TRUTHFUL LIARS: How They and Other Oddities are Possible

Topoi: The Formation of the Moral Point of View - The legacy of Bernard Williams 20 years after his passing (ed. Falcato & Cadilha), 2023

In chapter four of Truth and Truthfulness Bernard Williams presents an account of assertion that relies heavily on the 'psychological' notions of belief and intention. In chapter five his definition of lying similarly relies on such notions. For Williams, insofar as there are norms governing assertion as such or norms broken by lying as such, these norms relate to saying what you think to be true, as distinct from saying what is true. I argue that this 'psychologized' account of assertion (and lying) is for various reasons mistaken. A consequence of Williams's approach is that 'Shall I tell the truth here?' is presented as a much more open question for an agent than it possibly can be. Only by adverting to the language-game presupposed by that question's having any sense at all can we arrive at a fair picture of when and how the answer 'No' might be reasonable.

Bradley Armour-Garb and James A. Woodbridge

Open Insight Volumen IV • ISSN: 2007-2406, 2013

There is a tendency to assume that, under certain circumstances, lying is morally justifiable. There are numerous logical and philosophical arguments, which claim to have objective validity, point out that a world where only truth exists would be unbearable. This brings, as a necessary consequence, the relativization of the importance of truth and its function of being the pillar mode of the moral principle of honesty, turning truthful discourse into a tool, as usable as lying for pragmatic matters that are sometimes disguised as moral. Frankly in disagreement with such positions, this essay aims to present a detailed counter argument, claiming that lying is always immoral.

2013

In this paper, we put forward a conceptual argument for the Falsity Condition for lying, upon the assumption that lying is a form of deception. We argue that if the definition of lying did not include the Falsity Condition, then successful lying would not secure that the addressee ends up believing a falsehood (about what the lie is about), which is necessary for deceiving, and then successful lying (as such) would not necessarily be a form of deception. Although there is no generally accepted definition of lying, some conditions have recurrently been proposed as necessary conditions; especially, but not only, the statement condition (i.e. the requirement that the speaker assert or make a statement), the believe-to-be-false condition (that the speaker believe that what she states is false), the intention-to-deceive condition (that the statement be done with the purpose of causing the addressee to believe something false), and the falsity condition (that what is stated be false). So,...

Logics in Artificial Intelligence, 2010

This paper aims at providing a formal account of lying – a dishonest attitude of human beings. We first formulate lying under propositional modal logic and present basic properties for it. We then investigate why one engages in lying and how one reasons about lying. We distinguish between offensive and defensive lies, or deductive and abductive lies, based on intention behind the act. We also study two weak forms of dishonesty, bullshit and deception, and provide their logical features in contrast to lying. We finally argue dishonesty postulates that agents should try to satisfy for both moral and self-interested reasons.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2012

We model lying as a communicative act changing the beliefs of the agents in a multi-agent system. With Augustine, we see lying as an utterance believed to be false by the speaker and uttered with the intent to deceive the addressee. The deceit is successful if the lie is believed after the utterance by the addressee. This is our perspective. Also, as common in dynamic epistemic logics, we model the agents addressed by the lie, but we do not (necessarily) model the speaker as one of those agents. This further simplifies the picture: we do not need to model the intention of the speaker, nor do we need to distinguish between knowledge and belief of the speaker: he is the observer of the system and his beliefs are taken to be the truth by the listeners. We provide a sketch of what goes on logically when a lie is communicated. We present a complete logic of manipulative updating, to analyse the effects of lying in public discourse. Next, we turn to the study of lying in games. First, a game-theoretical analysis is used to explain how the possibility of lying makes games such as Liar's Dice interesting, and how lying is put to use in optimal strategies for playing the game. This is the opposite of the logical manipulative update: instead of always believing the utterance, now, it is never believed. We also give a matching logical analysis for the games perspective, and implement that in the model checker DEMO. Our running example of lying in games is the game of Liar's Dice.

2005

The Liar sentence is a singularly important piece of philosophical evidence. It is an instrument for investigating the metaphysics of expressing truths and falsehoods. And an instrument too for investigating the varieties of conflict that can give rise to paradox. It shall serve as perhaps the most important clue to the shape of human judgment, as well as to the nature of the dependence of judgment upon language use.

It seems that the most common strategy to solve the liar paradox is to argue that liar sentences are meaningless and, consequently, truth-valueless. The other main option that has grown in recent years is the dialetheist view that treats liar sentences as meaningful, truth-apt and true. In this paper I will offer a new approach that does not belong in either camp. I hope to show that liar sentences can be interpreted as meaningful, truth-apt and false, but without engendering any contradiction. This seemingly impossible task can be accomplished once the semantic structure of the liar sentence is unpacked by a quantified analysis. The paper will be divided in two sections. In the first section, I present the independent reasons that motivate the quantificational strategy and how it works in the liar sentence. In the second section, I explain how this quantificational analysis allows us to explain the truth teller sentence and a counter-example advanced against truthmaker maximalism, and deal with some potential objections.

Philosophia Scientiae, 2008

The article addresses the question whether the semantic realist should accept the principle (R) according to which every reason to think that a statement is true is a reason to think that the statement is warrantedly assertible, and vice versa. As against W. Alston’s suggestion, according to which the acceptance of (R) commits one to regarding “true” and “warrant- edly assertible” as having the same extension, it is argued that (R) just follows from the neutral assumption, also shared by Alston, that the acceptance of all non-pathological instances of the Equivalence Schema (it is true that p iff p) provides a necessary condition for understanding the truth-predicate. So, it is argued, (R) is open both to the realist and to the antirealist. In addition, in the final part it is sketched a general argument against the anti-realistic identifica- tion of meaning with assertibility conditions, which is essentially premised on (R). With this it is shown that the realist has also good dialectical motivations to accept (R).