Lies, damned lies, and statistics: An empirical investigation of the concept of lying
2013; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 26; Issue: 6 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/09515089.2012.725977
ISSN1465-394X
Autores Tópico(s)Psychology of Social Influence
ResumoAbstract 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 Carson, TL. 2006. The definition of lying. Nous, 40: 284–306. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]. 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. Keywords: Conceptual Analysis Experimental Philosophy Lying Acknowledgements The authors would like to acknowledge the support and feedback provided by Roy Sorensen, Thomas Carson, James Mahon, and Kay Mathiesen. We would also like to thank the members of the Arizona Experimental Philosophy Lab, the audiences at the Information Ethics Roundtable on “Misinformation and Disinformation,” and the Tucson Roundtable in Experimental Philosophy, as well as the anonymous referees for all of their insightful suggestions. Notes Notes [1] By itself, the Costanza Doctrine only requires that a liar fail to believe that what she says is true (see Carson, 2006 Carson, TL. 2006. The definition of lying. Nous, 40: 284–306. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar], p. 298; Sorensen, 2007 Sorensen, R. 2007. Bald-Faced lies! Lying without the intent to deceive. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 88: 251–264. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar], p. 256). However, this paper will only consider “lies” that the speaker actually believes to be false. [2] Some philosophers (e.g., Carson, 2006 Carson, TL. 2006. The definition of lying. Nous, 40: 284–306. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar], p. 284–285) think that, in addition, a lie has to be actually false. All of the “lies” that we consider in this paper meet this stronger requirement as well. [3] Dictionary definitions typically require that a lie be intended to deceive (Carson, 2006 Carson, TL. 2006. The definition of lying. Nous, 40: 284–306. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar], p. 286). But there can easily be a difference between the way that a word is commonly defined and the way that it is commonly used. [4] Fallis is attracted to the Augustinian view that “a person is to be judged as lying or not lying according to the intention of his own mind, not according to the truth or falsity of the matter itself” (1952, p. 55). [5] Carson (2010 Carson, TL. 2010. Lying and deception, New York, NY: Oxford University Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar], p. 37) has subsequently suggested that his definition might be revised to simply require intending to warrant the truth of what is said. Confused lies would count as lies on such a definition, but proviso lies (see below) still would not. [6] Carson (2010 Carson, TL. 2010. Lying and deception, New York, NY: Oxford University Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar], p. 38) has subsequently claimed that, if a speaker does not warrant the truth of what is said at all, then she is not lying. But this is just to insist, without argument, that his definition is correct. In a similar vein, defenders of the traditional definition might simply insist that, if a speaker is not intending to deceive at all, then she is not lying. [7] The traditional definition arguably counts confused lies and proviso lies as lies. But as noted above, it does not count bald-faced lies as lies. [8] Mahon (personal communication, March 30, 2012) essentially agrees that we are concerned with the term ‘lie’ as it is used by competent speakers of the language (though he seems to reject that all speakers who use the term are competent). [9] Typically called “experimental philosophers.” See Alexander and Weinberg (2007 Alexander, J and Weinberg, J. 2007. Analytic epistemology and experimental philosophy. Philosophy Compass, 2: 56–80. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]), Arico (2010 Arico, AJ. 2010. Folk psychology, consciousness, and context effects. Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 1: 371–393. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]), Huebner, Bruno, and Sarkissian (2010), Knobe (2003 Knobe, J. 2003. Intentional action and side effects in ordinary language. Analysis, 63: 190–194. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]), Knobe and Prinz (2008 Knobe, J and Prinz, J. 2008. Folk intuitions about consciousness: Experimental studies. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 7: 67–83. 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Rethinking intuition: The psychology of intuition and its role in philosophical inquiry. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield [Google Scholar]) for an excellent discussion on the relationship between reflective equilibrium and philosophical intuitions. [12] Kornblith (2002 Kornblith, H. 2002. Knowledge and its place in nature, Oxford: Oxford University Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]) does claim that knowledge is a natural kind which can and should be studied by using the methods of empirical science. However, see Goldman (2005 Goldman, A. 2005. Kornblith's naturalistic epistemology. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 71: 403–410. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) and Pernu (2009 Pernu, T. 2009. Is knowledge a natural kind?. Philosophical Studies, 142: 371–386. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) for criticisms of Kornblith's position. [13] In a similar vein, robins and cardinals are fairly representative of our ‘bird’ prototype, whereas emus and penguins are not. [14] And, Carson suggests, it is wrong to make an insincere promise even if it is clear to everyone that one is not going to keep it (Carson, 2006 Carson, TL. 2006. The definition of lying. Nous, 40: 284–306. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar], p. 296). [15] Similar results have been found in other cultures. In fact, Hardin (2010 Hardin, KJ. 2010. The Spanish notion of lie: Revisiting Coleman and Kay. Journal of Pragmatics, 42: 3199–3213. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar], p. 3206) found that, among Spanish speakers in Ecuador, the intent to deceive is, if anything, even less important to whether something counts as a lie. [16] Students were enrolled in an introductory philosophy course and had not discussed lying (or cognate topics, such as epistemic and moral norms governing assertions) in the class. 22 were eliminated from the study either for failing to identify ordinary cases of lying as lies, or for identifying instances of straightforward, true statements as lies. [17] See appendix A for an example of each version. [18] The Ten-Item Personality Index (Gosling, Rentfrow, & Swann, 2003 Gosling, S, Rentfrow, P and Swann, W. 2003. A very brief measure of the Big-Five personality domains. Journal of Research in Personality, 37: 504–528. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). [19] To avoid ambiguity, these questions were specifically worded to focus on the false P assertion (rather than, for instance, the proviso that followed the falsehood). For instance, in a vignette about a man who skips out of work to go gambling (but upon questioning tells his wife “no, Honey, I wasn’t gambling. Of course, I probably wouldn’t admit it if I was.”), the question was “did Charlie lie about gambling?” [20] This question was partially included to test whether the moral valence of the agents’ motivations would impact participants’ judgments of whether the statement was a lie, as has been observed with other concepts (Knobe, 2003 Knobe, J. 2003. Intentional action and side effects in ordinary language. Analysis, 63: 190–194. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). Interestingly, there did not seem to be a Knobe effect for intuitions about lying. [21] In fact, Sorensen defines bald-faced lies as “lies in which it is common knowledge that the speaker does not believe what he is saying is true” (2010, p. 614). It is not explicitly part of his definition that such lies are not intended to deceive. [22] See Appendix A for an example of our bald-faced vignettes. [23] The only way to completely eliminate this possibility would be to build the definition itself explicitly into the vignette. [24] Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for pressing this potential objection. [25] One anonymous referee raises the worry that these statements are not adequate, warrant-defeating (or—diminishing) provisos. According to this referee, in order for a proviso to work, the speaker would have to say, e.g., “I would tell you that I didn’t, even if I did; and with that said, I didn’t.” This strikes us as an inordinately demanding notion of proviso. Given that proviso cases are meant to be counterexamples to the definition of ‘lying’ as “warranting, or guaranteeing, the truth of something that you believe to be false,” so long as the speaker utters something that precludes a guarantee that his or her statement is true, it counts as a proviso. It is not necessary for being a proviso that the utterance be a direct contradiction—only that it undermine the warrant of the statement. In other words, a proviso is any utterance attached to the statement P that gives the audience some reason for thinking that P might not be true. “I wouldn’t tell you if I had … ” meets that standard. [26] Given the political nature of the example, and the fact that two U.S. Senators were actually running for President at the time, we wanted to test for possible influences of political bias. To this end, demographic measures included a question about the participant's political affiliation. We then varied the political valence of the falsehood being told by the senator: the senator either accused his opponent of wanting to kill newborn babies in order to promote stem cell research, or of wanting to invade Spain in order to fight terrorism. Counter to expectations, we found no evidence that participants’ political affiliations biased judgments of lies one way or the other. (Self-Described) conservative participants were just as likely to rate the falsehood told by (or about) the liberal candidate as a lie as the falsehood told by (or about) the conservative candidate; likewise for (self-described) liberal participants. [27] t(101) = 3.95, p < 0.001. [28] t(107) = 5.075, p < 0.0001. [29] ANOVA revealed a main effect for belief, F (1, 204) = 40.887, p < 0.0001 (MSerror = 3.579), but not for external conditions, F(1, 204) = 2.412, p > 0.122. There was also no interaction effect, F(1, 204) = 1.21, p > 0.273. All p-values adjusted (Sidak) for multiple comparisons. [30] Of course, if one takes the stance that lies are morally wrong simply in virtue of being lies, then the semantically-central feature will also serve as the morally-central; but few maintain such a position. Even Kant (1998 Kant, I. 1998. Groundwork of the metaphysics of morals, M. Gregor, Trans.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Original work published 1785. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]/1785), who argued that lying is always morally wrong, argued so not simply on the ground that they are lies, but from the fact that lies are told with the intention to deceive (and from the inherent irrationality of universalizing a maxim allowing assertions that are intended to deceive). [31] Indeed, we suspect that the initial plausibility and persistent popularity of the traditional definition, to some extent, can be chalked up to the centrality of moral concerns in considering the phenomenon of ‘lying’. [32] Sorensen (2007 Sorensen, R. 2007. Bald-Faced lies! Lying without the intent to deceive. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 88: 251–264. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar], p. 262) does also suggest that bald-faced lies might be considered morally contemptible, not because they are lies, but because they are symptoms of other moral failures.
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