Indifferent lies have been proposed as a counterexample to the claim that lying requires an intention to deceive. In indifferent lies, the speaker says something she believes to be false (in a trut...

This paper refines the received analysis of deceptive lies. This is done by assessing some cases of lies that are supposedly not intended to deceive and by arguing that they actually involve sophisticated strategies of intentional deception. These lies, that is, merely seem not to be intended to deceive and this is because our received analysis of deceptive lies is insufficiently sophisticated. We need to add these strategies to our analysis of deceptive lying. The argument ends by presenting (...) this refined analysis. (shrink)

This article defends the view that liars need not intend to deceive. I present common objections to this view in detail and then propose a case of a liar who can lie but who cannot deceive in any relevant sense. I then modify this case to get a situation in which this person lies intending to tell his hearer the truth and he does this by way of getting the hearer to recognize his intention to tell the (...) truth by lying. This case, and further cases that I develop from it, demonstrate that lying without the intention to deceive is possible. (shrink)

Arguably, the existence of bald-faced (i.e. knowingly undisguised) lies entails that not all lies are intended to deceive. Two kinds of bald-faced lies exist in the literature: those based on some common knowledge that implies that you are lying and those that involve tell-tale signs (e.g. blushing) that show that you are lying. I designed the tell-tale sign bald-faced lies to avoid objections raised against the common knowledge bald-faced lies but I now see that they are more problematic than (...) what I initially thought. Therefore, I will discuss these lies in more detail, refine the existing cases, and resolve some anticipated objections. I conclude that tell-tale sign bald-faced lies are genuine lies not intended to deceive. (shrink)

According to one influential argument put forward by, e.g. Chisholm and Feehan, Pfister, Meibauer, Dynel, Keiser, and Harris, asserting requires intending to give your hearer a reason to believe what you say (first premise) and, because liars must assert what they believe is false (second premise), liars necessarily intend to cause their hearer to believe as true what the liars believe is false (conclusion). According to this argument, that is, all genuine lies are intended to deceive. ‘Lies’ not (...) intended to deceive are not genuine lies because they do not involve assertions and you need to assert in order to lie. In this paper, I reject this argument by arguing that the first premise is false: intending to give your hearer a reason to believe what you say is not necessary for asserting. (shrink)

According to the traditional definition of lying, somebody lies if he or she makes a believed-false statement with the intention to deceive. The traditional definition has recently been challenged by non-deceptionists who use bald-faced lies to underpin their view that the intention to deceive is no necessary condition for lying. We conducted two experiments to test whether their assertions are true. First, we presented one of five scenarios that consisted of three different kinds of lies. Then we asked (...) participants to judge whether the scenario at hand was a lie, whether the speaker intended to deceive somebody, and how they would judge the behavior in terms of morality. As expected, our results indicate that the intention to deceive is not a necessary condition for lying. Participants rated indifferent lies to be lies and judged that no intention to deceive was involved in these cases. In addition, all bald-faced lies were evaluated as lies. However, participants widely ascribed an intention to deceive to bald-faced lies, which thus might not apply as counterexamples against the traditional definition of lying. Besides, lies are judged as morally wrong regardless of an intention to deceive. (shrink)

To understand lying, we naturally focus on small scale lies involving one speaker, one listener, one assertion. This methodology confers artificial plausibility upon the requirement that liars intend to deceive. For it excludes principal-agent conflicts that emerge from linguistic division of labor. When an employee lies for her boss, she need not inherit his motive to deceive. She displays loyalty even if her lie does not deceive. Focus on a single lie in isolation also blinds us to (...) tactical deceptions such as telling a lie which is intended to be caught to advance another lie. Many of these complexities arise from situations that approximate common knowledge without quite crystallizing into this uniform transparency. (shrink)

The traditional conception of lying, according to which to lie is to make an assertion with an intention to deceive the hearer, has recently been put under pressure by the phenomenon of bald-faced lies i.e. utterances that _prima facie_ look like lies but because of their blatancy allegedly lack the accompanying intention to deceive. In this paper we propose an intuitive way of reconciling the phenomenon of bald-faced lies with the traditional conception by suggesting that the existing analyses (...) of the phenomenon overlook a non-obvious category of hearers whom the speakers of bald-faced lies intend to deceive. Those hearers are institutions represented by the people involved, such as courts or secret police. We also criticize two recent rival accounts (Jessica Keiser’s and Daniel Harris’s) that attempt to save the traditional conception by saying that some bald-faced lies are not assertions, because they are conventional—rather than illocutionary—speech acts. (shrink)

This paper intends to open a discussion on how certain dangerous kinds of deceptive reasoning can be defined, in which way it is achieved in a discussion, and which would be the strategies for defense against such deceptive attacks on the light of some principles accepted as fundamental for rationality and logic.

Deceptionism about lying is the view that all lies are intended to deceive. This view sits uneasily with some cases that seem to involve lies not intended to deceive. We call these lies bald-faced because the liar lies while believing that the hearer knows that they are lying. The most recent deceptionist argument put forward by Rudnicki and Odrowąż-Sypniewska (this journal) defends the view that all genuine bald-faced lies are intended to deceive some of their hearers. I (...) argue that this argument is interesting but problematic: its premises do not support the view that all bald-faced lies are intended to deceive but rather only that some people who bald-faced lie to institutions or large audiences intend to deceive someone. Also, genuine bald-faced lies addressed at institutions are intended to (non-deceptively) manipulate institutions rather than deceive anyone. (shrink)

This chapter separates the problem of self-deception into two component questions: how it happens and what it is. The key to this chapter's account of self-deception is called “deflationary view”. Self-deception, it notes, does not entail “intentionally deceiving oneself; intending to deceive oneself; intending to make it easier for oneself to believe something; concurrently believing each of two explicitly contrary propositions”. The chapter also offers a discussion of the notion of “twisted self-deception”: the phenomenon of the self-deceived (...) person believing something he or she wants to be false. (shrink)

In their paper published in 2017 in Philosophical Psychology, Ronja Rutschmann and Alex Wiegmann introduce a novel kind of lies, the indifferent lies. According to them, these lies are not intended to deceive simply because the liars do not care whether their audience is going to believe them or not. It seems as if indifferent lies avoid the objections raised against other kinds of lies supposedly not intended to deceive. I argue that this is not correct. Indifferent lies, (...) too, are either intended to deceive or are not lies at all, since they do not involve genuine assertions. (shrink)

Sorensen offers the following definition of a ‘knowledge-lie’: ‘An assertion that p is a knowledge-lie exactly if intended to prevent the addressee from knowing that p is untrue but is not intended to deceive the addressee into believing p.’ According to Sorensen, knowledge-lies are not meant to deceive their addressee, and this fact is supposed to make them less bad than ordinary lies. I will argue that standard cases of knowledge-lies, including almost all the cases Sorensen considers, do (...) in fact involve deception, contrary to what Sorensen claims. And while there are cases of non-deceptive knowledge-lies, such cases are deviant, either because it is only incidental that the knowledge-preventing assertion is a lie, or because it is only incidental that the lie doesn't deceive. Here's an example of a knowledge-lie: Dr Head is considering firing Dr Appendix because of his weak research. But he doesn't want to fire Appendix unless he knows that Appendix's research isn't good, and so he consults Dr Heart. Head knows that if Appendix's research is good, then Heart will tell the truth and say so, whereas if Appendix's work isn't good, then Heart may or may not …. (shrink)

Excerpt from Custom an Essay on Social Codes Still a professor extraordinarius and thus not en cumbered with the time-consuming duties of an Ordinarius (a full professor), T onnies was living in the small town of Eutin, about an hour's ride on the train to Kiel, the seat of his university, and engaged in a prolific literary and scholarly pro duction on a great variety of theoretical as well as practical sociological, political and economic prob lems. Most of his articles (...) were intended for an edu cated though not professional public of people in terested in fundamental questions of social life or in social problems of the day. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works. (shrink)

Standard definitions of lying imply that intending to deceive others is a necessary condition of one's telling a lie. In an earlier paper, which appeared in this journal, Wokutch, Murrmann and I argued that intending to deceive others is not a necessary condition of one's telling a lie and proposed an alternative definition. In a reply which also appeared in this journal, Gary Jones argues that our arguments fail to establish the claim that it is possible (...) to lie without intending to deceive others, and that the objections which we raise for standard definitions apply equally to our own. The present paper argues that one can lie without intending to deceive others. I concede Jones' second criticism and propose a new alternative definition. (shrink)

Sorensen says that my assertion that p is a knowledge-lie if it is meant to undermine your justification for believing truly that ∼p, not to make you believe that p and that, therefore, knowledge-lies are not intended to deceive. It has been objected that they are meant to deceive because they are intended to make you more confident in a falsehood. In this paper, I propose a novel account according to which an assertion that p is a knowledge-lie (...) if it is intended not to provide evidence that p but to make you stop trusting all testimonies concerning whether p, which is how they undermine your testimonial knowledge. Because they are not intended to provide evidence that bears on the truth of p, they are not intended to make you more confident in a falsehood; therefore, knowledge-lies are not intended to deceive. This makes them a problem for the traditional account, which takes the intention to deceive as necessary for lying, and an interesting example of Kant's idea that allowing lies whenever one feels like it would bring it about that statements in general are not believed. (shrink)

We conducted two experiments to determine whether common folk think that so-called _tell-tale sign_ bald-faced lies are intended to deceive—since they have not been tested before. These lies involve tell-tale signs (e.g. blushing) that show that the speaker is lying. Our study was designed to avoid problems earlier studies raise (these studies focus on a kind of bald-faced lie in which supposedly everyone knows that what the speaker says is false). Our main hypothesis was that the participants will think (...) that the protagonists from our examples lied without intending to deceive, and the results of our surveys confirmed this hypothesis: most of our participants rated tell-tale sign lies as lies not intended to deceive. Therefore, our analysis suggests that common folk think that some lies are not intended to deceive. (shrink)

It is a widely held view that lying is defined in the traditional tripartite model as the conjunction of a statement, the false belief, and the intended deception. Much of the criticisms have been levelled at the third condition—intended deception—with contemporary counterexamples. My main criticism of the traditional and contemporary model of lying centres on that philosophers discard the social existence of the hearer. Schutz‘s phenomenological sociology gives a sheer inspiration to redefine the third condition by taking the hearer as (...) a consciously social being into account. Lying should be an intersubjective action for the Other from the perspective of the liar; it might be, thus, reasonable to assume that there should be commonsense awareness between the speaker and the hearer. This paper, by focusing on this commonsenseness and its typifications, introduces a new approach to the third condition: S must intend that H be induced to believe that p, where p is false. In this regard, once you lie, by being subjected to the taken-for-granted commonsenseness in our daily life, you must try as hard as possible to succeed in deceiving the hearer by stating that p. You, as a typical person, tell a typical lie in typical contexts for typical Others. The focus of attention, therefore, is on the hearer and it is the key to understanding that mere intent to deceive is too broad and unpragmatic for a social human being who always intends to flee the negative consequences of the context in which she has to lie. Making the extension narrower necessitates a new term, anti-social bullshit generally being replied rhetorically as "how can you expect me to believe that?" comprises the excluded cases. (shrink)

We argue against Christopher Meyers’s call for clinical ethicists to participate in deceiving patients, surrogate decision-makers, or family members. While we acknowledge that some forms of deception may be ethically appropriate in highly circumscribed situations, the type of case Meyers describes as involving justifiable deception differs in at least two important ways. First, Meyers fails to distinguish acts of deception based on the critical feature of who is being deceived—patient, surrogate, or family member—and the overarching duty to respect the autonomy (...) of relevant decision-makers to make rationally-informed decisions. Second, Meyers’s analysis relies on an assessment of harm, a value-laden concept which health care professionals and ethicists should not presumptively assess without considering how the patient, surrogate, or family might assess specific harms. (shrink)

Although some authors claim that deception requires intention, we argue that there can be deception in social robotics, whether or not it is intended. By focusing on the deceived rather than the deceiver, we propose that false beliefs can be created in the absence of intention. Supporting evidence is found in both human and animal examples. Instead of assuming that deception is wrong only when carried out to benefit the deceiver, we propose that deception in social robotics is wrong when (...) it leads to harmful impacts on individuals and society. The appearance and behaviour of a robot can lead to an overestimation of its functionality or to an illusion of sentience or cognition that can promote misplaced trust and inappropriate uses such as care and companionship of the vulnerable. We consider the allocation of responsibility for harmful deception. Finally, we make the suggestion that harmful impacts could be prevented by legislation, and by the development of an assessment framework for sensitive robot applications. (shrink)

Courts and commentators are notoriously puzzled about the mens rea standards for complicity. Accomplices intend to aid, but what attitude need they have towards the crimes that they aid? This paper both criticizes extant accounts of the mens rea of complicity and offers a new account. The paper argues that an intention can commit one to an event’s occurrence without committing one to promoting the event, or making it more likely to take place. Under the proposed account of the mens (...) rea of complicity, an accomplice must have an intention that commits him to the crime’s occurrence, but need not commit him to making it more likely that the crime occurs. The paper traces the implications of this view both for several difficult complicity cases, and for ongoing debates among philosophers of action about the necessary and sufficient conditions of joint agency. (shrink)

Among medical researchers and clinicians the dominant view is that it is unethical to deceive patients by prescribing a placebo. This opinion is formalized in a recent policy issued by the American Medical Association (AMA [Chicago, IL]). Although placebos can be shown to be always safe, often effective, and sometimes necessary, doctors are now effectively prohibited from using them in clinical practice. I argue that the deceptive administration of placebos is not subject to the same moral objections that face (...) other forms of deception in clinical practice and medical research. Although deception is normally objectionable on the grounds that it limits autonomy and breaches trust, these grounds do not apply to placebos when they are prescribed within appropriate ethical limits. Patients have reason to prefer that doctors can prescribe placebos in ethically responsible ways. Hence, the AMA has an obligation to endorse and to promote the responsible use of deceptive placebos in clinical practice. (shrink)

My aim in this paper is to refute an intriguing argument of Hugh McCann's for the thesis that'S tried to A' entails 'S intended to A. I shall call this the strong intention thesis about trying, or SIT. SIT implies, as McCann observes, that even an agent who thinks that the probability of her A-ing is close to zero intends to A, provided only that she tries to A.

There are many philosophical questions surrounding the notion of lying. Is it ever morally acceptable to lie? Can we acquire knowledge from people who might be lying to us? More fundamental, however, is the question of what, exactly, constitutes the concept of lying. According to one traditional definition, lying requires intending to deceive (Augustine. (1952). Lying (M. Muldowney, Trans.). In R. Deferrari (Ed.), Treatises on various subjects (pp. 53?120). New York, NY: Catholic University of America). More recently, Thomas (...) Carson (2006. The definition of lying. Nous, 40, 284?306) has suggested that lying requires warranting the truth of what you do not believe. This paper examines these two prominent definitions and some cases that seem to pose problems for them. Importantly, theorists working on this topic fundamentally disagree about whether these problem cases are genuine instances of lying and, thus, serve as counterexamples to the definitions on offer. To settle these disputes, we elicited judgments about the proposed counterexamples from ordinary language users unfettered by theoretical bias. The data suggest that everyday speakers of English count bald-faced lies and proviso lies as lies. Thus, we claim that a new definition is needed to capture common usage. Finally, we offer some suggestions for further research on this topic and about the moral implications of our investigation into the concept of lying. (shrink)

According to the traditional philosophical definition, you lie if and only if you say something that you believe to be false and you intend to deceive someone into believing what you say. However, philosophers have recently noted the existence of bald-faced lies, lies which are not intended to deceive anyone into believing what is said. As a result, many philosophers have removed deception from their definitions of lying. According to Jennifer Lackey, this is ‘an unhappy divorce’ because it (...) precludes an obvious explanation of the prima facie wrongness of lying. Moreover, Lackey claims that there is a sense of deception in which all lies are deceptive. In this paper, I argue that bald-faced lies are not deceptive on any plausible notion of deception. In addition, I argue that divorcing deception from lying may not be as unhappy a result as Lackey suggests. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

This paper defends two main theses related to emerging deepfake technology. First, fears that deepfakes will bring about epistemic catastrophe are overblown. Such concerns underappreciate that the evidential power of video derives not solely from its content, but also from its source. An audience may find even the most realistic video evidence unconvincing when it is delivered by a dubious source. At the same time, an audience may find even weak video evidence compelling so long as it is delivered by (...) a trusted source. The growing prominence of deepfake content is unlikely to change this fundamental dynamic. Thus, through appropriate patterns of trust, whatever epistemic threat deepfakes pose can be substantially mitigated. The second main thesis is that focusing on deepfakes that are intended to deceive, as epistemological discussions of the technology tend to do, threatens to overlook a further effect of this technology. Even where deepfake content is not regarded by its audience as veridical, it may cause its viewers to develop psychological associations based on that content. These associations, even without rising to the level of belief, may be harmful to the individuals depicted and more generally. Moreover, these associations may develop in cases in which the video content is realistic, but the audience is dubious of the content in virtue of skepticism toward its source. Thus, even if—as I suggest—epistemological concerns about deepfakes are overblown, deepfakes may nonetheless be psychologically impactful and may do great harm. (shrink)

Some believe that the mere beneficiaries of wrongdoing of others ought to disgorge their tainted benefits. Others deny that claim. Both sides of this debate concentrate on unavoidable beneficiaries of the wrongdoing of others, who are presumed themselves to be innocent by virtue of the fact they have neither contributed to the wrong nor could they have avoided receiving the benefit. But as we show, this presumption is mistaken for unavoidable beneficiaries who intend in certain ways to benefit from wrongdoing, (...) and who have therefore done something wrong in forming and acting on such an intention. (shrink)

The paper argues that the correct definition of lying is that to lie is to assert something one believes to be false, where assertion is understood in terms of the notion of the common ground of a conversation. It is shown that this definition makes the right predictions for a number of cases involving irony, joking, and false implicature. In addition, the proposed account does not assume that intending to deceive is a necessary condition on lying, and hence (...) counts so-called bald-faced lies as lies. (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)

This thesis addresses philosophical problems concerning improper assertions. The first part considers the issue of defining lying: here, against a standard view, I argue that a lie need not intend to deceive the hearer. I define lying as an insincere assertion, and then resort to speech act theory to develop a detailed account of what an assertion is, and what can make it insincere. Even a sincere assertion, however, can be improper (e.g., it can be false, or unwarranted): in (...) the second part of the thesis, I consider these kinds of impropriety. An influential hypothesis maintains that proper assertions must meet a precise epistemic standard, and several philosophers have tried to identify this standard. After reviewing some difficulties for this approach, I provide an innovative solution to some known puzzles concerning the permissibility of false assertions. In my view, assertions purport to aim at truth, but they are not subject to a norm that requires speakers to assert a proposition only if it is true. (shrink)

In order to lie, you have to say something that you believe to be false. But lying is not simply saying what you believe to be false. Philosophers have made several suggestions for what the additional condition might be. For example, it has been suggested that the liar has to intend to deceive (Augustine 395, Bok 1978, Mahon 2006), that she has to believe that she will deceive (Chisholm and Feehan 1977), or that she has to warrant the (...) truth of what she says (Carson 2006). In this paper, I argue that none of the existing definitions of lying identify a necessary condition on lying. I claim that lying is saying what you believe to be false when you believe that the following norm of conversation is in effect: "Do not say what you believe to be false" (Grice 1989, 27). And I argue that this definition handles all of the counter-examples to the existing definitions. (shrink)

Why do people share or publicly engage with fake stories? Two possible answers come to mind: (a) people are deeply irrational and believe these stories to be true; or (b) they intend to deceive their audience. Both answers presuppose the idea that people put the stories forward as true. But I argue that in some cases, these outlandish (yet also very popular) stories function as signals of one's group membership. This signaling function can make better sense of why, despite (...) their unusual nature or lack of a factual basis, some of these stories are so widespread. (shrink)

Il est impossible de tromper la nature. C’est l’avertissement que Galilée adresse aux « ingénieurs ignorants» qui étaient convaincus que les machines pouvaient vaincre la nature en réalisant l’impossible. Dans Le mecaniche il montre que les mouvements mécaniques ne peuvent pas se produire contre la nature. Les machines doivent obéir à certaines lois de la nature auxquelles on ne peut pas déroger, comme le principe de compensation qui établit une liaison entre la force motrice et la résistance déplacée; formulé en (...) termes de mouvements virtuels, il devient le principe fondamental d’une nouvelle approche de la dynamique, au moyen de laquelle Galilée construit une nouvelle science de l’équilibre, première forme de la statique moderne. (shrink)

Il est impossible de tromper la nature. C’est l’avertissement que Galilée adresse aux « ingénieurs ignorants» qui étaient convaincus que les machines pouvaient vaincre la nature en réalisant l’impossible. Dans Le mecaniche il montre que les mouvements mécaniques ne peuvent pas se produire contre la nature. Les machines doivent obéir à certaines lois de la nature auxquelles on ne peut pas déroger, comme le principe de compensation qui établit une liaison entre la force motrice et la résistance déplacée; formulé en (...) termes de mouvements virtuels, il devient le principe fondamental d’une nouvelle approche de la dynamique, au moyen de laquelle Galilée construit une nouvelle science de l’équilibre, première forme de la statique moderne. (shrink)

Surprisingly, the fact that the speaker is lying is sometimes common knowledge between everyone involved. Strangely, we condemn these bald-faced lies more severely than disguised lies. The wrongness of lying springs from the intent to deceive – just the feature missing in the case of bald-faced lies. These puzzling lies arise systematically when assertions are forced. Intellectual duress helps to explain another type of non-deceptive false assertion : lying to yourself. In the end, I conclude that the apparent intensity (...) of our disapproval of non-deceptive lies is a rhetorical illusion. (shrink)

Donald Davidson once suggested that a liar ?must intend to represent himself as believing what he does not?. In this paper I argue that, while Davidson was mistaken about lying in a few important respects, his main insight yields a very attractive definition of lying. Namely, you lie if and only if you say something that you do not believe and you intend to represent yourself as believing what you say. Moreover, I show that this Davidsonian definition can handle counter-examples (...) that undercut four prominent definitions of lying: viz., the traditional intend-to-deceive definition, Thomas Carson's definition, Don Fallis's definition, and Andreas Stokke's definition. (shrink)

It is common for people to misstate their bargaining positions during business negotiations. This paper will focus on cases of the following sort: I am selling a house and tell a prospective buyer that $90,000 is absolutely the lowest price that I will accept, when I know that I would be willing to accept as little as $80, 000 for the house. This is a lie according to standard definitions of lying-it is a deliberate false statement which is intended to (...) deceive others. I will defend the following two theses:a. Appearances to the contrary, this kind of bluffing typically does not constitute lying. (I will argue that standard dictionary definitions of lying are untenable and defend an alternative definition hinted at, but never clearly formulated by, W. D. Ross. On my definition, deliberate false statements about one's negotiating position would rarely constitute lies in this society.)b. It is usually permissible to misstate one's bargaining position when one has good reason to think that one's negotiating partner is doing the same and it is usually impermissible to misstate one's negotiating bargaining if one does not have good reason to think that the other party is misstating her position. (shrink)

Traditionalists affirm that in self-deception I intend to deceive myself; but, on the standard account of interpersonal deception, according to which deceiver intend to make their target believe a falsehood, traditionalism generates paradoxes, arising from the fact that I will surely know that I want to make myself believe a falsehood. In this thesis, I argue that these well-known paradoxes need not arise under my manipulativist account of deception. In particular, I defend traditionalism about self-deception by showing that what (...) causes paradoxes is not the idea that self-deception is an intrapersonal analogue of interpersonal deception but rather our incorrect conceptions of deception, interpersonal deception, and lying. I show, by way of counterexamples, that the essence of deception is not ending up epistemically worse off but rather being intentionally manipulated into forming or retaining a certain truth-evaluable mental state. Vitally, contra the standard view, the deceiver need not hold that the mental state he intends to produce in the deceived involves a falsehood; in fact, the targeted effect may involve a proposition believed by the deceiver to be true or about whose truth the deceiver suspends belief. Any phenomenon rightly called self-deception, I argue, involves an action in which the person intentionally manipulates (by way of a trick) her own way of forming or retaining some truth-evaluable mental state of her own (belief or a belief-like thought). Thus, on the manipulativist view, a self-deceiver may non-paradoxically intend to deceive himself: the relevant intention is to affect a particular truth-evaluable thought by way of non-deviantly manipulating his agential use of his own cognitive capacities. While all cases of self-deception involve intentional manipulation of the self by the self, how this manipulative trick works out varies in different kinds of cases. In some cases, the self-deceptive manipulative trick is not intentional under that description, a description that captures the so-called deflationary view. Although the manipulativist account allows for numerous different strategies of self-deception, and is consistent with both traditionalism and deflationism, it cannot, by itself, vindicate the idea of lying to oneself. On the standard conception, lying to myself is practically impossible (if the mind is not partitioned) and this is because the very forming the intention to lie to myself – as including the intention to make myself believe my own lie – seems very unlikely. Arguably, people will not φ if they think that φ-ing is impossible. I argue that some kinds of behaviour typically understood as self-deception are actually cases in which the person is lying to herself without the intention to deceive herself; rather, she avoids legitimising an unfavourable state of affairs by openly affirming its contrary. It may also be the case, however, that some lies to oneself are aimed at deceiving – this is because, as I argue, liars need not assert what they believe is false; hence, by lying to myself, I may intend to increase my confidence in the belief I already hold. Finally, the motive for self-deception is always a matter of preserving the person’s endorsed idealised picture of reality. This account allows me to explain all possible cases of self-deception. In the last chapter, I apply my theory to some paradigmatic cases first outlined in my introduction. (shrink)

In this essay I criticize recent attempts to prove that the concept of lying does not include the intent to deceive. I argue that examples by Isenberg and Carson fail to prove that one can lie without intending to deceive and, furthermore, that untoward consequences would follow if these authors were correct. I conclude that since intending to deceive is indeed a necessary condition of lying, the class of statements that constitute lies is smaller than (...) what Isenberg et al. would suggest. Hence the class of deceptive advertisements is also correspondingly smaller. (shrink)

It has recently been suggested that the fact that punishment involves an intention to cause suffering undermines expressive justifications of punishment. I argue that while punishment must involve harsh treatment, harsh treatment need not involve an intention to cause suffering. Expressivists should adopt this conception of harsh treatment.