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Lying, Misleading & What Is Said

2013; Oxford University Press; Volume: 64; Issue: 254 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/pq/pqt033

1467-9213

Jamie Whyte,

Free Will and Agency

You are visiting a dying woman in hospital. She asks after her son, who, unknown to her, was killed that morning. To save her from useless pain in the moments before her death, you say, ‘I saw him yesterday and he was well’, which is true. This answer is intended to deceive her; you want her to believe that he is now well. But you did not lie because you believe what you said. There are many ways to deceive people, and lying is but one of them. This seems little more than obvious. Yet Jennifer Mather Saul argues that the distinction between lying and what she calls misleading—that is, deceiving while saying only what you believe—has important implications in the philosophy of language. Suppose, for example, that you identified what is said by an utterance with all the beliefs the speaker intended the hearer to get from it. Then, in Saul's example of the dying mother, you will have to count your kind deception as a lie. You intended to make her think that her son is now well, which you know to be false. But, Saul claims, your kind deception obviously is not a lie. So any theory of what is said that entails that it is a lie must be wrong.