonge pernicieux? Comment échapper à l'emprise du mensonge et trouver la vérité qui nous est propre? Toutes ces interrogations poussent ainsi le lecteur à évaluer la place qu'occupent (...) le mensonge et la vérité dans sa vie. S'appuyant sur de nombreux exemples, l'auteur met en lumière les aspects positifs et négatifs de chacune des notions évoquées. Ses propos inspirants amènent à la réflexion et à l'introspection et aideront le lecteur à se libérer du jugement et à développer l'amour et la bienveillance envers lui-même et les autres. Cet ouvrage est une vraie démarche thérapeutique avec de nombreux exemples tirés de consultations en psychothérapie. Il est lumineux et stimulant qui rappelle à chacun la force d'aller au-delà des limites que l'on s'impose. (shrink)

Affirmer une théorie et vivre le contraire, est-ce une contradiction, un mensonge, une folie, une liberté? Rousseau écrit un traité d'éducation grâce à l'abandon de ses cinq enfants, Kierkegaard compose des textes religieux quand il vit en libertin, Beauvoir fonde la philosophie du féminisme tout en jouissant d'une relation servile à son amant américain, Foucault exalte le courage de la vérité et organise le secret sur son Sida, Deleuze hait les voyages et devient le philosophe du nomadisme... Qui sommes-nous lorsque (...) nous pensons? Plusieurs, sans doute, comme le montrent les penseurs qui s'inventent des personnalités multiples à travers leurs théories. Au lieu de dénoncer leurs erreurs ou leur hypocrisie, François Noudelmann étudie le plus complexe des mensonges, celui envers soi-même, à travers les angoisses, les fugues et les métamorphoses de ces philosophes au double je. (shrink)

Signs and States, programme financé par l'ERG (European Research Council), a pour but d'explorer la sémiologie de l'Etat du XIIIe siècle au milieu du XVIIe siècle. Textes, performances, images, liturgies, sons et musiques, architectures, structures spatiales, tout ce qui contribue à la communication des sociétés politiques, tout ce qu'exprime l'idéel des individus et leur imaginaire, est ici passé au crible dans trois séries de rencontres dont les actes ont été rassemblés dans une collection, Le pouvoir symbolique en Occident (1300-1640). Ces (...) volumes, adoptant une perspective pluridisciplinaire et comparative dans une visée de long terme, combinent études de cas, analyses conceptuelles et réflexions plus théoriques. Et les réponses à ce questionnaire, issu d'une réflexion sur une histoire culturelle poursuivie sur plus de cinq siècles, remettent en cause une histoire de l'Occident latin où l'on opposerait Eglise et Etat : la mutation culturelle engendrée par la réforme grégorienne qui, tout en assurant d'abord le triomphe de la papauté, a donné à l'Etat moderne les moyens d'assurer sa propre légitimité en créant les conditions d'une révolution du système de communication. Elle engendre un partage du pouvoir symbolique et des processus de légitimation avec l'Etat : la capacité de ce dernier à se légitimer par le consentement de la société politique en dehors de la contingence religieuse est une spécificité de l'Occident latin, clé de l'essor des Etats modernes européens. (shrink)

A provocative assessment of the nature of love and deception draws on classic works of literature and personal experiences to offer philosophical arguments about the integral experiences of lying in erotic love and marriage. Includes notes. By the author of How to Sell.

Examines climate change, military intervention and financial collapse to reveal how truth is used by competing interests to shape individual behaviour, attitudes and identity.

"In this exquisitely written book, Denery draws on centuries of rumination on the moral issues surrounding lying to address the question of how we should live in a fallen world. The serpent in the Garden of Eden led humankind astray with lies. The Devil is the father of lies. Premodern sources agonized constantly over the act of lying. Denery not only superbly narrates the long history of this obsession, but also locates the conditions that reveal an Enlightenment shift toward a (...) not entirely comfortable modernity."--William Chester Jordan, Princeton University "Can God lie? Are women 'born liars'? These are just two of the questions Denery asks--and answers--in his wide-ranging, erudite study. Written in an engaging and accessible style, The Devil Wins sheds a new and fascinating light on a mendacious world stretching from the Book of Genesis to the dawn of the Enlightenment."--Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, author of Poets, Saints, and Visionaries of the Great Schism, 1378-1417 "This is a wonderful and beautifully written book. The fruit of extensive research, The Devil Wins traces the history of lying and deception through the medieval and early modern periods. Denery offers compelling and immensely significant arguments."--Ian P. Wei, author of Intellectual Culture in Medieval Paris "This is a marvelous book. Denery uses a fundamental question--when, if ever, is it acceptable to lie?--to explore a vast intellectual and historical terrain. In doing so, he gives us one of the most subtle and penetrating briefs I have read for the importance of medieval thought for modern efforts to understand ethics, politics, and conscience. I read this book with enormous delight."--Jonathan Sheehan, author of The Enlightenment Bible. (shrink)

"Why do we lie? What types of lies are there? What are the consequences of lying? What methods are used to detect lies? And when is it okay or even good to lie? From forgeries and hoaxes to plagiarism and placebos, [this book] offers historical anecdotes, scientific studies, and sociocultural analyses to help unpack the complex world of untruths"--Amazon.com.

Lying in Early Modern English Culture is a major study of ideas of truth and falsehood in early modern England from the advent of the Reformation to the aftermath of the failed Gunpowder Plot. The period is characterised by panic and chaos when few had any idea how religious, cultural, and social life would develop after the traumatic division of Christendom. While many saw the need for a secular power to define the truth others declared that their allegiances belonged elsewhere. (...) Accordingly there was a constant battle between competing authorities for the right to declare what was the truth and so label opponents as liars. Issues of truth and lying were, therefore, a constant feature of everyday life and determined ideas of individual identity, politics, speech, sex, marriage, and social behaviour, as well as philosophy and religion. This book is a cultural history of truth and lying from the 1530s to the 1610s, showing how lying needs to be understood in action as well as in theory. Unlike most histories of lying, it concentrates on a series of particular events reading them in terms of academic theories and more popular notions of lying. The book covers a wide range of material such as the trials of Ann Boleyn and Thomas More, the divorce of Frances Howard, and the murder of Anthony James by Annis and George Dell; works of literature such as Othello, The Faerie Queene, A Mirror for Magistrates, and The Unfortunate Traveller; works of popular culture such as the herring pamphlet of 1597; and major writings by Castiglione, Montaigne, Erasmus, Luther, and Tyndale. (shrink)

Low-level dishonesty is rife everywhere, in the form of exaggeration, selective use of facts, economy with the truth, careful drafting - from Trump and the Brexit debate to companies that tell us 'your call is important to us'. How did we get to a place where bullshit is not just rife but apparently so effective that it's become the communications strategy of our times? This brilliantly insightful book steps inside the panoply of deception employed in all walks of life and (...) assesses how it has come to this. It sets out the surprising logic which explains why bullshit is both pervasive and persistent. Why are company annual reports often nonsense? Why should you not trust estate agents? And above all, why has political campaigning become the art of stretching the truth? Drawing on behavioural science, economics, psychology and of course his knowledge of the media, Evan ends by providing readers with a tool-kit to handle the kinds of deceptions we encounter every day, and charts a route through the muddy waters of the post-truth age." -- Publisher's website. (shrink)

Welcome to the Post-Truth era-- a time in which the art of the lie is shaking the very foundations of democracy and the world as we know it. The Brexit vote; Donald Trump's victory; the rejection of climate change science; the vilification of immigrants; all have been based on the power to evoke feelings and not facts. So what does it all mean and how can we champion truth in in a time of lies and 'alternative facts'? In this eye-opening (...) and timely book, Post-Truth is distinguished from a long tradition of political lies, exaggeration and spin. What is new is not the mendacity of politicians but the public's response to it and the ability of new technologies and social media to manipulate, polarise and entrench opinion. Where trust has evaporated, conspiracy theories thrive, the authority of the media wilt and emotions matter more than facts. Now, one of the UK's most respected political journalists, Matthew d'Ancona investigates how we got here, why quiet resignation is not an option and how we can and must fight back. (shrink)

"L'irruption récente de la notion de "post-vérité", désignée comme mot de l'année 2016 par le dictionnaire d'Oxford, a suscité d'innombrables commentaires journalistiques, notamment sur le phénomène des fake news, mais peu de réflexions de fond. Or, cette notion ne concerne pas seulement les liens entre politique et vérité, elle brouille la distinction essentielle du vrai et du faux, portant atteinte à notre capacité à vivre ensemble dans un monde commun. En questionnant les rapports conflictuels entre politique et vérité, Myriam Revault (...) d'Allonnes déconstruit nombre d'approximations et de confusions. Elle montre que le problème majeur de la politique n'est pas celui de sa conformité à la vérité mais qu'il est lié à la constitution de l'opinion publique et à l'exercice du jugement. L'exploration du "régime de vérité" de la politique éclaire ce qui distingue fondamentalement les systèmes démocratiques, exposés en permanence à la dissolution des repères de la certitude, à la tentation du relativisme et à la transformation des "vérités de fait" en opinions, des systèmes totalitaires, où la toute-puissance de l'idéologie fabrique un monde entièrement fictif. Loin d'enrichir le monde, la "post-vérité" appauvrit l'imaginaire social et met en cause les jugements et les expériences sensibles que nous pouvons partager. Il est urgent de prendre conscience de la nature et de la portée du phénomène si nous voulons en conjurer les effets éthiques et politiques."--Page 4 de la couverture. (shrink)

We all do it -- Social lies -- Lying out of fear -- Lying to get ahead -- Lies that wow -- Lying to yourself -- The truth of the matter.

This stuff is everywhere -- The damage that it does -- On weasel words -- Building your own bullshitometer -- Noble monkeys: where we all came from -- The wonderful power of woo -- Bugs, bodies: mysteries of medicine -- Implacable foes of reason: the antivaxers -- No hoax: the truth about climate change -- That isn't exactly how it went: faking history -- Coprolite claims: faking archaeology -- All the news that's fit to fake.

Post-truth: from the public to the academy -- Post-truth and the person -- Post-Truth and the political.

Presentación editorial: "Le terme parreŝia signifie en grec ancien "franc-parler, liberte ́de parole, courage de dire la veŕite"́. Il met en ev́idence le lien qui peut unir le langage, le courage et la veŕite.́ Il insiste sur la dimension et́hique dans l'acte de parler et de penser, autrement dit l'implication de celui qui parle dans un eńonce ́qui pret́end a ̀la coin̈cidence du discours et de la veŕite.́ La parreŝia est une manier̀e de dire la veŕite ́qui fait fi des (...) conventions et de la retenue que requier̀ent les bienseánces.0Elle inflige a ̀l'autre ou a ̀l'institution le constat parfois amer d'une veŕite ́qui n'est jamais bonne a ̀dire. Elle peut causer une souffrance et plonger dans la honte. Les et́udes reúnies dans ce volume explorent plusieurs aspects de la parreŝia telle qu'on a pu la consideŕer et la vivre dans l'Antiquite,́ a ̀la Renaissance ou au siec̀le des Lumier̀es.". (shrink)

This book offers information about what constitutes dishonesty or lying and why it occurs. Based on the author's professional experiences as an attorney and a psychologist, he explains reasons why lying is a human frailty and offers guidance on how a person can detect lies, nip them in the bud, and maintain personal defenses against being treated in a harmful manner. The book is wrapped up with comments about how the control and elimination of influence from dishonest people enhances self-fulfillment, (...) and how this will lead to personal health, happiness, and positive social relationships. (shrink)

The Perils of Invention is based on three Hannah Arendt Center Conferences: "Human Being in an Inhuman Age," "Lying and Politics," and "Truthtelling: Democracy in an Age without Facts." Contributions written for these conferences are placed alongside many new essays that reflect on the ideas they raised. The result is a freshly invigorated investigation into these critical and timely themes. The authors have diverse backgrounds--Arendt scholars, public intellectuals, novelists, journalists, and business people--and include Uday Mehta, Marrianne Constable, Nicholson Baker, George (...) Kateb, Marianne Constable, Linda M.G. Zerilli, Peg Birmingham, Davide Panagia, and many others. (shrink)