Imperfect Cognitions

This week's post is from Vladimir Krstic (a philosopher at the United Arab Emirates University) on his recently published paper  Lying by Asserting What You Believe is True: a Case of Transparent Delusion (Review of Philosophy and Psychology).  Imagine that I tell you that I believe that I am Hitler but that I am not Hitler since he is dead and I am not. You would probably think that you did not hear me correctly. But, if — upon your request for clarification — I tell you specifically that I believe that I am Hitler but that this is not possible and that, thus, my belief is obviously false, you might think that I am toying with you. Many people, following Moore, think that these claims are absurd. Vladimir Krstic However, this impression is misleading. One can confidently believe that p and ascribe this belief to oneself, while judging that not-p. This is what happens to transparently delusional people. They suffer from a delusional belief, they correctly ascribe this belief...

Stephen Wright I 'm Stephen Wright, a lecturer at the University of Oxford. I completed my PhD at the University of Sheffield in 2014, I mainly work on issues in epistemology and the philosophy of language. Whilst my research is primarily in the epistemology of testimony, I have recently been thinking about philosophical issues concerning lying, in preparing a piece for the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Lying edited by Jörg Meibauer . One of the questions at the centre of philosophical investigations into lying concerns what exactly lying is. In particular, I have been looking at the question of whether lying involves saying something that is untrue, or something that is untruthful. Put another way, the question is whether what I say can be a lie only if it is false, or if it merely seems to me that it is false. Those that defend that idea that lying involves saying something untrue endorse the following claim: (1) S’s statement that p is a lie only if p is false. ...