Lying is a familiar and important concept for virtually all of us, and philosophers have written a lot about what it means to lie. Although it is commonly accepted that an adequate definition of lying captures people's use and understanding of this concept, there have been surprisingly few empirical studies on it. n recent years, however, there is a trend emerging to remedy this lacuna. In this paper, we provide an overview of these studies. Starting from a widely accepted philosophical (...) definition of lying, we focus on the following three questions: Is an intention to deceive required for lying? Is it possible to lie despite saying something true? Can you lie by falsely implicating? (shrink)

Deceptive implicatures are a subtle communicative device for leading someone into a false belief. However, it is widely accepted that deceiving by means of deceptive implicature does not amount to lying. In this paper, we put this claim to the empirical test and present evidence that the traditional definition of lying might be too narrow to capture the folk concept of lying. Four hundred participants were presented with fourteen vignettes containing utterances that communicate conversational implicatures which the speaker believes to (...) be false. We further collected several potential proxy measures of lying, to get a better understanding of when a deceptive implicature is considered a case of lying. The results indicate that most implicatures (ten out of fourteen) were evaluated as lies and that lie ratings were closely tracked by the degree to which speakers were considered to have committed themselves to the truth of the content conveyed by their deceptive implicatures. (shrink)

This paper addresses the question whetherbullshitis a reasonable pragmatic category. In the first part of the paper, drawing on the insights of Harry Frankfurt’s seminal essay, bullshit is defined as an act of insincere asserting where the speaker shows a loose concern for the truth, and does not want the addressee to become aware of condition. The author adds to this definition the condition requiring that the bullshitter expresses morecertaintythan is adequate with respect to condition. In the second part of (...) the paper, it is discussed whether the above definition can cope with special types of bullshit considered to be a challenge to Frankfurt’s definition. These areevasive bullshitting,bullshit lies, andbald-faced bullshitting. It is shown that there is hope for establishing a reasonable pragmatic category of bullshitting if it is related to certain levels of pragmatic description, e.g. conversational implicatures, that can explain the putative challenges. (shrink)

Studies on the nature of quotation have become a topic of growing interest among linguists and philosophers of language. What is the function and logical status of quotations? How can an analysis of quotation help to develop a general theory of the semantics-pragmatics interface? This volume is a collection of original papers by leading researchers in the field on such issues and related linguistic and philosophical aspects of quotations.

The notion of an indirect speech act is at the very heart of cognitive pragmatics, yet, after nearly 50 years of orthodox (Searlean) speech act theory, it remains largely unclear how this notion can be explicated in a proper way. In recent years, two debates about indirect speech acts have stood out. First, a debate about the Searlean idea that indirect speech acts constitute a simultaneous realization of a secondary and a primary act. Second, a debate about the reasons for (...) the use of indirect speech acts, in particular about whether this reason is to be seen in strategic advantages and/or observation of politeness demands. In these debates, the original pragmatic conception of sentence types as indicators of illocutionary force seems to have been getting lost. Here, I go back to the seemingly outdated “literal force hypothesis” (see Levinson 1983: 263–264) and point out how it is still relevant for cognitive pragmatics. (shrink)

Bringing together different theoretical frameworks, the volume provides thought-provoking discussions of how the notion of context can be understood, modeled, and implemented in linguistics.

Ever since the seminal work of Paul Grice, tautologies such as Business is business have been discussed from a number of angles. While most approaches assume that tautological utterances have to do with the operation of conversational maxims, an integrated analysis is still lacking. This paper makes an attempt at analysing tautologies within the framework of Levinson, who proposes a distinction between three pragmatic levels, namely Indexical Pragmatics, Gricean Pragmatics 1, and Gricean Pragmatics 2. It is shown that observations of (...) Ward and Hirschberg on the exclusion of alternatives, the claim of Autenrieth that the second NP in nominal equatives is predicative, and the recent insights of Bulhof and Gimbel on `deep' tautology, may be fruitfully integrated within Levinson's framework. The gist of this paper is to show that tautologies are not as tautological as once thought, because implicatures influence their truth conditions. Data are drawn from the author's corpus of authentic German examples. (shrink)

We can distinguish a minimalist and a maximalist concept of lying. Whilst the former assumes that lying is the same communicative act for all human beings but can be used in a different way according to social and cultural contexts, the latter holds that there are as many different concepts of lying as there are different social and cultural configurations in which lies are used. In particular, some researchers claim that Asian (collectivist) cultures possess different concepts of lying than Western (...) (individualist) cultures. When carefully looking at pertinent studies, it appears that the concept of lying as constituting a violation of the first submaxim of Quality according to Grice is a good candidate for a minimalist (universal) concept of lying. (shrink)